This article was originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald: https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/when-buying-milk-is-a-whole-new-experience-20180906-p5027o.html
Overwhelmed shoppers have had to deal with a lot of change in the supermarket industry lately.
First, supermarket checkouts did away with the single-use plastic bag, favouring instead the sturdier, environmentally-friendlier reusable totes. Now it seems we’re set to go a step further and ditch the checkout altogether.
Today, Woolworths became the first major supermarket in Australia to give grocery shoppers a ‘checkout-free experience’ with the launch of its Scan&Go in-app shopping campaign.
The cashier-less campaign may sound familiar to those who have been following American online vendor Amazon’s venture into the brick-and-mortar retail business, with ‘checkout-free’ supermarket Amazon Go popping up in Seattle earlier this year.
Amazon’s trial was initially met with enthusiasm, with headlines cropping up across the World Wide Web claiming that the cashier-less experience would be the future of the retail industry. As the trial progressed, however, this enthusiasm gave way to scepticism as confused shoppers continued to report that the experience was less Back to the Future and more 2001 A Space Odyssey: baffling, overly dependent on hostile technology, and ultimately disappointing.
So why is it that we feel we have to repeat Amazon’s mistakes?
New retail technologies may be novel and exciting, but the supermarket industry has a history of new-fangled gadgetry that has been introduced to great fanfare, and then failed to become mainstream. Consider Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), a tool used in the mid-1990’s that was expected to revolutionise the daily trip to the store. RFID used electromagnetic fields to identify and track tags attached to certain goods, doing away with the need for manual barcode scanning at the checkout.
The reason you may have never heard about this revolutionary technology is that its benefits were massively outweighed by the cost to install it across retail outlets. The stores that did outfit the system claimed that customers found the entire ordeal more trouble than was necessary, and were happier manually scanning their items than having to re-learn the process of buying a carton of milk.
And while there are suggestionsthat these cost complications will not plague the Australian market to the same degree, Woolworths’ new shopping format is not without its complications. The supermarket shake-up will also mean displacement of the thousands of Australians who work at supermarket checkout registers, an issue reminiscent of the introduction of self check-outs, which themselves are on the rise.
So does a checkout-free supermarket simply cut the fat and usher in the four horsemen of the retail worker’s apocalypse?
As early as 1939, emerging technology has encroached upon the retail sector, beginning with the seemingly innocuously named ‘Keedoozle’. The machine was an intricate circuitry of levers and conveyer belts, and allowed inventor Clarence Saunders to open the very first ‘fully automated’ supermarket in Tennessee. Shoppers would insert a specialised key into a slot below their chosen items, which produced a ticker tape list that, when fed into another machine, sent the chosen items travelling down a conveyer belt and into the hands of the customer.
The only issue was that the levers often short-circuited and the store closed for good in 1949 – another example of innovative technology that, in the end, is unable to keep up with the demands of a supermarket outfit.
Ultimately it appears that while the writing is on the wall for the Woolworths Scan&Go campaign, the retail industry will continue to announce innovative technology to enrich the experience of the everyday shopper.
For now, aisle-dwellers like myself will likely simply need to continue to remember to bring in their reusable bags.
Eden Faithfull 