Self Checkouts were brought in as a business model at Walmarts a couple years ago. After all, this high tech method of checkout, only demanded a couple people to oversee about 6 self checkouts so it was more efficient. It also had the advantage of not taking so long for those people who only had a couple items they wanted to scan and pay for.
But these advantages weren’t seen by everyone. Instead, others saw that Walmart was hiring the customer at the grand total of $0.00 an hour to do work that was formerly done by a Walmart employee. Not to mention that Walmart was hurting the economy by having fewer employees.
These leftish concerns were ignored by Walmart and really I thought this was the end of the discussion. Until I heard of a Walmart in Ottawa taking out self serve areas and putting back full serve cashiers.
What is believed to be the reason for this backpedaling by this mighty corporation? Five finger discounts or theft seems to be behind it all. Walmart has neither confirmed or denied this. After all, they don’t want to spread the idea of stealing from the rich (don’t forget Walmart is legally a person with deep, deep, deep pockets) and giving to the poor (by comparison to Walmart virtually anyone is poor) is good.
In the affected store, Walmart said: “We are pleased to announce the test of the full service experience”. Now doesn’t that quote make you just have bubbles of joy move around your body.
But Walmart hasn’t backpedaled completely. They said the affected store would still have a smaller self checkout area. But it sounds like its going to have more staff lurking about. This is for the people with the couple items that don’t want to wait as long. There will be more cashier using checkouts, too. Sounds like this may be a win/win for Walmart customers and staffing.
Possibly Walmart will spread the new formula throughout its system. This way they can still say their newish business model works. It just had to be tweaked a bit.
