Self-checkouts: Have Shops Reached Peak Self-Scan?

The Bottom Line

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Business

4.6 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Self-checkouts have become a staple in supermarkets, fast food chains and other shops, but now some companies are reconsidering their use. Evan Davis explores the technology's role in the retail landscape and asks whether we’ve reached peak self-checkout, or if they’re just a step on the way to an even more digitised shopping future. With insights from industry leaders and experts, he examines the economics behind un-manned tills, generational differences in consumer acceptance, and their links to a recent rise in shoplifting. Plus, is automation actually making our lives easier, and what's lost if the personal touch disappears from shopping?

Guests: Julian Metcalfe, founder, Itsu; Robert Elsey, chief digital and information officer, Co-op Natalie Berg, retail analyst and host of the Retail Disrupted podcast

Presenter: Evan Davis Producers: Simon Tulett and Eleanor Harrison-Dengate Sound: Rod Farquhar Production Coordinator: Katie Morrison Editor: Matt Willis

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of The Bottom Line podcast.
0:08.2	It contained some extra goodies. We couldn't quite squeeze into the Radio 4 bagging area. But before you unpack them, a quick reminder that next week for the last episode in the series, we're throwing the discussion over to you.
0:21.6	We're going to put a selection of your business questions to a panel of expert guests.
0:26.6	And there is still time to send them in. Many of you already have.
0:30.6	If you want advice on starting or building your own company,
0:34.6	if you want to know what a chief executive does, or any burning questions
0:38.9	about how businesses in general are run, or maybe how you think they should be run, do send
0:44.3	them to us our email address is bottom line at BBC.co.uk. But back now to the checkout for this
0:51.3	week's show. Do you use the self-checkout machines in supermarkets?
0:55.4	Or do you avoid them?
0:56.5	Or like me, do you use them when it's a handful of items,
0:59.9	but let a professional do the scanning if it's a full cart of shopping?
1:04.5	Well, look, there are plenty of areas in life where consumers end up doing a job for themselves
1:09.6	where once a paid employee did it for them before.
1:13.7	Filling a car up with petrol.
1:15.7	Drivers are now very used to not instructing someone else to do it.
1:19.6	Similarly, to take a more extreme example, pushing the buttons in a lift.
1:23.0	The lift operators have all gone.
1:25.7	And that's fine.
1:26.5	No one's going back to full service petrol stations as the default.
1:31.0	But when it comes to the self-checkout machines in supermarkets
1:35.4	or the self-ordering kiosks in fast food outlets, we can't be so sure.
	...

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