Do we prefer the ‘human contact’ of checkout operators because they are more efficient than computers? Do self-service checkouts really take jobs? After the overwhelming response to the Community Question ‘How do you feel self-service checkouts at supermarkets affect your shopping experience?’ Everything Mandurah rang Coles and Woolworths to get a statement from these companies in relation to self-service checkouts as well as examining overseas statistics, in order to explore the issue of whether or not self-service checkouts do indeed take jobs and whether or not we prefer human contact during our trip to the supermarket. For Coles it is a matter of efficiency they state, they are good for people with a few items and they free up the other checkouts for customers with bigger shopping loads. Coles also believe that the self-service checkouts free up team members to be able to do other things in the store. For example stack shelves. This is an excerpt from the official statement by Coles: “Our Self Serve Checkouts are designed to provide our customers with choice, when choosing a checkout. The Self Serve Checkouts are manned at all times by a team member, who is fully trained to assist customers that may be having difficulties processing their order. We will also continue to offer the traditional style of checkout, for those customers who prefer using them. We would like to assure you that there have been no job losses, as a result of the implementation of these checkouts”. Woolworths had not replied to my enquiry by the time of print. According to the Daily Telegraph in an article written by Steve Doughty in 2012 he sites Eurostat statistics. He writes “self-service checkouts are clearly highly profitable for supermarkets. I am indebted to the EU statistics service Eurostat for today’s information that the average hourly cost of labour to an employer is £17.50 an hour. So if a branch of Tesco Express is open for 17 hours a day, and has two self- service checkouts replacing people, that means…you work it out.” These are statistics for Europe but does it translate to Australia? In relation to the human element of grocery shopping according to the Wall Street Journal in a recent research paper called Dancing With Robots, the economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane point out that computers replace human workers only when machines meet two key conditions. First, the information necessary to carry out the task must be put in a form that computers can understand, and second, the job must be routine enough that it can be expressed in a series of rules. The article goes on to state that self service checkouts don’t meet the first of these criteria, that is, for example customers must indicate to the computer which vegetables or fruit they are buying - something the self-service checkout computer can’t manage on its own but a ‘human’ operator can. Humans have the ability to sort carrots from beans where a computer cannot in other words! Maybe this is a factor in shoppers preferring human checkout operators. It seems in this instance humans have the upper hand when it comes to check out at a supermarket...
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 04:00:15 +0000
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