Walmart self checkout12/17/2023 ![]() It could boost revenue and improve the experience, without-as suggested-reducing the payroll by $12 million. If those redeployed associates are going to be helping customers and doing other high-impact functions, that could be a huge help. When the CFO moved from the slide language-that this is what a second of cashier salary costs Wal-Mart-to his phrasing that this amounts to those same dollars in savings, is when things got dicey.Īgain, this doesn't mean that self-checkout is not a great investment. (It was the promise to not use self-checkout to fuel layoffs that pretty much kills the association.) But it doesn't mesh with the $12-million one-second savings line, because Wal-Mart would still be paying those salaries. Redeployed talent is certainly efficient and helpful. ![]() That would only happen, though, if self-checkout was siphoning off enough traffic that a staffed lane could be shut down. Self-checkout is certainly a boost for store efficiency-which ultimately saves money-but associating with a time reduction seems a reach.A Reuters story said Holley pledged that the chain "will not eliminate cashiers." Potentially, the argument goes, they could be redeployed elsewhere in the store. Self-checkout systems are supposed to only handle 10 or fewer items, so self-checkout lanes will either remove only smaller baskets or will radically slow down from the weight of many large shopping efforts. But it's not a clean reduction, because an associate has to manage a handful of self-checkout lanes to deal with exception items, glitches, training customers and watching for thefts. How would self-checkout lanes change that? Its value is that self-checkout enables the store to process more transactions with fewer people. Let's assume that the math is correct and that a second spent by all of Wal-Mart's cashiers costs the chain about $12 million a year. That's a key difference, and it speaks to the ongoing self-checkout debate. The slide (which presumably went through legal eight or nine times) said: "For every 1 second in average transaction time, we spend ~$12M in cashier wages." What the CFO said, though, was: "For every second we can save, that's $12 million in savings we can pass along." Let's drill into Holley's comments.įirst, the keynote remarks he made at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Consumer & Retail Conference differed slightly-but materially-from the slide he was working from. The savings, though, are much more amorphous. The expansion referenced for Sam's Club would see a self-checkout increase from the 80 stores that currently have it to 300 by December. One of the many reasons is that the savings being hinted at are almost impossible to prove, assuming they exist at all. The implication of the comment was to associate such savings with self-checkout, but the Wal-Mart CFO was careful to not go there. That's really interesting, but mostly because of what Holley did not say. On the same slide and in practically the same breath, he said that Wal-Mart saves $12 million in cashier wages for every second it reduces in checkout. 56% said they want a human cashier, and just 36% said they’d do self-checkout.At a New York conference Wednesday (March 7), Wal-Mart CFO Charles Holley mentioned that Wal-Mart-and its Sam's Club division-will be sharply increasing how many self-checkout lanes it offers. In a recent poll, people were asked what they’d do if there were NO LINES. Of course, many people DON’T EVEN WANT to do their checkout. Walmart said that they are taking “basic measures to control inventory,” but they wouldn’t say how widespread their self-checkout crackdown is, or what their policies are for citations and other penalties. She didn’t say what the “mistake” was, but $30 isn’t just missing a couple of veggies. In some cases, the police were called, one woman said that because her mistake was more than $30, the sheriff arrested her for petty theft. Related: No More Price Matching At Walmart… In some cases, people ARE stealing, and that’s bad, but a report out of Arizona talked with people who claim they were cited for MISTAKES while handling a LARGE number of items or dealing with children while checking out. Have you ever realized something didn’t get scanned, or you forgot to get it out of your cart? Some Walmart locations are cracking down on self-checkout “shoplifting,” and are issuing citations if people walk away without paying for all their items. You may want to be a little more careful when scanning your items at the self-checkout!
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