Grocery store self-checkouts are now more popular than human cashiers, according to a researcher at Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab.
“Canadians are starting to befriend machines at the grocery store,” Sylvain Charlebois, the lab’s scientific director, told CTVNews.ca. “Nobody really wants to wait to pay for food in 2022, that's the reality.”
Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie in Halifax, says the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumer behaviour.
“At the end of the end of the day, grocers want to provide a quick exit for customers, and a safe one as well,” he said. “COVID really got people to think about safety, public health, and it's less contact.”
In a May 2021 survey from Charlebois’ team, 53 per cent of respondents said they would use a self-checkout machine in the future. Respondents born between 1981 and 2005 were even more likely to embrace the technology, with 60 per cent saying they’d opt for self-checkouts.
“The younger generation certainly are embracing technology much more so than the older generation,” Charlebois said. “Boomers aren’t necessarily comfortable with the concept; they still see these machines as job stealers or replacements for humans.”
Charlebois believes retailers struggling to maintain staffing levels appears to be changing that perception with consumers.
“They're starting to accept fact that this may actually be a path to the future, essentially, knowing that these positions are hard to fill,” Charlebois explained.
Charlebois notes 75 per cent of respondents reported using a self-checkout in the past six months, and 85 per cent said they were satisfied with their experience.
“Over the last, I'd say five years, there's been tremendous progress in terms of how intuitive and more speedy the technologies are,” Charlebois said. “The banking sector really embraced ATMs, many decades ago. That conversion really was seamless, compared to the grocery business.”
According to the survey, 47 per cent of Canadians are also willing to try a completely cashier-less store like Amazon Go, which utilizes digital sensors so customers can grab goods from shelves and leave without opening their wallets.
“I was in New York City this week, and I visited my first Amazon Go store,” Charlebois added. “To be honest, I was actually a little bit underwhelmed, because I actually had some questions about certain products and nobody was around.”
Self-checkout technology has been widely adopted by companies like Walmart, but it still isn’t perfect. Charlebois admits it’s often easier to have a human cashier ring up purchases when you have lots of items like fruits and vegetables.
“The concern that I think we should all have is, what's in this for consumers, really?” Charlebois said. “At the end of the day, we do more work.”
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