iDiz Incorporated

I went grocery shopping last week, and I learned something the hard way. After 10:00 pm, the Kroger supermarket near me closes down all their human-staffed checkouts, forcing everyone to to scan and bag their own groceries.

Lines grew, carts were abandoned, and shoppers entering the store took one look at the developing riot and left. A few enterprising types casually rolled away with far more in their carts than they ran through the scanner.

What can we learn from Kroger’s failure?

Excuse Me, Your Cost Cuts are Showing
Removing checkout staff was obviously just corporate cost-cutting, with absolutely no benefit to the consumer. Automation should be about a lot more than just shoving some of your work back to the consumer.

Perhaps attitudes would change if Kroger gave shoppers 5% off at the self checkouts — some incentive to choose self-check. In the credit union world,  e-deposit is a good example of this give and take in action — members have to enter check info and hunt up a stamp, but they’re happy to do a little more work because they’re getting a lot of convenience in return.

No Choice For You
Forcing automation on consumers only creates resentment. Remember, there was a time when most people would rather write checks than use those newfangled debit cards. People are far more willing to try automation when they can still fall back on the old way.

Unclear on the Concept
Grocery store scanners include sensitive scales — you scan the item, and you can’t scan the next item until the scale weighs the added item and the weight matches the machine’s database of product weights. The problem is, there’s no explanation of this anywhere, and most people take a while to catch on, if they ever do. Perfectly normal behavior, like loading your cart with the groceries you just scanned, will cause the system to stop working and shout at you.

Automation and interfaces must build on existing mental maps and behavior. ATMs are a great example — if you can talk to a live teller, you can figure out how to use an ATM.

Automation Represents You
The Kroger scanners were so filthy that they couldn’t scan anything on the first try, and the bagging table scales didn’t pick up a lot of items. The scanners stopped dead with nonsensical errors after almost every item.

No one trusts unreliable or unusable automation — what if your home banking froze up on every other transaction, or only reported last week’s balances? You can bet that members wouldn’t trust it to handle anything important.

You wouldn’t tolerate sloppy appearance, errors, and bad attitudes from loan officers and tellers, and it makes even less sense to tolerate these traits in the automated systems your members use more often.

No More Gee-Whiz Factor
The first ATM was hailed as a newsworthy technological advance — a “robot teller” that never sleeps. Nowadays, no one’s impressed by a phone the size of a candy bar that also shoots hi-def video. People need to see an immediate, personal benefit to new technology or they can’t be bothered.