Asda to put more staff on checkouts as self-service reaches limit

Asda is going to put more staff on checkouts after admitting it has reached a limit with self-service tills.

The supermarket said while self-checkouts work well for customers, it wants to invest additional hours into having manned checkouts.

It claimed that the decision was not about shoppers’ preference for a human to help them rather than a machine.

But other retailers, such as northern supermarket chain Booths, have axed almost all self-service tills.

It said when it took the decision late last year that “we believe colleagues serving customers delivers a better customer experience”.

Supermarket shoppers have previously told the BBC about their issues with self-service tills.

“I am severely sight impaired – registered blind – so, self service tills are a non-starter,” Pennie Orger said. “My guide dog is clever, but not that clever.”

The tills can also be an issue for deaf shoppers who can’t rely on the self-checkouts verbal instructions.

Michael Gleeson, Asda’s chief financial officer, said that a threshold had been reached in terms of how many self-checkouts it feels works well.

“I think we have reached a level of self-checkouts and scan and go where we feel that works best for our customers, and we feel we’ve got the balance just about right.

“We have invested additional hours in manned checkouts and that’s been within the existing physical infrastructure [of the stores],” he said.

He added that the move was not about more checkouts but about “more colleagues on checkouts”.

Staff will be added to tills over the rest of the year, said Asda, adding that an increased staff presence was not related to shoplifting.

Last year, shoplifting in England and Wales hit the highest level for 20 years.

Shoplifting offences recorded by police reached 430,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The origin of the self-service checkout began with the invention of the automated teller machine in 1967.

A few decades later, the self-service till was invented by David Humble who had been inspired by standing in a long grocery checkout line in south Florida in 1984.

The tills became popular in the 1990s and by 2013, there were more than 200,000 in stores around the world. Numbers hit 325,000 by 2021.

In UK supermarkets alone, there are about 80,000 self-service tills, according to data from RBR Data Services, up from 53,000 five years ago.