As the battle for cashier-less stores rages on — with Amazon Go’s one-store trial pushing Microsoft and Walmart to explore a mobile cart-based system to ditch associates at checkout — it’s worth questioning whether an employee-less checkout system is something that retailers should truly want. Fully cashier-less efforts should fall into the “be careful what you wish for” category.
The challengers for cashier-less checkout are not solely technological, although the tech hurdles are substantial. Anyone remember JCPenney’s failed effort to fuel cashier-less checkout via RFID?
The real issue is trusting any one system too much. That’s both an IT issue as well as a consumer/shopper issue. Retailers first must convince shoppers/consumers that the system is trustworthy enough for them to try it. Consider when Apple first rolled out its checkout-by-app tactic and then promptly had a customer who tried it only to be incorrectly arrested and jailed overnight. What message did that send other customers who were considering trying it, too?
There have been plenty of examples of driverless cars having accidents, sometimes deadly ones. What message does that send to potential drivers? This column looked last month at the Amazon Echo privacy nightmare when the software made some autonomous decisions and recorded — and transmitted — a family’s private conversation to a co-worker.
Let’s get back to cashier-less stores. Why not take a page from self-checkout deployments, which similarly struggled with the fear of falsely accusing loyal customers of shoplifting? Stores would typically assign an associate to stand by and cover as many as a half-dozen self-checkout units. That way, the store realized a dramatic reduction in associate checkout costs, but it left a human failsafe in the system. If anything looked wrong, a human was summoned to investigate.
In the non-associate checkout efforts being pursued by both Amazon and Walmart/Microsoft, all that they would need do is add one associate at an exit. That way, if a shopper has a dispute (“My phone says that I bought shampoo, but I merely looked at it and replaced it on the shelf. Somehow, the system missed that. Please look in my cart and search me if you must, but delete this item from my list so I’m not charged”), it can be resolved by a human before the shopper leaves the store. Once shoppers leave and call from home, their ability to prove that they didn’t make a purchase is far weaker. I also doubt customer service will routinely check store video on a mischarged $3 purchase. Customer service (at least for Amazon) will more likely just credit the item.
Now that is a concern for the retailer. The lack of a human at checkout will mean far more “courtesy credits” because customer service won’t trust the automated system any more than a consumer would.
Please don’t get me wrong. A cashier-less system — with the addition of human failsafes — could be a major help for both retail bottom lines and customer experience. Although customer experience could certainly be improved by reallocating those displaced associates into more service-oriented efforts (baking, floral arrangements, helping customers find items, making special orders, even loading cars and delivering groceries), I am referring to a more immediate customer experience improvement.
The biggest complaint of most shoppers today — aside from prices being too high — is how long it takes to check out. The instant they place the last item in their cart, they want to be able to leave immediately. In theory, this is what cashier-less stores can do. Marrying a better customer experience with costs cut is a rare gift, but automated checkout has that potential. Just don’t turn it into a disaster from trusting the software too much.