Supermarket giant Coles is to trial limiting the number of items that shoppers can scan through self-serve checkouts, directing people with more than 12 to a traditional staffed lane. While the company says it's not related to a recent crackdown on checkout theft, it's hard not to see it as further crumbling of the great self-service experiment.
Coles says that self-serve checkouts are more convenient for customers. But isn't the real point to boost the company's profits by cutting the wage bill? Part of doing that means shifting work back onto the customer.
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Shoplifting at self-service checkouts
The DIY machines are clearly a convenient option for many, especially light-fingered supermarket customers.
Self-serve checkouts are only the latest move in a basic big business strategy: squeeze the producer, squeeze the workforce and squeeze the consumer.
Why are all the goods on shelves in open aisles? So you, the customer, can do the work of gathering groceries that a store clerk used to do. Electronic payments rather than cash? Now you're doing their banking for them. Self-service checkouts? You're scanning and packing your own shopping, a job that used to be done by two people.
No wonder many shoppers view the supermarket giants as faceless food factories that it's OK to rip off: they've made themselves faceless by taking away the faces at the checkouts. Research undertaken at the Australian National University found that up to one-third of shoppers give themselves a "discount" when scanning their own goods – the "carrot discount", where customers scan an expensive item such as cherries as a cheap root vegetable. Coles has even called in the NSW Police, who in October said they will charge people for theft over "discount" amounts as small as $2.
Coles might think they have a shoplifting problem, but really they have a customer relations problem: they are cutting customer service in the pursuit of profits and customers are pushing back.
This is not a defence of theft, nor an incitement to steal. But Coles might want to take a lesson from public transport in Melbourne. We didn't have much of a problem with fare evasion when conductors sold tickets on trams. Once scratch tickets and then Myki came in and conductors went out (nothing more than a cost-cutting and union-busting exercise by transport managers), fare evasion took off.
PTV now deploys goon squads of inspectors to heavy fare evaders, creating an adversarial relationship with customers: Very Bad Business Practice.
Coles, by calling in the cops, might be headed down the same path, treating their customers like potential criminals and creating a similarly dysfunctional relationship.
Oh, and they might want to think twice about what it means to charge someone with theft for pinching a loaf of bread in New South Wales.
Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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