22 April 2008 05:19 PM
Tags: woolworths, supermarket, retail, ncr, fastlane, customer, checkout, terminal
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Hopefully this will help with the weekend and holiday rush times. It is a shame it has taken Australian stores so long to adopt technology that has been out for over 5 years in other countries.
I used to work at Big W and was among the first workers to operate and maintain them. And to be honest, those first units were rubbish.
Although they have improved greatly since then, even now I don't believe they are ready to be used for large quantities of groceries like they inevitably will be. The hardware and software just isn't developed enough yet.
Why would I spend the time to check myself out when there are staff who are trained to do this quickly and accurately. I had noticed the reduction in staff lately (about 10-20% or registeres open at any time), which resulted in much longer lines, so I wasn't surprised to see these units come to my local store. It ticks me off that companies are making their customers do more and more work, while at the same time their profits go up and up.
I'm not interested in these self-checkout units unless they upgrade their systems to trolly based scanning units (scan when you put the item into the trolly) or RFID (wheel the trolly through reader and all groceries in the trolly are read in one go). Realistically we are about 5 years behind some of the European countries in this respect.
You are right that the corporate goal is not to make it easier on the customer, but to eliminate jobs. This happened all over the U.S. beginning years ago, when gas companies instituted a "pump your own gas" policy, claiming it would "save money". It did save money -- for the oil companies. It allowed them to eliminate a lot of service station jobs, and
have their customers not only pay continually rising prices, but to do the work they USED to have to pay employees to do. This is the same pattern you see everywhere -- customers not only paying increasingly high prices, but having absolutely no customer service. And of course workers finding less and less possibility of employment.
This has been available in a number of Coles stores in Melbourne for over a year.
The fact is, most customers are stupid enough to have trouble getting through the checkout with an associate to help them. God help them trying to do it themselves.
Furthermore, I wonder how many of the poor automatons going through there will have trouble finding their money when it comes out.
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Darwin has had this technology for quite some time now.