The nice self-checkout debate: Is it REALLY one of the simplest ways to buy?

Self-checkouts in supermarkets and retail stores are the hot topic once again this week after it was revealed that six million Brits are using them to steal.

Using a loophole, commonly known as the ‘banana trick’,  one in eight shoppers put the more expensive item they want through the scanner manually as a fruit or vegetable to get a cheaper price, a poll of 1,099 people by Ipsos discovered.

Eight per cent confessed they have stolen something which cost up to £10 without paying, and thirteen per cent of people admitted to taking something worth £1 or under.

It comes as shoplifting reaches a record high of 443,995 offences recorded in the past year with retailers estimating that £1.8 billion worth of goods are stolen annually. As a result, shops have to shell out an extra £700 million on security measures.

The blame has been pointed at the rise of self-checkout tills, which have increased by 50 per cent from 53,000 to 80,000 in the UK.

Are YOU a secret shoplifter? Tell your story anonymously: freya.barnes@mailonline.co.uk

Now, some big British chains have decided to dial back on self-checkouts to combat theft and to please other customers who are sick of them and would prefer to be served by a human.

Morrisons became the latest retailer to make a U-turn on its self-checkout policy with its boss admitting it ‘went a bit too far’ with the number of unmanned tills.

Rami Baitiéh, the chief executive of the company, said that it is ‘reviewing the balance between self-checkouts and manned tills’ as the company reveals plans to cut down on the numbers after installing too many.

It comes amidst mounting backlash against the technology, with northern retailer Booths announcing in November it was scrapping them and Asda last week promising to invest in staff instead.

Self-checkout tills have become common place in supermarkets but their introduction in clothing stores is more recent, with the likes of Primark, Zara and Uniqlo installing them in 2022.

Primark originally soft-launched them in a handful of its stores in Sheffield, Northampton, West Bromwich and Kingston, but this year expanded to include them in a further 20 branches. The fast-fashion giant has installed security gates at the self-checkouts which only let the customer out once they have scanned their receipt.

Zara and Uniqlo have adopted a different approach to prevent stealing with their automatic scanning technology which allows customers to dump their shopping in a box that scans it all at once using tiny chips inside the tags or fabric.

In March, MailOnline put supermarket self-checkouts to the test to find out which are the fastest and most user friendly, with Tesco coming out on top at just 43 seconds and Aldi crashing into last place at nearly two minutes.

Reporter Freya Barnes has returned to Britain’s highstreets to test self-checkouts inside clothing stores and a few supermarkets at Westfield Stratford in east London to compare the experiences and test their efficiency again.

Zara. The love of my life and keeper of my soul. Seldom do I walk past one without being drawn in like a moth to a flame. 

The self-checkouts here are very high tech, using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which allow the scanning machine to identify each item and calculate the total amount.

You dump the clothes in a box which scans them all at once and that’s it – dink your card on the reader, grab a free bag and leave. Sometimes you have to remove a security tag or two but it’s not time consuming. 

I loved the ease of it and how it gave me no time to stand in a queue and talk myself out of buying more clothes. I had scanned, paid and bagged up the vest top I bought in a speedy 38 seconds. Zara, you are my girl.

Or so I thought. 

Less than 24-hours later, I was back in Zara with my father, Sherman, on my day off. We have a great deal which means he pays for the things I want as long as I pick out some clothes for him from the men’s section.

Weighed down with shirts, skirts and hangers, we headed to the self-checkouts where I explained to him how easy and clever they are. 

As an east end business man who values his time, he was impressed. That was until we were humiliated, not once but twice, on our way out.

The security alarms mercilessly blared out a siren noise as we left the shop, sending my cheeks bright red at the thought of fellow shoppers thinking I had stolen something.

My bewildered father looked at the security guard who turned his phone around to show us that one of the shirts had not been paid for. We explained that it was a mistake and hurried back to the scanners to pay for it.

We thought the embarrassment was over as we scurried out again, only to be met with the dreaded alarm once more.

The security guard showed us his phone which flagged a Cherry Bomb perfume as unpaid for. Why their system did not flag the shirt and the perfume on our first attempt at leaving is beyond me. 

My father began tutting out of frustration, having just spent well over £100 in Zara. He dug the perfume out of the bag and gave it back, telling the security guard to ‘just forget it’.

We ended up ordering the perfume online but left ranting about how humiliating the whole ordeal was, with my dad huffing and puffing about how they ‘made us look like a pair of tea leaves’ (Cockney rhyming slang for thieves).

After my original and misleading Zara experience the day before, I headed into Primark to test out their self-checkouts which I had been side-eyeing since they were installed a few months back.

