Real People Check-Outs

Norman_Conquest said:
Two trolley checkouts would take up the same room as two normal checkouts.

Queues at the Tesco on the Trunk Road regularly have queues at their trolley and basket self-service checkouts.

Asda South Bank and Tesco don't have self-service with conveyor belts;

We've been down the route of not everyone can manage self-scan shopping, self-service checkouts, etc. and you replied with a crass reply that others on here also found heartless.
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But two trolley self checkouts can be operated 24/7/365 with only one member of staff covering 3-6 of them. 2 actual. Checkouts need multiple members of staff per checkout per day. You're acting like they haven't ran the numbers or something, it's orders of magnitude cheaper to use self service checkouts. You don't have to pay them when there is no queue and they don't phone in sick. There's always going to be some here with a manual checkout or at least a member of staff to help people use them.

You said you hope I never slow down and get confused? I said if that was the case I wouldn't be doing my own shopping - that's a fact, I'd just have it delivered.

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ThatFragranceGuy said:
But two trolley self checkouts can be operated 24/7/365 with only one member of staff covering 3-6 of them. 2 actual. Checkouts need multiple members of staff per checkout per day. You're acting like they haven't ran the numbers or something, it's orders of magnitude cheaper to use self service checkouts. You don't have to pay them when there is no queue and they don't phone in sick. There's always going to be some here with a manual checkout or at least a member of staff to help people use them.

You said you hope I never slow down and get confused? I said if that was the case I wouldn't be doing my own shopping - that's a fact, I'd just have it delivered.

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Keep on posting it, it makes you look heartless.
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
I'm heartless because I would order my shopping in if I couldn't work a checkout? have a day off.
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The problem is, you are speaking as a younger person who is au fait with shopping online. The current older generation don't have that background so it could be misinterpreted that your comment is a bit cold. I see both points of view, but sadly, this is the internet and discussions can quickly get out of hand when there is actually little controversy to them.
 
dooderooni said:
The problem is, you are speaking as a younger person who is au fait with shopping online. The current older generation don't have that background so it could be misinterpreted that your comment is a bit cold. I see both points of view, but sadly, this is the internet and discussions can quickly get out of hand when there is actually little controversy to them.
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I'm speaking as myself when I get old as per Norman's "I hope you don't struggle when you get old" argument.
Norman_Conquest said:
Change the context to take the heat away from yourself. I wasn't the only one who read it that way.
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Your comment literally said I hope YOU don't slow down and get confused my reply literally said if I ever slow down to the point I cant work a checkout, I probably wont be doing my own shopping.

I've added some fancy highlighting to help you take this in :love:
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
So why make a joke that there are 2 supermarket staff on over 20k, when the minimum wage in the UK is above 20k? By default if you work as a full time checkout assistant, you are on over 20k if you are over 23 years old. Even the £10.18 for 21-22 year olds is only £149 off being £22k a year.

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I would presume your figures are because there will be a lot of part time staff due to being students or parents, so flexible part time hours suit them. Majority of people I see working in supermarkets aren't 17 years old these days, but there will be plenty, just like there will be plenty that want part time hours. Tesco has a LOT of people that want part time hours for school times etc, in fact they were in the news recently for letting people request flexible working patterns from day 1. But no matter how many people you employ you still need the same overall amount of FTE.

Because even with increased fraud it is still cheaper. You have to steal an awful lot of bananas or tubs of iced cream to breach the savings of having the equivalent amount of checkout assistants manning tills.


Security guard at the door, plus majority of items are paid for on card so while people will commit fraud on the machines, its generally pretty dumb to do seeing as they have your details and a video of it. Some accept cash, some don't. There is an acceptable level of fraud due to the savings involved and the fact that its usually fairly traceable.


Average salary of a boots manager is £33k, fully loaded cost will be more due to pension, national insurance contributions and benefits, but reality is you're talking about an extreme edge case - a manager is not going to man the checkouts full time, but there will always be staff there -just less are needed for that part of the store and more needed in things like warehousing, distribution, logistics, home delivery drivers etc. Company can sell a lot more for a lot less.

