How Frictionless Checkout Can Help You Solve Your Labor Woes
Grocery stores and chains are struggling with the lack of available labor in today’s marketplace, and this makes it tough to keep up with store traffic, online ordering, curbside pickups, and customer service needs.
As unemployment has dipped near 50-year lows and grocery industry wages have risen 3.8%, stores are struggling to hire and retain enough workers affordably, with turnover running at 48% for food retail employees.
Therefore, frictionless checkout has become a strategic and practical way to reduce reliance on scarce labor and help stores free up existing staff to keep up with demand and deliver a superior customer experience.
Upgrading to faster and more efficient checkouts with less friction gives consumers the speedy, hassle-free checkout experience they prefer, and it saves grocers time and labor, which can be reallocated to other customer service tasks and channels.
For example, at Data Cash Register, we’ve been working with many grocers to create a more frictionless checkout experience by implementing faster and more efficient checkout technology and point-of-sale software in their traditional and self-checkout lanes. We’ve also been helping them add or expand self-checkout lanes using the same technology and software, to satisfy growing consumer preference for self-checkout convenience and free up more of their staff to serve customers and help manage the supply chain in other ways.
Using Scanner Scale Technology to Speed Up Checkouts and Free Up Staff
One key to creating more frictionless checkouts has been Zebra’s MP7000 Grocery Scanner Scale, which creates true “swipe and go” scanning in traditional and self-checkout lanes, with much faster and more reliable barcode scanning.
The MP7000 scans barcodes almost as fast as your customers or cashiers can move items into the scanning area, without having to worry about lining up a barcode in just the right way. The MP7000 uses multi-plane bioptic imaging to automatically scan 1D or 2D barcodes from virtually any angle, and it happens so quickly and easily that customers and cashiers are often startled at the difference.
Barcodes for products, coupons and loyalty cards are captured immediately and reliably, whether they’re printed on a product or label, or they’re rendered on a customer’s smartphone screen. As a result, checkout times are significantly reduced, and the whole experience becomes smoother and more frictionless for customers and cashiers alike.
Zebra’s scanner scale can also scan and capture checks, receipts, loyalty cards and even utility bills, so it saves time and effort with virtually any aspect of the checkout process. And there’s an optional customer-side scanner that allows customers in a traditional checkout lane to scan their loyalty cards and electronic or paper coupons while a cashier scans their groceries.
Savings seconds or minutes in each checkout transaction can seem like a small improvement in isolation, but over the course of a full business day and across all your checkout lines, cashiers, and customers, it quickly adds up to considerable time and labor savings. Using this improvement alone, many of our customers have been able to reduce the number of checkout lanes they need to staff while still serving heavy foot traffic, and they’ve been able to reassign a portion of their workforce to other mission-critical tasks such as providing in-aisle customer service, helping manage inventory and the supply chain, and fulfilling curbside and delivery orders.
Reducing Checkout Friction with a More Efficient and Intuitive Point of Sale
A frictionless checkout isn’t just a matter of improving your scanner scale hardware. You can also upgrade your point-of-sale software to save additional time and labor and create more store efficiency.
When we work with stores to speed up and create more frictionless checkouts, LOC Point-of-Sale Software and the LOC Store Management Suite are often two additional improvements we help them implement.
LOC’s Point-of-Sale Software works seamlessly with Zebra’s MP7000 Grocery Scanner Scale to quickly identify items; match them up with prices, quantities, weights, and other characteristics in your product database; and add them to your customer’s order. It streamlines the scanning and checkout process and simplifies the payment process with intuitive audio and visual cues, user-friendly touch interactions, and frictionless integration with your payment acceptance hardware and related systems.
LOC’s solutions make it easy to set up your store items with the right prices and provide an intuitive and incredibly easy-to-use digital interface that’s great for customers, cashiers, store managers and other staff.
Integrating a seamless point-of-sale with your traditional checkout lanes and self-checkout kiosks makes scanning, item identification and payment processes quicker and more frictionless. Moreover, it means more time and labor saved at every transaction, so you don’t have to staff so many checkout lanes and can reassign workers to other tasks and service channels, such as e-commerce.
At a time when grocery executives expect e-commerce to more than double as a percentage of their organization’s total sales over the next three to five years, to an average of 23 percent. This kind of staff reassignment and reconfiguration is all-important.
There will be many more curbside pickup and home delivery orders to fulfill and manage, and even if you’re outsourcing home delivery to third-party services, there will be more in-store labor required to service the additional curbside pickup demand.
Even if your stores aren’t yet offering curbside pickup or home delivery, creating more frictionless checkouts will still be crucial to future survival and success. As the labor pool shrinks and competition for workers increases, stores must find creative and effective ways to do more with less labor while meeting growing demand and providing exceptional, personalized service.
Learning More About Frictionless Checkout Strategies and Solutions
To learn more about proven ways to create frictionless checkouts and solve today’s labor woes, connect with our grocery technology and point-of-sale experts at DCR. For over 60 years, we’ve been helping grocers solve their biggest business challenges with the latest grocery technologies and innovations, and we’d be happy to help.
