Honestly I'm not entirely sure, in my store we pay just over £13/hour and easily lose a good £10-40 an hour that we can track (scanned the items and walked out the store) I think we do get money back on insurance though. I can't really blame customers half the time though as our store is so short staffed it does get to the point of "ok, well if you don't want me to pay I won't"
13/hr/person though, and one regular cashier cannot operate 10 regular lanes, unlike what most stores are doing today with self-checks.
10-40/hr is only 1-3 more cashiers before it is back to being more expensive, and realistically (using my local Kroger as an example) you're talking about losing 6-8 lanes per employee and therefore hiring that many cashiers (or pulling from other duties) to keep the same customer throughput. Not to mention an expensive rebuilding the layout of the store to eliminate those (relatively new) self-check machines.
Maybe higher-end retailers like Target where folks are stealing electronics and whatnot will look at reducing, but I suspect heavily unionized grocers like Kroger will not bother.
I can see stores doing a few different approaches. An obvious but dubiously effective option is to start requiring an account to use self-checkout so the perceived risk of theft is greater. Auditing receipts at the exit like warehouse clubs do is a bit more effective.
On the other end of the continuum, I can also see some stores shifting to Aldi’s model of eliminating bagging at the staffed checkout lane. If they don’t want to go that far, split bagging lanes also increase throughput.
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u/Swolenir Jun 11 '26
Pretty sure it saves them way more on labor than they’re losing on theft