50. Self-Checkout

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Economics of Everyday Things — Episode 50: "Self-Checkout" (June 22, 2026)
Host: Zachary Crockett, Freakonomics Network

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the hidden economics, history, and social implications of self-checkout technology in grocery stores and beyond. Host Zachary Crockett explores whether self-checkout lanes truly make shopping more convenient, and at what cost—to consumers, employees, and retailers. Crockett interviews sociology professor Christopher Andrews, retail tech consultant Sarah Eloy, and grocery analyst Phil Lempert, examining the tension between technological convenience and shifting labor, the realities of theft, customer experiences, and possible futures for self-service retail.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins and Evolution of Self-Service Retail

• Early Shopping Experiences

  • In the early 1900s, shoppers provided a list and store clerks gathered items and tallied bills.
  • This changed with the 1916 founding of Piggly Wiggly, the first self-service grocery store.
    • Christopher Andrews (03:00): "Piggly Wiggly’s innovation was to allow customers to go through the store, gathering items from the aisle, which ultimately cut the labor costs… this was really a revolutionary change."

• The Original Dream: Fully Automated Stores

  • Piggly Wiggly’s founder, Clarence Saunders, dreamed of stores run entirely by machines (Kidoozle), but the idea failed in practice—though it planted seeds for future automation.

• Advent of Self-Checkout Technology

  • The first automated checkout debuted at Kroger in Atlanta in 1986.
  • Mass adoption didn’t occur until the 2000s, as chains sought to cut costs ahead of the Great Recession.
    • Christopher Andrews (05:00): "Businesses saw self checkout lanes as possibly a way to cut costs so they could compete with the Walmarts and the Targets."

2. The Modern Self-Checkout Economy

• Prevalence & Cost

  • Now, 96% of major U.S. grocery chains use self-checkout, making up nearly 40% of lanes.
  • Machines are costly: ~$125,000 for a four-lane setup, plus ongoing maintenance and software.

• Implementing Self-Checkout: Tech & Metrics

  • Sarah Eloy (06:31): "We look at...time in store, time through checkout, how quickly you can scan an item, errors you might encounter, do you need help from a human?"
  • Efficiency is not always achieved; it depends on the customer’s skill.
    • Sarah Eloy (06:51): "It doesn't necessarily create an affordance every time...is the customer capable of scanning something faster than a traditional employee would be able to do?"

• Illusion vs. Reality of Speed

  • Self-checkout often feels quicker due to perceived control, but trained cashiers are usually faster, thanks to their skill and experience.
    • Christopher Andrews (07:26): "Cashiers have a lot of informal knowledge...that's why cashiers are often faster than we are in the checkout lane."

• Social Pressure and User Experience

  • Shoppers feel performance anxiety and social pressure to hurry while using self-checkout.
    • Christopher Andrews (08:03): "You can feel the clock ticking. You can see the eyes of the person behind you...there is this social pressure to hurry up, hurry up."

• Errors and Technological Frustrations

  • 70% of shoppers have experienced an error in self-checkout ("unexpected item in bagging area," etc.).
  • Increasingly, stores offer fewer, or no, staffed lanes—making self-checkout unavoidable for all item counts.

3. Economics, Labor, and Shrinkage

• The Promise vs. Reality of Labor Savings

  • Theoretically, self-checkout cuts labor costs by 80% (replacing 6 cashiers with 6 self-checkouts and 1 attendant).
    • Christopher Andrews (09:27): "You just cut your labor costs at the checkout by roughly 80%."
  • Actual results: average employee count sometimes rises due to union rules and new roles (monitoring, maintenance, security).

• Shoplifting and "Shrinkage"

  • Self-checkout escalates theft: shrinkage is 4–5x higher than before, costing U.S. retailers ~$10 billion/year.
    • Phil Lempert (12:36): "The shrink factor…is now four to five times what it was pre-pandemic."
  • 1 in 7 shoppers admit to intentional theft, with tricks like entering expensive items (like lobster) as cheap produce ("banana trick").
    • Christopher Andrews (13:24): "They had lots more apples than the system said they should have had...people were going through entering these cases of king crab legs and frozen lobsters as cheap produce items."
  • Accidental theft is also common: forgetfulness or frustration leads to unscanned items ("walk-offs," "bottom of basket/cart").
    • Christopher Andrews (14:11): "If you forget to bring that up and scan it and you walk out…technically, you’ve just shoplifted."