If time is valuable, why are you wasting it queuing to get served? You still pack your own shopping at a checkout, just someone scans it for you, and time is valuable but you'd rather spend it nattering to the shop assistant and other customers instead of the people you know?

Did you avoid going into department stores that made you pick your own floor as well when they got rid of lift operators? Or was that ok? You've just made a similar post in the other thread, yet you have double the amount of posts on FMTTM that I have and I was on this forum from Day 1. Really odd stance to take :ROFLMAO:
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Jesus you do go on..
 
Nice thread - Some facts might help

Self checkouts do increase theft/stock loss - around 0.5% of sales in most instances. So, if the supermarket takes £200k a week, they will lose £1k a week more as a result of putting in self checkouts.

Self checkouts do lead to job losses. The grocery sector is not philanthropic.

There are problems with ‘out of order’ as the technology has moved on and some are now difficult to repair. Lead times for ‘new’ are long.

It is a moot point as to whether they have reduced prices. In the early days almost certainly when competition was fierce. Fair to say competition is a little more circumspect at the moment with rising costs making it more difficult to drive prices down.

The cost of labour in the industry is a huge - anywhere between 10% and 12% of sales. That is only going to increase as minimum/living wage increases.
They have commitments to shareholders so they are all looking for tech solutions to remove cost.

Sainsbury’s and Amazon have tried no tills - and got nowhere

In the good/bad old days the likes of Sainsbury’s would generate around 7% net profit. That is now around 2%.

Booths is a bit of an outlier for most of the reasons stated.
However the real reason they have pulled them is they couldn’t get a return. They couldn’t take the required number of people out (service is really important to their customers) and stock loss wasn’t factored in.

I’ve tried them in my business and have stopped the roll out - can’t make them pay their way.
 
ThatFragranceGuy said:
So why make a joke that there are 2 supermarket staff on over 20k, when the minimum wage in the UK is above 20k? By default if you work as a full time checkout assistant, you are on over 20k if you are over 23 years old. Even the £10.18 for 21-22 year olds is only £149 off being £22k a year.

View attachment 66889

I would presume your figures are because there will be a lot of part time staff due to being students or parents, so flexible part time hours suit them. Majority of people I see working in supermarkets aren't 17 years old these days, but there will be plenty, just like there will be plenty that want part time hours. Tesco has a LOT of people that want part time hours for school times etc, in fact they were in the news recently for letting people request flexible working patterns from day 1. But no matter how many people you employ you still need the same overall amount of FTE.

Because even with increased fraud it is still cheaper. You have to steal an awful lot of bananas or tubs of iced cream to breach the savings of having the equivalent amount of checkout assistants manning tills.


Security guard at the door, plus majority of items are paid for on card so while people will commit fraud on the machines, its generally pretty dumb to do seeing as they have your details and a video of it. Some accept cash, some don't. There is an acceptable level of fraud due to the savings involved and the fact that its usually fairly traceable.


Average salary of a boots manager is £33k, fully loaded cost will be more due to pension, national insurance contributions and benefits, but reality is you're talking about an extreme edge case - a manager is not going to man the checkouts full time, but there will always be staff there -just less are needed for that part of the store and more needed in things like warehousing, distribution, logistics, home delivery drivers etc. Company can sell a lot more for a lot less.

If time is valuable, why are you wasting it queuing to get served? You still pack your own shopping at a checkout, just someone scans it for you, and time is valuable but you'd rather spend it nattering to the shop assistant and other customers instead of the people you know?

Did you avoid going into department stores that made you pick your own floor as well when they got rid of lift operators? Or was that ok? You've just made a similar post in the other thread, yet you have double the amount of posts on FMTTM that I have and I was on this forum from Day 1. Really odd stance to take :ROFLMAO:
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I'm fully aware what the minimum wage is, thanks. I've been paid it for the last 13 years. My point was, that there are very few retail workers, at the shop floor level who are full time, either through personal choice or through the unwillingness of employers to take on more full time staff as evidenced in the figures outlined about the Tesco store in Wales.
 
