Top Stories
UK supermarket Booths to scrap most self-service tills
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
LONDON (Reuters) – Northern England supermarket chain Booths is to axe almost all of the self-service tills in its stores, saying the decision was in response to feedback from customers.
LONDON (Reuters) – Northern England supermarket chain Booths is to axe almost all of the self-service tills in its stores, saying the decision was in response to feedback from customers.
The shift is the first by a UK grocer of a significant size, bucking a trend that has seen all of the major players, including market leader Tesco and No. 2 Sainsbury’s, open thousands of self-checkouts and dramatically reduce the amount of staffed checkouts.
Booths, an upmarket supermarket chain, said it believed staff serving customers delivered a better customer experience and had therefore taken the decision to remove self-checkouts from all but two of its 28 stores.
Nigel Murray, managing director of Booths, told BBC Radio Lancashire that customers had told the firm that its self-scan machines can be slow and were unreliable and impersonal.
“We like to talk to people and we’re really proud that we’re moving largely to a place where our customers are served by people, by human beings, so rather than artificial intelligence, we’re going for actual intelligence,” he said.
Tesco, which has over 27% share of the UK grocery market, introduced self-service checkouts more than two decades ago.
Over the last year it has added trolley self-checkouts to existing basket self-checkout areas to enable customers to process bigger purchases.
Tesco CEO Ken Murphy told investors at its last annual general meeting that self-service tills had over time proved a “very popular” method of payment for customers.
“This is not by the way designed to replace people, quite the opposite … There is always in every shop a cash-manned checkout alternative, but we genuinely believe that at the end of the day it provides a better customer experience.”
(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Paul Simao)
A self-service till is a checkout system that allows customers to scan and pay for their items without the assistance of a cashier, often found in supermarkets and retail stores.
Customer experience refers to the overall perception and feelings a customer has while interacting with a company, including their satisfaction with products, services, and support.
A supermarket chain is a group of supermarkets owned and operated by the same company, offering a wide range of groceries and household items across multiple locations.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems, enabling them to perform tasks like problem-solving and decision-making.
A checkout is the process and location in a retail store where customers pay for their selected items before leaving the store.
Explore more articles in the Top Stories category
