Will Grocery Retailers Eliminate Cashiers?

Cashiers have arguably the toughest job in grocery retail. They are the last interaction and most important impression a customer will have in a store. As much as pricing, assortment or displays, they determine the experience for shoppers. Cashiers also collect most of the payments that a grocery store receives, despite being low paid, sometimes even entry level workers. So why is there a growing trend to eliminate cashiers with expanded automation, self-checkout and cashier-less technologies?

Until recently, retail couldn’t function without cashiers. As a cashier you are the frontline of frontline workers, ringing up customers to make sure every penny is counted accurately. An accurate till is your holy grail. Miss it by a few pennies too often and you are out of job. So you are counting cash and staying present in the moment to make sure you give correct change. 

As a cashier, you are herding dozens of customers every hour, making eye contact, occasionally smiling or making small talk. You are handling customer complaints and comments, from belligerent anti-maskers mouth breathing all over plexiglass barriers, to the special diets customers who couldn’t find their gluten-free cauliflower crust pizzas because they were looking in the cooler and not the freezer. All in a day’s work.

When an item doesn’t scan correctly, or a customer thinks the sale price was X and not Y, you get on the intercom and buzz your supervisor to mediate and solve the momentary crisis. When the grocery department is out of a customer’s favorite item, or in the current circumstances where out of stocks are sometimes hovering over 20%, out of all of a customer’s favorite items, you have to be the diplomat and let them know the situation is temporary (so you have been told) and that you appreciate their business.         

When prices start going up and customers either make pleasant small talk about it or aim their frustration about it your way, you handle it politely and efficiently. On a well-staffed shift, you have a bagger at your side packing customers’ items into shopping bags and loading them into carts. More often, you have to switch gears from scanning items and counting change to doing the bagging yourself, 15, 20 times an hour. Occasionally, a helpful customer even bags their own groceries.

When your retail employer put in some automated self-checkout kiosks, they tasked a few employees to hover near them to make sure customers knew how to use it. Most customers still seemed to prefer coming through cashier checkouts. 

Cashiers make the retail world go round.

So why are retailers going out of their way to eliminate cashiers?

Cashier-less technology is starting to roll out to tech-enabled retailers and may eventually impact the whole grocery industry. Executives and boosters claim that tech-savvy customers love it, as it eliminates wait times, crowded kiosks and potential Covid-19 exposures. Customers can pick up what they want and stroll out the door without a single human interaction.

But the technology will have other knock-on effects in retail operations, like recent tech innovations such as click and collect. Not only does the cashier-less technology make cashiers obsolete, but it requires an extreme form of retail discipline, de-skilling and surveillance in stores. Each product must be in the exact place determined by the planogram from corporate HQ. Product must be faced and fronted frequently so that the inventories are accurately captured by the scanning technologies that track the movements of product and people. The inventories are perpetual, everything that comes on shelf and out the door is tracked and quantified in real time, all the time. There is no option as a clerk to improvise the assortment, add new items, onboard local suppliers, negotiate hot deals at the back dock or change the merchandising to suit the seasonality, locality or evolving customer preferences; those decisions are made elsewhere. This new retail environment is total surveillance of stores, products, staff and customers. In the name of convenience, is the retailer now a panopticon?

Such automation is an existential threat to cashiers, who are a service industry unto themselves. In 2018, 3.3 million people worked as cashiers, making it the third largest occupation in the U.S. Retail sales or cashier jobs are the most common jobs in 46 states. There are over 865,000 cashiers in the grocery industry, accounting for 30% of this overall workforce. Such retail workers tend to be younger, over 70% are women, and are disproportionately Black, Latin/Hispanic and immigrant. Most cashiers do not have Bachelor’s degrees and are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty and have Medicaid. And unlike their counterparts in some European countries who have stronger unions and better working conditions, most U.S. cashiers need to stand all day at the cash register.

The mean wages for cashiers hovered around $12.00 an hour in 2019 and the median earnings for full-time cashiers was just over $22,100 annually. Considering their jobs are to harvest and account for every single transaction that happens in the retail store, they are woefully underpaid and undervalued. What they don’t receive in hourly compensation they make up for in sheer numbers. A bustling, busy store will have from 10 to 30 cashiers buzzing along during any given shift. 

Eliminating cashiers is really about rationalizing store labor; those jobs won’t likely be reassigned elsewhere in stores. This major variable expense, when cut, goes right to bottom line improvement. A grocery store typically budgets about 12-15% of their sales for labor, and lower for mass merchants and discounters. Cashier teams can account for 20-25% or more of store labor dollars. Even a partial rollout of this technology would be tempting for a retailer looking to save 2-3% in overhead, even if it radically altered operations and the customer experience. Could this happen? It was barely a decade ago that online ordering, delivery and click and collect were seen as not operationally feasible, yet here we are.

A widespread adoption of this technology would eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide. Stores without cashiers may mean slightly lower prices in non-inflationary times, if this cost savings is passed on to consumers. But it also means that incremental profits can be invested into expansion and market share growth. In a retail sector with lax Robinson-Patman oversight, scale is key to locking in better deals with suppliers and underselling competitors.

But more likely, the difference will just be redistributed as profits back to institutional shareholders and executives in the form of buybacks, dividends and bonuses. In the race to the bottom that is food retail, there will be pressure on the whole industry to lower labor expenses, regardless of whether holdouts adopt the technology or not.

But on the other hand, working in retail during the pandemic has caused many grocery staff to question their career paths. Turnover in grocery has been at record levels for the past year, with hundreds of thousands of employees changing jobs or leaving the industry. Fed up with low wages, poor benefits, difficult customers, erratic schedules, long hours and lack of childcare or sick leave, retail workers have been a leading force in the so-called “great resignation”. And while many retailers have raised wages and increased benefits in order to attract and retain workers, these boosts are usually well below what constitute livable wages in most major metro areas. This threshold is typically north of $50,000 a year after taxes, or what the minimum wage would be if it had kept up with productivity growth since the 1960’s. Retailers have used the workforce turnover and staffing issues as an opportunity to invest in more automation and de-skilling technologies. It could mean that once these jobs are gone, they are gone for good.

Yet there is a healthy strain of misanthropy in assuming that jobs should get replaced by artificial intelligence in the name of convenience and narrowly defined consumer sovereignty. Are livable wages with good benefits, plus safe and convivial working conditions really that anachronistic and unachievable? It seems like technology historian David F. Noble was prophetic in his understanding of automation as authoritarian.

On your next trip to the grocery store, thank your cashier for their hard work. Maybe dial up the store manager and let them know how much you appreciate cashiers. Or call your congressperson and ask them to protect blue collar jobs from automation. Before they are gone forever.