Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Modern MBA"
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Interestingly, at the supermarkets here in m y part of New Zealand, the self checkouts are a mix of ones which will take cash and ones which won't (clearly labled with signs you can see from a way away from them). The ones which take cash are set up to give change, for obvious reasons. Thing is, just like the manned tills, they're Also set up to be able to give cash as change for Debit (and probably credit) Card Purchases (it's just straight up listed as change on the print out in both cases). Just got to select the relevant options in the payment step.
Which is a very good thing, given that the banks went from 'no fees at our ATM for our customers, low fees for other banks' customers' to 'we sold most of our ATMs to third party operators who charge 'other bank' level fees to all users... oh, and the fee for our customers actually going up to a bank teller and getting their cash that way is even higher but Isn't Charged Imediately, instead coming weeks later'... meanwhile the supermarkets have just built the EFTPOS transaction fee into the price of their goods to start with and don't have to make any more or less Cash transactions (and are using the business bankign system rather than personal banking anyway)...
So if you're buying groceries Anyway, might as well get your cash out at the same time.
Actually, ANY business that uses EFTPOS and has enough cash coming in over the course of the day compared to how much change they usually have to hand out can do this, though I think the supermarkets are the only ones that will just casually let an automated process give you a couple of hundred NZD cash because you decided your wallet was a bit empty.
(properly speaking, if you're asking the cashier at the supermarket for this, you ask for 'cash out', and that's what the self checkout buttons refer to it as too.)
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@RextheRebel Because it's legitimately faster, mostly.
Except when it isn't, at which point you shouldn't.
Which has largely been solved where I live (not the USA) by using self checkout as the 'express lane', like the old '12 items or less' express checkouts we used to have (which they seem to have directly replaced), but with higher throughput and no hard item limit (though there is a Practical limit, it varies with what sorts of items you're buying). ... it helps that our machines seem to be less terrible and better integrated with EFTPOS (the system which handles credit and debit card transactions) than seems to be the norm in the USA.
We still have the regular checkouts, fully manned (at least at the times of day when there's enough customers to warrent it), and if you don't mind waiting in line for a bit, or have items that are annoying to put through the self checkout, or just have too much Stuff, you go through them instead.
Importantly, the thinking here seems to have been generally about increasing customer throughput (and thus income), Not cutting staff numbers (and thus costs).
Mind you, it's been ... decades, I think, at this point, since supermarkets employed people Specifically to bag your purchases (that went out of style about the same time as a new chain popped up whose entire selling point, to the point that it was in their Name, was that in exchange for bagging your own stuff, everything was cheaper (they also did other things to keep costs down relative to their competitors, of course). At this point very few supermarkets will bag your stuff for you... and you have to bring your own bags anyway (which are often rather nonstandard) given that the old single use plastic bags aren't a thing anymore.
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My experience in (my part of) New Zealand is that, for the most part, self check outs have basically replaced the old '12 items or less' express checkouts, though you can fit six of them in the space required for the old express checkouts, with one staff member overseeing the lot rather than one or two per old express checkout.
And people's use of them pretty much matches: if you have a quantity of groceries that it's practical to carry out (rather than using a trolley to get it out to your car, and also needing a car to take the groceries home) that doesn't include any awkward items (certain products don't register properly on the scales or require more fiddling around to enter the purchace), the self checkouts are a fast and easy option and if they allow more shoplifting (no real evidence one way or the other that I've come across, though I've also not actively been lookking), it's by less than the efect of increased sale throughput and reduced cost per transaction, given that the self checkouts don't seem to be going anywhere.
Importantly though, the regular manned checkouts remain and still see a lot of use.
Interestingly, while the old express lanes were generally a supermarket only thing, the 'self checkout as express option' has cropped up in a number of other places too... but always more as an 'as well so as to increase throughput and income' rather than an 'instead so as to cut staff and reduce costs'.
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