Is Cashierless Tech Ready For Prime Time?

Even as other food retailers have embraced self-checkout stations as a way to reduce front-end bottlenecks, New York grocer George Zoitas has turned them away.

While Zoitas, who is CEO of Westside Market, a chain of seven grocery stores in Manhattan, takes pride in his efforts to use technology to run his business, asking people to interact with machines that were helpful but also very temperamental was a nonstarter. So in 2019, the year after he decided to try self-checkout technology, Zoitas parted ways with it.

"We didn't like the self-checkouts whatsoever. We felt that they weren't efficient in controlling any type of shrinkage associated with them," Zoitas said. "And it's not per se that people intentionally tried to steal from them. It's just they would weigh the item, and there would be frustration. You don't know if it scanned or if it didn't. It created a lot of heartache versus efficiency on time and execution and getting people out."

In place of the self-checkout system, Zoitas has installed a cashierless-payment system in one of his stores that lets customers use their smartphones to scan and pay for items. Behind the scenes, location-tracking technology charts people’s movements and records where they are when selecting merchandise within a few inches, giving him insight into shopping behavior similar to what online shopping systems can provide.

Early customer acceptance of the self-scanning service has been positive, and Westside Market is preparing to deploy it at its other stores within the coming weeks, Zoitas said.

Westside Market's system is part of a breed of technology that backers say is ready to make a big impact on the way people shop in retail locations by eliminating lines, reducing touch points and otherwise speeding up the shopping experience. While those benefits have guided the technology's development from the start, the safety concerns posed by the pandemic have hastened its development, industry officials said.

An enduring benefit of next-generation checkout systems may be their ability to provide data about customers' in-store habits. In addition to eliminating checkout friction, Westside Market's system enables retailers to deliver personalized coupons or other advertisements to a customer’s smartphone that are triggered as they move around the store, said Will Hogben, CEO of FutureProof Retail, which worked with SIRL, a provider of location-tracking technology, to build Westside Market's system.