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Consumer Reports


Consumers can expect more do-it-yourself checkout

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) ATMs were only the beginning.

The world is increasingly becoming a forest of self-serve kiosks, with consumers acting as their own cashiers at hotels, sports venues, big-box retailers and movie theaters.

McDonald's and Home Depot are recent additions to the list of retailers where customers can take matters into their own hands, but they're by no means the only places.

Baseball fans can buy tickets at stadium kiosks, travelers can check in to their hotel rooms at lobby terminals, and airlines continue to expand on their self-serve options.

And the possibilities for expansion appear almost unlimited, thanks to technological advances including retailers' use of bar codes and radio tags, the travel industry's embrace of computerized reservation systems and consumers' yen to pay with plastic.

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The rise of self-serve "is driven by the back-end systems that these companies have already invested in," said Jack Plunkett, chief executive at Plunkett Research Ltd., a Houston-based market-research firm. "Now they're giving us, the consumers, an interface to let us deal directly with those back-end systems."

McDonald's has put self-serve kiosks, where customers order and pay for their food, in 40 restaurants nationwide, said Todd Liebman, president of Quick Kiosk, a Framingham, Mass.-based company working with Kinetics Inc., to produce the terminals.

The next self-serve venues are likely to be CD and DVD retailers, as well as department stores, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst with The NPD Group, a market-research firm.

"Sears and Dillard's are starting to explore the new formats where they have either self-checkout or semi-assisted checkout," he said.

Already, supermarkets are expanding on simple do-it-yourself checkout to providing variations on the theme. "You'll find in supermarkets that have full-service delis a kiosk that will allow you to walk up to it and punch in your deli order," said Lee Holman, vice president of product development at IHL Consulting Group in Franklin, Tenn.

Rental-car companies are also pushing self-service, he said. "One of the things that you'll see is more collaboration between the airlines and the rental-car company," Holman said, "so when you get off the flight, you may be able to check in" while you're shuttled to the car agency.

Still, not everyone is pleased with the proliferation of self-service. For one, the machines will likely lead to some job losses. "We don't feel like it's a good move for the industry. It hurts jobs," said Jill Cashen, a spokeswoman with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, adding that the new technology has not lead to significant job cuts yet.

"It's having a subtle effect at this point. When someone retires, they're not posting for a new job," she said. Workers "feel like the companies are cutting back on the number of people at work, which means less staff to provide service to the customers (and) more customer frustration."

Also, Cashen said, consumers aren't reaping any benefit of the potential cost savings. "When customers use a self-scanning machine, it's not like their groceries are any cheaper, and they're doing all the work. They're bagging them, scanning them ... they're not getting any cut on that for doing the work."

Still, said The NPD Group's Cohen, the automation may allow retailers to be more competitive on costs, and the time savings alone may be enough benefit for many consumers.

"You may not see the ultimate cash benefit of it, but you will ultimately benefit," he said. "Who wants to wait in line?"

But Cohen did note that a glitch can quickly eliminate the time savings. He said his experience with Home Depot was "major-league annoying" because the scanner only accepts smaller items. "If the item is bigger than the basket, it won't accept it. I had to go get back into the long line. It annoyed me twice as much."

And, he said, eventually the lack of person-to-person interaction could hurt stores more than help them. "In the retailers' attempt to make purchasing self-service, they're eliminating one of the most important elements of the sale and that is ... the educational factor."

Cashiers can tell customers when buying, say, two cans of paint rather than one will offer cost savings, or that a higher-quality paint might be a better buy.

Said Cohen: Retailers have "lost the opportunity to have any connection with the consumer. That's a major downside."

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