Dive Brief:
- The self-checkout market experienced a “new record year” in 2023, according to a recent report from RBR Data Services. Over 217,000 terminals were delivered globally, up 12% year over year.
- The U.S. is the largest self-checkout market, a trend driven in part by supermarket chains and c-stores. Locations with existing self-checkout operations are installing additional terminals or refreshing older hardware, per the report.
- Global installations of self-checkout terminals are predicted to reach 2 million by 2029, per the report.
Dive Insight:
Retailers are reshaping their self-checkout options amid shifting consumer habits.
An increasing number of self-checkout units, for example, only accept digital payment options such as mobile wallets, cards and biometric payments. Additionally, in response to concerns about shrinkage, some retailers have altered their operations, such as limiting basket sizes.
“Self-checkout pilots are popping up in smaller countries and the technology is taking off in major markets that initially had been slow to adopt, such as Germany, showing strong potential for the global market to grow,” Jeni Bloomfield of RBR Data Services said in a statement.
Automatic age verification is coming to self-checkout. A 24/7 store at the Stuttgart Airport in Germany earlier this year started piloting Diebold Nixdorf’s Vynamic Smart Vision age verification solution, which allows users to buy age-restricted items via self-checkout.
Though the U.S. has led self-checkout adoption, a number of major retailers have started to back away from the technology. Companies like Walmart, Dollar General and Five Below have scaled back or removed their self-checkout terminals. Target has moved to limit self-checkout transactions to 10 items or fewer at most stores and added more cashier-staffed lanes across its locations.
Shrink continues to be an issue plaguing self-checkout, though, prompting grocers to find creative measures to reduce losses. Safeway, for example, has recently added receipt-scanning gates to the self-checkout areas of select stores in certain cities.
Additionally, some retailers have integrated RFID technology into their operations to improve their supply chain and self-checkout functions. However, such efforts have yielded mixed results. Walmart this spring ended an RFID tech pilot that verified customers' purchases as part of its scan-and-go checkout service at a Bentonville, Arkansas, location.
