Self-Checkout in the Labor Shortage Era

Are autonomous checkout solutions, like self-checkout, the future of retail? Brendan Witcher, Vice President, Principal Analyst, wrote in a recent Forrester blog post, “Labor shortages continue to plague the industry both in stores and in operations, and holiday hiring may drop from last year,” citing Macy’s holiday hiring target as being down 46% from last year. With so much traffic going online and staffing shortages driving up the cost of store associates, it’s more important than ever to increase efficiencies at physical locations.

Increasingly, retailers are switching to self-checkout to achieve these efficiency gains. In a previous blog post, it was mentioned how Jumpmind Commerce can be toggled into self-checkout mode at will. This means associates are free to work on whatever is most important at the moment, whether that’s cleaning up a rack or helping a customer find a specific item. Then, whenever they’re available again, the associate can toggle the device back and continue using it as a normal register. The capability of a device being multi-functional reduces the need for multiple types of devices and reduces the barrier of entry into the self-checkout space for a retailer who needs to maintain traffic flow at stores with fewer workers.

Additionally, the future of self-checkout has begun with the removal of the scanner. There are multiple hardware providers now that allow customers to lay out all of their items and have a camera to determine everything they’re purchasing without the need to scan a single barcode. Since Jumpmind Commerce is device and platform agnostic, it can easily be integrated with hardware like this to further simplify the self-checkout experience.

The self-checkout might have been ubiquitous in grocery stores in the past, but it is rapidly growing in popularity in all kinds of retail sectors. At Jumpmind, we offer a flexible solution to getting self-checkout in stores today, while looking to the future to be prepared for the evolution of autonomous checkout.