Do self-checkout tills make shopping better or worse? What Yahoo readers said

Yahoo UK’s poll of the week lets you vote and indicate your strength of feeling on one of the week’s hot topics. After 48 hours the poll closes and, each Friday, we’ll publish and analyse the results, giving readers the chance to see how polarising a topic has become and if their view chimes with other Yahoo UK readers.

Supermarket giant Morrisons is cutting back on self-checkouts in its stores.

Rami Baitiéh, the company’s CEO, said: “Morrisons went a bit too far with the self-checkout. This had the advantage of driving some productivity. However, some shoppers dislike it, mainly when they have a full trolley.”

Baitiéh said Morrisons is now “reviewing the balance between self-checkouts and manned tills” and removing some from stores.

It comes after Asda also announced this month it would be putting more staff on checkouts, saying “we believe colleagues serving customers delivers a better customer experience”.

Self-checkout technology was first deployed on a large scale in the 2000s, with retailers hoping automated tills would cut queue times and costs.

But consumers remain to be fully sold on the benefits of the technology, with customers often left waiting due to scanning problems and age checks.

Yahoo News UK asked our readers what they think and here are the results…

Our poll, which ran from Tuesday until Thursday this week, asked: “Have self-checkouts made shopping better or worse?”

It received 4,614 votes and showed more than three-quarters – 78% – of Yahoo readers saying they have made their weekly shop worse, with just 16% approving of them.

Yahoo readers were also asked, on a scale of zero to 10: “How much do you care about keeping human cashiers in shops?”

This poll received 2,952 votes, with the most common vote being 10, which received 1,713. The average strength-of-feeling score was 8.75 out of 10.

Asked how often they use self-checkout tills, 39% of our respondents said ‘Never’, while 15% said they did so all the time.

A 2022 YouGov poll found that just 36% of Britons would choose a self-checkout till in an empty supermarket, compared to 56% who would choose a manned till.

Our original poll article can be found here.

Read more of Yahoo UK’s Poll of the Week articles