UK supermarkets AVOID technology: Booths ditch self-checkouts as Amazon returns to cardless payments – as customers welcome the return of ‘a more personal and engaging’ shopping experience

From the Big Four chains like Tesco and Sainsbury’s to budget stores like Aldi, supermarkets have been in a rush to embrace high-tech solutions in recent years.

These range from self-service checkouts to portable barcode scanners, in-app payment methods and even digital price labels.

But bucking the trend is high-end northern chain Booths, much to the delight of many customers.

This week, the company announced it is scrapping self-checkouts and putting staff back behind the tills so shoppers can ‘talk to people’ again.

While the majority of UK supermarkets are rolling out new technology with great enthusiasm, here are the possible signs that the more traditional shopping experience may return this year.

SELF-CHECKOUTS AXITED

Booths – which has 27 stores in the north across Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Cheshire – has been dubbed the northern Waitrose due to its focus on quality.

The company finds self-checkouts ‘slow, unreliable and impersonal’ and decided that ‘we are going for actual intelligence instead of artificial intelligence’.

The decision has been made to remove self-checkouts from all but two of the 28 stores, with the exception of the Lake District in Keswick and Windermere, which can be very busy at times.

Many shoppers were happy to hear the news. One of them called it ‘great’ that the staff ’embraces the human touch’.

“It’s great to see Booths stores returning to manned checkouts, promoting a more personal and engaging shopping experience,” says X user @zmilkhan1.

The shift is the first by a UK grocer of significant size, bucking a trend where all major players, including market leaders Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have opened thousands of self-checkouts and dramatically reduced the number of staffed tills.

According to CBS NewsCostco in the US is now adding more staff to its self-checkout areas, although not cutting them out completely.

Costco employees discovered that non-members had sneaked into the self-checkout to use membership cards that did not belong to them.

CARD PAYMENTS RETURNED

Although Amazon is known for its pioneering use of technology in its physical ‘Fresh’ supermarkets, Amazon has backtracked on its no-cards rule.

Previously, customers could only enter an Amazon Fresh store by opening the Amazon app and being given a QR code to scan to open a barrier.

Once customers had done their shopping and were done shopping, they could simply walk out of the barrier again.

But after the innovations in the British branches this fall, Amazon Fresh now allows customers to enter the store normally.

An inviting pair of double doors say ‘Way in’, while there is also a separate entrance for people ‘just looking around’ and some extra staff appear to be at the entrance.

When people have finished shopping, they can scan the QR code on the app as before, but they now also have the more traditional option of paying for their groceries contactless.

An Amazon spokesperson said the Fresh experience will “continue to evolve with customers” and that the company will listen to their feedback – suggesting the change was driven by public demand.

But by preventing anyone without the Amazon app from entering Fresh stores — including people without smartphones — Amazon may also have lost sales.

“One of the ways we have improved our stores is by offering customers more ways to pay,” the spokesperson said.

‘We know customers want choice and recently we have implemented more payment methods in our stores, including the introduction of credit card options and more traditional checkouts where customers can pay for their items.’

Amazon Fresh stores still have cameras and depth sensors developed with deep artificial intelligence techniques to monitor what customers pick up and put back on the shelves.

It means that the technician knows exactly what each person has taken from the store and how much they have to pay to the payment details, which are stored in the app.

HOME DELIVERY APP ENDS

Bother was a British home delivery startup founded in 2020 and focused on essentials that didn’t require refrigeration.

It used AI to ‘learn’ what a customer was running low on and automatically placed it in the customer’s in-app shopping cart for their next order.

Both’s founder and CEO, Douglas Morton, described its mission as “saving you and the planet from household groceries.”

But the startup went bankrupt in June and outstanding deliveries went unfulfilled, meaning affected customers had to contact their banks for refunds.

Many users were stunned when they checked their orders and saw a message stating that the company had gone into liquidation.

DIGITAL LABELS REMOVED

In September, Asda ended the use of electronic shelf labels in one of its stores after just three years, although the company says it was only a trial.

The high-tech labels – which used hardware developed by Panasonic – quickly updated price and allergen information, without the hassle of paper labels.

Around 23,000 of these were rolled out at supermarket giant Stevenage, although the trial ‘has now ended’, Asda confirmed to MailOnline.

“We will assess the results as we shift our focus to other live trials and projects,” a spokesperson said.

Digital labels have proven controversial because they make it easier for supermarkets to suddenly change prices on the fly, and they can be difficult to read.

Bugs also cause the gadgets to malfunction and fail to display information, causing additional problems for staff.