• Legal Risks for Consumers

  • Innocent mistakes can result in prosecution; retailers have detained customers for missing even small items.

4. The Pushback and Possible Futures

• Retailer and Consumer Response

  • Retailers have tried multiple anti-theft measures (cameras, weight sensors, receipt gates), but these add friction and suspicion.

    • Phil Lempert (15:29): "Consumers are really getting a feeling that the supermarket doesn’t trust them at self checkout. And the truth is, the supermarket doesn’t trust them."

  • Some consumers demand rewards for their free labor (discounts, loyalty points).

  • Some locations have reversed course:

    • Booths (UK) removed self-checkout from 26 of 28 stores; some U.S. chains (Dollar General, Walmart, Shoprite) have pulled back.
    • Boutique grocers (Erewhon) tout "human-centered service."
    • Dutch chain Jumbo introduced "slow lanes" for chatty cashiers and higher customer loyalty.

• Notable Quote

  • Phil Lempert (17:50): "If I was in the self checkout manufacturing business, I'd be worried.”

5. What's Next for Self-Checkout?

• Tech Innovations and Next Steps

  • Amazon’s "Just Walk Out" technology innovations have struggled; pivot toward "smart carts."
  • New barcode standards (like QR codes) will eventually replace current scanners, pushing for mobile device checkout.

• Enduring Trends: Labor Shift

  • Christopher Andrews sees broader "unpaid labor" expansion into other industries (restaurants, hotels, hospitals).
    • Christopher Andrews (19:37): "The idea of passing paid tasks onto unpaid consumers is just…too seductive for businesses to not pursue."
    • Christopher Andrews (20:39): "You have to ask yourself, are we getting anything out of this?"

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On customer experience:
  Christopher Andrews (01:11): "After working all day, I just walked out of the store."

• On perceived control and speed:
  Christopher Andrews (07:09): "Self checkout lanes are like a fun house. They create a time warp effect."

• On theft at self-checkout:
  Christopher Andrews (10:21): "They literally turned us into a nation of shoplifters."

• On businesses shifting labor:
  Christopher Andrews (19:37): "The macro view is looking at the economy more broadly…even hospitals are starting to look at self service technology."

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Key Timestamps

• 01:11: Shopper Christopher Andrews on frustration with self-checkout.
• 03:00: Evolution to Piggly Wiggly and the rise of self-service.
• 05:00: Acceleration of self-checkout adoption post-2000.
• 06:31: Sarah Eloy on the performance metrics behind self-checkout.
• 07:09: Andrews explains the “fun house” effect and time warping.
• 08:52: How stores nudge/force shoppers toward self-checkout.
• 09:27: Labor vs. machine cost breakdown.
• 10:21: Higher rates of shoplifting at self-checkout.
• 13:24: “Banana trick” and fraud examples.
• 14:11: Accidental shoplifting and legal consequences.
• 15:29: Customer/retailer trust tensions at self-checkout.
• 17:30: Boutique and slow-lane approaches (Erewhon, Jumbo).
• 18:05: Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” pivot and future tech.
• 19:37: Andrews on the wider trend of consumer labor.

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Conclusion

This episode of The Economics of Everyday Things offers a nuanced and entertaining investigation into the real costs and hidden economics of self-checkout lanes. It moves from the history of grocery retail to modern technology, uncovering the benefits and pitfalls of automation for customers and retailers alike. With memorable real-world anecdotes, candid expert insights, and a look at changing industry practices, listeners gain both practical context and deeper economic understanding—ending with an open question about the future balance between automation, efficiency, and human (unpaid) labor.

Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Christopher Andrews]

I was shopping at my local supermarket and I was pushing the cart and I had probably between 30 to 40 items. And when I got to the checkout lane, I saw several staff and associates and they were standing around and I asked, you know, is this lane open? And they said, no, but self checkout is open. And I looked at my watch, it was 9pm I was tired, I was ready to go home and I thought, I'm not going to spend the next 20 minutes, 30 minutes doing this. After working all day, I just walked out of the store.