The actual process is easy and familiar but upon trying to leave you find yourself caged in like a farm animal by their security gates that only open if you scan your receipt, assumedly to prevent theft. 

But the system made me – an innocent shopaholic – feel uncomfortable, only intensifying the untrusting relationship I’ve had with Primark since I found out their leggings are see-through after wearing them in public for years. 

However, I have to give it to them, they were the fastest out of the three clothing stores we tried at a lightening fast 30 seconds. The receipt scanned and opened the gates seamlessly for a tech savvy Gen Z like myself but I have seen older people struggle with it.

Next up was Japanese clothing store Uniqlo which also has the magic scanning boxes. Their ones ask too many questions for my liking. Do I want a bag? Yes, obviously. Can they have my email? No. Would I like to donate money to a charity they provided very little information on? Also no. And how would I be paying? With my card of course, it’s 2024.

It was like pop-up city on that checkout screen, which meant it took me 15 seconds longer than it did in Zara to buy a vest top. 

After putting the clothing stores through their paces, I headed to Waitrose, Marks and Spencer and Asda to give their self-checkouts another try.

Waitrose seem to have improved their self-checkouts since my scathing review in which I reprimanded them for having no shopping bags and suggesting I pay and commit to a bag for life. 

All of which meant it took me an unacceptable one minute and 49 seconds to check out. But today it only took me 34 seconds. We love a supermarket that can take feedback and learn from it. Kudos Waitrose.

Marks and Spencer… where this whole conversation began. People bemoaned their self-checkouts which were such a faff they made some of their middle class customers result to shoplifting. 

However, it took me just 28 seconds to buy a jar of coffee this time and the staff members were very attentive. 

Holding supermarkets to account and getting results isn’t much but its honest work. Keep it up Marks and Spencer.

Last but not least, I took a jaunt to my local Asda in Leyton Midlands in east London. Their self-checkouts are always extremely busy which is why I usually and opt for big Tesco instead. But I had high hopes since they announced that they are dialling back on self-checkouts and hiring more staff to serve customers instead.

It was choc-a-block in there but there were plenty of workers serving at the regular checkouts as promised. It took me 40 seconds to buy some biscuits which isn’t bad, but also not the best.

This should improve drastically as they continue to hire more staff, hopefully.

The supermarket has reported a 2.1 per cent dip in like-for-like sales in the first half of 2024 – and is spending £30million on extra staffing hours to keep shelves fully stocked around the clock and to increase the number of workers on checkouts. 

It is not the only one to admit that the tech is failing, Booths supermarket – which has 27 stores in the North across Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Cheshire – has been finding the machines to be ‘slow, unreliable and impersonal’.

Earlier this year, Booths axed all of its self-service tills and returned to fully-staffed checkouts, adding ‘rather than artificial intelligence, we’re going for actual intelligence’.

I spoke to a range of shoppers to find out if shops like Booths, Asda and Morrisons had hit the nail on the head by acknowledging that shoppers prefer to be served by a human.

Faye Hewitt, 45, pointed out that the lack of face-to-face service not only impacts the customer but also the workers.

She said: ‘You’re putting a lot of people out of their jobs. When I go into a supermarket I prefer actually talking to somebody and getting the benefit of that because the self-service isn’t really that quick.

‘I just like socialising and seeing someone. It’s nice to go in the supermarket and say “Hi, how are you? How’s your day going?”. It’s really lovely.’

87-year-old Bob, who has lived in the area for many years and watched Asda change over that time, prefers to be served by a person instead of a machine, like the good old days.

He said: ‘A machine is going to break, whereas I could speak to you and get a response.’

Saarah Rahman, 21, acknowledged the impact of self-checkouts on elderly shoppers as well as those who can only pay in cash.

She said: ‘I feel like, coming from a different perspective, for those who are perhaps elderly and they don’t know how to use the self check outs or for those who are having financial difficulties or homeless, they may not have a debit card at all, and they can only pay by cash. It’s definitely a massive disadvantage.’ 

Uber driver Syed Ahmed proposed a clever idea for supermarkets to give shoppers who use the self-service checkouts a discount as a token of gratitude for doing the work themselves.

The 55-year-old said: ‘Self-checkout is actuall difficult for everyone. Every time you get stopped and they are saving money reducing staff and we are getting nothing.

‘If they give us a discount on sales check, like a 10 per cent discount, then it’s worth it for us because at the same time we are doing work for them. So they are saving money and we are getting nothing.

‘So my suggestion is either they give us a discount on the self-checkout or remove them.’