earticle

영어

Customer satisfaction in retail stores are considerably affected by checkout services. Self-checkout counters have been installed in order to reduce waiting times at checkout in retail stores. However, it is uncertain whether the self-checkout lanes actually decrease the average waiting time of customers. Rather, there are some problems associated with self-checkout lanes such as theft or service failure due to technological problems. This study analyzes comparison between self-checkout and regular staffed-checkout lanes, based on the dataset collected from a retail store in Poland. As a result, we observe that the average transaction times were longer at the self-checkout lanes though fewer products were purchased than at the staffed-checkout lanes. In addition, the customers who buy more products tend to use self-checkouts less frequently. We also check that transaction times are proportional to the number of products customers purchase, and that both the time to scan one item and the fixed time related to checkout are significantly longer at the self-checkout counters. As there has been very few research on the effectiveness of self-checkouts, this study can be the first step to investigate managerial insights on checkout services in retail stores.