[Zachary Crockett]

If you've been in a supermarket in the past decade, you've encountered a self checkout machine. The technology comes with a promise. Instead of waiting in a long line operated by a human cashier, you can control your own destiny by scanning, bagging, and paying for things yourself. In its ideal form, it's faster and more convenient than sending your purchases down a conveyor belt to a supermarket employee. But is it really a good deal for shoppers?

[Christopher Andrews]

It's essentially transferring what were paid tasks that cashiers do onto unpaid customers. I think a lot of shoppers are left asking, you know, what's in this for me?

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today Self Checkout There was a time when customers weren't allowed to do any work at a grocery store. If you went shopping at the turn of the 20th century, you'd hand over your grocery list to a clerk. They'd collect everything for you, put it in a bag and tally up your bill. That system changed with a store called Piggly Wiggly.

[Christopher Andrews]

So Piggly Wiggly, which was founded by Clarence Saunders in 1916, was really the first self service grocery store.

[Zachary Crockett]

Again, that's Christopher Andrews. In addition to being a disgruntled shopper, he's a sociology professor at Drew University who studies how technology affects the workforce. He's also the author of a book titled the Overworked Consumer, which explores the history of self service.

[Christopher Andrews]

Piggly Wiggly's innovation was to allow customers to go through the store, gathering items from the aisle, which ultimately cut the labor costs, and in turn let the store offer customers lower prices. So at the time, this was really a revolutionary change.

[Zachary Crockett]

Self service became the norm in grocery retail. The final step of the process. Though the checkout still required human assistance from a cashier, Saunders wanted to change that.

[Christopher Andrews]

He had this dream of a giant robot store. And so he experimented with a store they called Kidoozle or Key does all. And it was essentially a store comprised wholly of vending machines, with the idea being that we would come in and there would be practically zero staff, and it would dramatically cut down on the overhead.

[Zachary Crockett]

The venture ended up being ahead of its time, and it failed. But it got retailers thinking about a more automated future. That Future arrived in 1986, when a company called Checkrobot introduced the first automatic checkout machine at a Kroger outside of Atlanta. For the first time, shoppers could scan their own groceries. A machine would read the barcode and announce the price in a digitized voice. The invention was hailed by one newspaper as a revolution in the supermarket, one that would make shopping more efficient for consumers and reduce labor costs for stores. But it took a while for the idea to catch on.

[Christopher Andrews]

It was really the 2000s when it began to take off in significant numbers. This was in the months leading up to the great recession. And so businesses saw self checkout lanes as possibly a way to cut costs so they could compete with the Walmarts and the targets.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, self checkouts are used by 96% of major grocery chains, and they account for nearly four out of every ten lanes. For retailers. The machines don't come cheap. A four lane setup runs around $125,000, and a large grocery store usually has at least two or three of them. Installation, maintenance, and software add tens of thousands of dollars to that cost. There's a whole economy of people who help implement these systems.

[Sarah Eloy]

My name is Sarah Eloy. I'm the experienced retail lead for North America at publicusapient.

[Zachary Crockett]

Publicis Sapient is a digital consultancy. They help businesses, including major Grocery chains find solutions to problems using technology.

[Sarah Eloy]

People, you know, they either love or hate a self checkout. We like to work with our retailers to kind of take a step back and actually think about how customers want to use something like a self checkout in the general flow of the store. They want to help customers get out of the store, frankly, through checkout as fast as possible.

[Zachary Crockett]

After helping a retailer install self checkout lanes, publicist Sapient will track a bunch of metrics to see if they're serving their intended purpose.

[Sarah Eloy]

The type of data we would check would just be time in store time through checkout. We would look at, you know, when you start the checkout to when you would finish. How quickly could you scan an item? What kind of errors might you encounter along the way? Do you need help from a human?

[Zachary Crockett]

And what does that data say? Is self checkout actually more efficient than regular checkout?

[Sarah Eloy]

It doesn't necessarily create an affordance every time. It's kind of up to, is the customer capable of scanning something faster than a traditional employee would be able to do?

[Zachary Crockett]

Andrews says self checkout lanes often create the illusion of efficiency.

[Christopher Andrews]

Self checkout lanes are like a fun house. They create a time warp effect. Because we're so busy when we're doing things, time seems to move more quickly.

[Zachary Crockett]

But in most cases, we are not, in fact, faster than trained employees.

