Target makes (another) self-checkout change customers will hate

Most retailers these days seem to be moving in a new direction — whether it pleases customers or not.

The changes came about mostly during and after the covid pandemic, which saw consumers sharply shift their shopping behavior. For retailers, safety measures were prized above profit.

Many customers preferred to stay at home and shop online from their couches. Others wanted to limit their exposure when they did go into physical stores. For many retailers, this meant a significant decline in foot traffic — and the profit that goes along with it.

Unless retailers had the time, footprint, brand recognition and resources to rapidly scale up their online fulfillment capabilities, they suffered, and a number went under. Many still struggle four years after the height of the shutdowns.

Only a few came out stronger, and mostly those were the bigger one-stop-shop retailers where you could conveniently shop for all your necessary goods via a variety of avenues, such as pickup, delivery and drive-up.

But becoming a catch-all for the customers who did return came with its pitfalls, too. An uptick in inventory shrink, the industry term for theft of goods, hit stores’ bottom lines just as consumer zeal for shopping in person returned.

This has forced many of the giants, like Target  (TGT)  and Walmart  (WMT) , to get creative to stave off the losses.

Target self-service checkout stations registers. Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

Target makes a self-checkout change

For many of these retailers, offering more self-checkout kiosks for suddenly busy stores seemed like the obvious solution to lower staff counts. It’s often easier and cheaper to let a machine ring up customers than to hire employees to do so.

But it’s also a far more porous option. Theft is far more common with self-checkout kiosks, which enable customers to ring up cheaper items in place of pricier ones and to avoid scanning some items at all. (And that doesn’t include the revenue stores lose when customers make honest errors in not scanning items.)

In fact, stores with self-checkout kiosks report a loss rate of about 4%, about twice the national average.

It’s gotten out of control in some stores, which ultimately forced Target in March to limit its self-checkout stands to customers with 10 items or fewer.

Now, according to multiple reports, Target stores are planning to install cameras on self-checkout kiosks, which alert customers if they have not scanned an item properly.

The technology, called Truscan, works by detecting items in a cart or around a kiosk that have not been scanned. It issues an alert, reminding the customer to scan the items properly. The alert is both noisy and visual, making it hard to miss.

Truscan will also alert Target when customers have failed to scan multiple items repeatedly.

Target declined comment on the matter, but reports say Truscan is expected to roll out to the stores later in 2024.