EHI Technology Days: self-checkout is on the rise

Up to 50 percent of Ikea's customers already use self-checkout

Ikea is once again the pioneer: Approximately 50 percent of existing cash lines in 45 Swedish furniture stores in Germany were equipped with self-service Express cash this year. Specifically 480 conventional funds were dismantled and 960 Express POS installed. The reported Holger Apel, responsible at Ikea for POS technology, the technology days the EHI Retail Institute in Cologne. According to a report by the trade magazine The trade is the furniture store "one of the few dealers in Germany, put the area-wide and in a big way on this, Self-Checkout' POS solutions." That seems only logical to pay but about 70 percent of 46 million customers in cash anyway.

However, Germany is lagging behind EHI details of development in self-service area behind where the Metro subsidiary Real is a pioneer and has installed in 62 markets self-scanning terminals while in the major European food retailers Tesco, Carrefour or Continente of Self- Checkout the standard belong. There, as reported, the trade, "can customers so they because want to be a matter of course automatically at checkout." The consulting firm Retail Banking Research (RBR) also assumes that the number of worldwide currently 92.000 terminals to 2014 will quadruple.

According to Holger Apel, 40 percent of all customers at Ikea are already using the new offer, and even 50 percent on peak days, with a company employee always being available in the immediate vicinity. It is positively noted that the solution is not technical, but "clear and easy to understand". With 62 customers processed per hour compared to 43 at traditional checkouts, the new solutions showed clear advantages in terms of productivity and time savings.

For industry experts, the topic of self-checkout is no longer new territory anyway. “There is great potential for self-checkout solutions and more and more customers who know exactly what they want and need. You save time when shopping at the self-service terminal and go home happier,” says Peter Laudien-Weidenfeller, Director Global Key Account Management Retail Systems at the technology manufacturer Bizerba from Balingen. At the same time, one should not ignore those customers who want direct advice, but must always have the entire range of services available. "In the bank today I only do all standard transactions at the ATM or online and appreciate the personal advice on individual issues," he says. Bizerba takes the wind out of the sails of critics who fear an increase in shoplifting as a result of the spread of self-checkout systems, for example, by using intelligence in self-checkout terminals and self-scanning systems. “An important criterion for food retail is weight. If a high-quality wine bottle is hidden in a cereal box, the scales, in combination with the scanner, notice the wrong weight and trigger a warning," says Tudor Andronic from the Retail Systems Development management team at Bizerba. The combination of self-checkout and scales can generally analyze contradictions between the goods in the shopping cart and the weight of the scanned goods at the checkout. In addition, the scanned goods can be compared with the purchased product using the item master data stored via barcodes, such as shape, color and weight.

Source: Cologne / Balingen [ PLAIN TEXT ONLINE ]