Supermarkets rethink self-service
Beginning this month, Albertsons is removing the self-checkout lanes in all of its 217 stores in eight states.
Albertsons is a Boise company that acquired some Albertsons supermarkets that Supervalu didn't want when Supervalu acquired Albertsons in 2006.
Supervalu, which owns all the Albertsons stores in Idaho, said on Monday that it will not remove self-checkout lanes from its 460 Albertsons stores.
Seattle Times says, for Boise-based Albertsons, self-checkout no longer fits with the customer-service experience it wants, spokeswoman Christine Wilcox said.
“Our customers are our highest priority, and we want to provide them with an excellent experience from the time they park their car to when they leave,” Wilcox said.
When Albertsons installed self-checkout lanes nearly a decade ago, “it was in response to a growing trend in retail for stores to be even more self-service” than ever before, she said. Albertsons is replacing the self-checkout lanes with regular lanes and opening more staffed lanes during peak shopping hours.
Last month, Kroger removed the self-checkout lanes in its high-traffic store in Houston in response to shoppers who want to move through quickly with a few items, Kroger spokesman Gary Huddleston said.
However, according to The Wall Street Journal, Kroger is testing a new advanced self-checkout technology that it believes will improve the customer experience and help eliminate loss due to theft or mis-ringing of merchandise.
“Stores used to be designed to keep you in there as long as possible, so that you would buy as much as possible, but, in more recent years, there has been this push to make things easier, faster and more convenient for the customer,” said Joseph Agnese, food and drug retailer analyst at Standard & Poor's.
Every company wants to have a differentiator and, in this day and age, moving back to only traditional lanes could help, he added.
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