[Christopher Andrews]

Cashiers have a lot of informal knowledge about where the barcodes are placed on tens of thousands of different product packagings. They have memorized all of the codes for the various different forms of produce and fruit and vegetables. So while we might think of it as a very unskilled job, there's actually a lot more to it. And in part, that's why cashiers are often faster than we are in the checkout lane.

[Zachary Crockett]

One thing that might slow us down is the dreaded performance anxiety of self checkout.

[Christopher Andrews]

When you're in there, you can feel the clock ticking. You can see the eyes of the person behind you. When we're bagging our groceries, I think there's this very keen sense that, you know, every second we're taking to finish our transaction, somebody is waiting for us. And so there is this social pressure to hurry up, hurry up, figure out where the barcode is.

[Zachary Crockett]

But the problem isn't just our own incompetence. One consumer survey suggested that nearly 7 out of 10 shoppers have experienced an error or technological issue in a self checkout lane. At some point, everyone has faced an unexpected item in the bagging area. Message or even less. Welcome, please wait Help is on the way. All of these problems are made worse by the fact that self checkout is often our only option.

[Christopher Andrews]

For shoppers with just literally a handful of items, self checkout lanes are great. They're a solution to having to wait in those long lines. The problem is that because of stores employment practices, we often see more and more people, in a sense, forced to use self checkout lanes because there's one, or maybe not even any human operated cashiers open.

[Zachary Crockett]

So why are supermarkets replacing friendly, efficient cashiers with expensive and error prone machines? You might think it's to reduce labor costs. And that's true in theory.

[Christopher Andrews]

In an abstract sense, if you replace six cashiers with six self checkouts and one staff left to assist customers, you just cut your labor costs at the checkout by roughly 80%.

[Zachary Crockett]

But the reality is a little different. After Albertsons installed self checkouts in its stores, its average employee count went up from 118 workers per store to 128. The same thing happened at Kroger and Target. This is partly because many grocery stores are unionized. A displaced cashier who has strong employment protections might just be assigned to another role in the store. Self checkouts also often call for additional jobs, chief among them security officers. Because as it turns out, when shoppers are in charge of the scanning, they take some liberties.

[Christopher Andrews]

Shoplifting is significantly higher through self checkout lanes. They literally turned us into a nation of shoplifters.

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[Zachary Crockett]

Phil Lempert is a journalist and retail analyst who's been covering grocery trends for more than 30 years. He runs a website called Supermarket Guru. And for years he's been predicting the downfall of self checkout lanes.

[Commercial Narrator]

There's probably, in my opinion, you know, a good 30, 35 reasons to get rid of self checkout.

[Zachary Crockett]

The biggest reason, he says, is self checkout theft. Known in the industry as shrinkage, retailers

[Commercial Narrator]

around the country are seeing their bottom line being affected. We're talking about a huge problem. When I talk to the CEOs of supermarkets, it's number one on their list. The shrink factor, as more people have gravitated towards self checkout is now four to five times what it was pre pandemic. A lot of people can fool that checkout.

[Zachary Crockett]

Various studies have found that theft is far more likely to occur at a self checkout than at a checkout run by a cashier. One in seven shoppers admit they have intentionally stolen something at a self checkout, which works out to around $10 billion worth of goods each year in the US alone. Christopher Andrews, the sociologist, says that shoppers employ various techniques to dupe the machines.

[Christopher Andrews]

One way that's been popularly referred to as the banana trick is by entering a more expensive produce item as something like an apple or a banana. In one store I went to, they told me about an incident in which they went to the back of the store and they had lots more apples than the system said they should have had. And meanwhile they were missing several of these cases of seafood. And what had happened is that because nobody was staffing the self checkout lane, people were going through entering these cases of king crab legs and frozen lobsters as cheap produce items.

[Zachary Crockett]

But not all self checkout theft is intentional. The technology also leads to lots of accidental shoplifting.

[Christopher Andrews]

There's different categories of shoplifting ranging from organized retail theft rings to what they call walk offs. People who walk off with items because they become frustrated or as I've experienced, things you forget to scan they call a bottom of basket or bottom of the cart. If you forget to Bring that up and scan it and you walk out. Technically, you've just shoplifted.

[Zachary Crockett]

Wow. Okay, duly noted.

