New solutions for long checkout lines

Store Equipment & Design, June, 2000

Everyone knows long lines annoy customers, but what do they do about it, besides grumble? According to a recent study by America's Research Group, they leave--83 percent of women and 91 percent of men surveyed said long lines have prompted them to stop shopping at a particular store.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, these statistics are one motivation for big-box retailers like WalMart and Kmart to look into technologies--like self-checkout and "smart packaging"--that help speed things along.

Wal-Mart is testing new cash registers in its store across the street from the Bentonville, Ark., headquarters; the registers have special keypads that change functions as a cashier moves through a transaction, which eliminates keystrokes. A store in Fayetteville, Ark., uses a self-checkout system from Optimal Robotics Corp., which allows one cashier to oversee four checkout stations at a time. Another tool in Wal-Mart's arsenal is its "line buster" service: When lines back up, employees use hand-held computers to scan a customers' items and give them a reusable card containing the total; the cashier then simply swipes the card to ring up the order.

A less high-tech approach is WalMart's team of 15 people who, with stopwatch in hand, spend hours watching videotapes of checkouts; they also work as cashiers one Saturday a month to gain real-world experience.

IBM, meanwhile, figures it's about five years away from bringing to market technology that could eliminate the checkout altogether. A recent commercial shows a man stuffing groceries in his coat and walking out the door; a small monitor has looked at his groceries, calculated the total and charged his credit card. The technology is there, according to Jim Green, a vice president in IBM's retail group, but the cost is prohibitive.

Some consumer product manufacturers are working on smart packaging, with help from the new Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The participants are working to develop tags that will speed up checkout; because they will allow constant readings of sales information, they will also allow tighter management of production and store deliveries. The project's director, Kevin Ashton--a brand manager for Proctor and Gamble's Oil of Olay unit--has developed shelves that work with the tags by reading and transmitting data via the Internet to the store manager and the manufacturer, notifying them when they run low.

The tags now cost two to three cents each, according to the Journal article; Ashton said the cost could reach the target for implementation--below one penny--within three years. Until these tags can become an industry standard, the Consumer Products Manufacturers Association, which includes Proctor and Gamble, Eastman Kodak and Johnson & Johnson, are working to develop a monitor that can read the various types of source tags used today.