Don't really see why @ThatFragranceGuy deserves multiple posts attacking his character.

The sad thing is that people unfortunately do get old and confused, not that technology changes how jobs work. There must have been old confused people whenever shops went from that old 4 candles/fork handles style reading your list out to the shopkeeper to going round the aisles yourself with a trolley.
 
How long does it take to serve an average customer with a trolley - 6 minutes - average value of shop - £60? 6 minutes is about £1.35 in labour costs (based on £10.42/hour) - self service tills stil need some staff say £0.25 in labour costs for the same customer so net labour saving of self service is £1.10 on a £60 shop in thsi example tale off 30p in extra theft and the saving becomes 80p, but they cost money to install and maintain.

What puzzles me is why supermarkets pack your stuff and delivery it for £3 on a £40 shop - it must cost them at least £10 so they are losing say £5.65 compared with the same shopper going into a store and been served at a till.
 
Redwurzel said:
How long does it take to serve an average customer with a trolley - 6 minutes - average value of shop - £60? 6 minutes is about £1.35 in labour costs (based on £10.42/hour) - self service tills stil need some staff say £0.25 in labour costs for the same customer so net labour saving of self service is £1.10 on a £60 shop in thsi example tale off 30p in extra theft and the saving becomes 80p, but they cost money to install and maintain.

What puzzles me is why supermarkets pack your stuff and delivery it for £3 on a £40 shop - it must cost them at least £10 so they are losing say £5.65 compared with the same shopper going into a store and been served at a till.
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your maths is way out. For every customer a self service till operator is serving they're also serving multiple others, they might even have the whole section if there's two of them and one is covering a complex query. But a self service till doesn't need a break, doesn't need a day off to stay home for the gas man, doesn't need someone to cover their shift on overtime, doesn't need paying extra on bank holiday or unsociable hours. But hourly rate isn't the cost per hour to a business, for that you need a fully loaded cost which can be higher. On top of that hourly rate you also have pension contributions, national insurance employer contributions, 10% staff discount, holiday allowance & sickness overheads, benefits package / life cover / cycle2work, subsidised canteen etc

Maths like this assumes they've been silly and not done the numbers, believe me they will have done the numbers thousands of tiles using datasets of millions of customers. If they can fit in two SS tills for even standard till, then they only need one or two manned tills and the rest can be SS which will massively increase their capacity to serve at busy periods. If people see they have to queue less, they will buy more items.

For everyone saying they will walk to another shop if there are no manned checkouts, you are few and far between as majority of people have gone to that shock specifically, and just want to get what they want and leave and get on with their day. If they see huge queue at the tills they may leave and come back when less busy, but doubt they'd change which shop they're going to shop at. The shops know their customer behaviour through data - clubcard, more card, sparks etc - they're all designed to profile customers spending habits so they'll know which checkout options customers in every demographic prefer.
 
Redwurzel said:
How long does it take to serve an average customer with a trolley - 6 minutes - average value of shop - £60? 6 minutes is about £1.35 in labour costs (based on £10.42/hour) - self service tills stil need some staff say £0.25 in labour costs for the same customer so net labour saving of self service is £1.10 on a £60 shop in thsi example tale off 30p in extra theft and the saving becomes 80p, but they cost money to install and maintain.

What puzzles me is why supermarkets pack your stuff and delivery it for £3 on a £40 shop - it must cost them at least £10 so they are losing say £5.65 compared with the same shopper going into a store and been served at a till.
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I can solve that puzzle
Home delivery loses them money.

Pre Covid at least two of the big 4 were looking at how they could get out of it.
Then they all had to invest more to cover the boom.

They do it because they are scared of losing market share

A number of successful retailers don’t touch home delivery - Aldi, Lidl, B+M
 
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ThatFragranceGuy said:
I'm speaking as myself when I get old as per Norman's "I hope you don't struggle when you get old" argument.

Your comment literally said I hope YOU don't slow down and get confused my reply literally said if I ever slow down to the point I cant work a checkout, I probably wont be doing my own shopping.

I've added some fancy highlighting to help you take this in :love:
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I've added a song to help you take it in.


 
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