[Christopher Andrews]

I don't think we ever really had that discussion about, you know, what are the legal implications of using self checkout lines. If you make a mistake, you could be charged.

[Zachary Crockett]

Lempert says there's precedent for this.

[Commercial Narrator]

There was a woman at a Walmart store who checked out, I think it was about 12 or 15 products, and she forgot to scan a candy bar. And she was then pulled into the back room by security and threatened to go to jail for not scanning, you know, a candy bar.

[Zachary Crockett]

Retailers have experimented with various solutions to the theft problem. Security guards, surveillance cameras, scales that can sense when the weight of a product is off. Gates that won't open until you scan your receipt. But customers sometimes bristle at the security measures.

[Commercial Narrator]

Consumers are really getting a feeling that the supermarket doesn't trust them at self checkout. And the truth is the supermarket doesn't trust them at self checkout. But, you know, it's very off putting when you think about going into a grocery store which is supposed to be a community place where you have a great experience with all these great colors and aromas in the produce department and so on, and then you go to leave and there's this big burly security agent coming over to you for the self checkout.

[Zachary Crockett]

And customers aren't just frustrated about being policed, they're tired of doing labor for the store.

[Commercial Narrator]

I hear from a lot of consumers that they're saying, you know, if I have to do my own checkout, if I have to do my own bagging, give me a discount, give me some benefit for doing it.

[Zachary Crockett]

Last year, a bill in Rhode island proposed giving customers a 10% discount for using the self checkout to buy 10 or more items. In 2019, Oregon attempted to pass a measure that limited grocery stores to just two self checkout lanes. Both of these efforts failed. Some stores have decided that self checkout isn't worth all of this backlash. Last year, the UK based grocery chain Booths removed self checkouts from 26 of their 28 locations, citing a return to human centered customer Service. In the U.S. dollar General, Walmart and Shoprite have also pulled back on aggressive self checkout expansion in certain markets. Other retailers have never dabbled in self checkouts and have instead leaned into their human cashiers as sort of a boutique offering in the digital age.

[Commercial Narrator]

Here in Los Angeles, there's a chain called Erewhon. It makes Whole Foods look like a discount store. What they're pricing and with their offerings. Their driving force is having a great customer experience. You know, they wouldn't put in a self checkout for any amount of money.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Dutch grocery chain Jumbo has so called slow lanes where human cashiers intentionally take more time to chat with customers. There may be a business case for decisions like this. A recent study found that checkouts with human cashiers lead to more customer loyalty than self checkouts.

[Commercial Narrator]

The fact that we're seeing major retailers experimenting with getting rid of self checkout says to me that if I was in the self checkout manufacturing business, I'd be worried.

[Zachary Crockett]

There have been efforts to make self checkout radically easier for customers. Amazon spent several years experimenting with a process it called just walk out. At its brick and mortar stores, cameras and scanners detected when a product was picked off the shelf and customers were automatically billed when they walked out of the store. Earlier this year, the company gave up on just walkout and shifted its focus to smart carts that allow you to ring up items as you shop. There are also changes on the horizon for how products are scanned. GS1, the organization that maintains standards for barcodes, has proposed a new product identifier that looks more like a QR code.

[Commercial Narrator]

It's going to be able to tell where the product was made, when it was made, any food safety recall information. I mean, it's just going to have a plethora of data. And you know what, those self scanners that are there today, some of which have been there 10, 15, 20 years, they can't read this new barcode. And I think you're going to see a major push for people to use their mobile devices to scan those codes, to be able to check out, to take the money right from our bank account or our credit card and deliver it instantaneously to that retailer.

[Zachary Crockett]

But Christopher Andrews says that even if self checkout technology is changing, one thing is here to stay. The exploitation of consumers unpaid labor.

[Christopher Andrews]

If the micro view is self checkout land in the supermarket, I think the macro view is looking at the economy more broadly and looking at self checkout in libraries, in retail stores, looking at self ordering systems, in fast casual dining, looking at self check in at hotels. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. Even hospitals are starting to look at self service technology to try to displace some of the tasks and the costs associated with that front end labor of receptionists and people processing medical records. The idea of passing paid tasks onto unpaid consumers is just, it's simply too seductive for businesses to not pursue. We're busy running around doing these things and you have to ask yourself, are we getting anything out of this?

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Economics of Everyday Things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

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