Adjustment Costs Fall Heavily on Store Associates During RFID Self-Checkouts' Growth in Europe

Contactless RFID-based self-checkout technology tends to frame as customer-focused, but the majority of employee adaptation pressure in the European context occurs among retail store associates rather than consumers.

The change affects front-end roles and responsibilities in a way that most European retailers are just beginning to grapple with. Where associates were previously responsible for supporting scanning and monitoring payments, they now must deal with tagging problems, RFID processes and inventory problems that result from automatic transactions.

This adds another layer of complexity to the existing challenge of adequate employee coverage.

The traditional self-checkout approach involved a distinct workflow that included the scanning action itself, along with an attendant's monitoring of individual checkouts in case of identification verification or payment issues.

RFID checkout technology takes much of that process away since tagged products register themselves in the payment zone.

What remains in the employee's responsibility are exceptional situations, which tend to complicate things further.

For instance, a customer might take a product out of the shopping cart, place an item with a damaged tag or place two separate tagged products in a manner that prevents detection. The problems in question aren't necessarily indicative of a security threat but still require immediate attention from store employees.

Thus, employees now find themselves under additional pressure to monitor checkout anomalies instead of watching over scanning procedures.

Alongside that responsibility comes the pressure of training. Whereas employees did not necessarily require any specific knowledge about inventory management in traditional checkout environments, their role in RFID checkout systems involves a deeper understanding of inventory logic.

In other words, employees will need to know what can trigger a detection problem, how to verify exit alerts or why there may be no receipt printed if a tagged product was registered as part of a transaction.

Another issue facing retailers in Europe is the relatively high employee turnover in most store categories. This increases the difficulty of maintaining consistent employee training on new processes when staff turnover rates remain constant or rising.

Some companies are discovering that consumer attitudes are slow to change. Even though consumers may have access to the automatic basket check, they may still prefer using barcodes for scans. Similarly, some customers distrust the process of automatic detection and want manual confirmation from the store associate before leaving the store premises.

This behavior reduces the potential labor cost reductions in RFID-based self-checkout environments.

During busy periods of trading, this burden on the retail staff is even more apparent. When an employee is monitoring several checkout stations, there isn't always enough time to resolve each dispute that arises with regards to automatic detection.

Even one such incident can affect other nearby customers since the process of detecting items in a customer's basket may prove confusing.

Trade unions are becoming aware of these problems, so retailers should be prepared for greater scrutiny. On the one hand, RFID checkouts make some of the cashiering process redundant. On the other, they create a different kind of labor challenge – one that involves employee decision-making and problem-solving.

Retailers' interest in frictionless payment experiences remains clear. Queue reduction is commercially attractive in highly populated urban markets where payment speed is expected by consumers. However, the issue of retail staff responsibilities needs more attention as deployments grow.