Self-checkout (known as SCO) is the single biggest shift in the retail customer experience in decades.
But despite its myriad benefits, SCO has become a stumbling block for even some of the world’s biggest brands. Publicly, retail giants like Walmart, Target, and Dollar General have all walked back their reliance on SCO. Poor customer experience and system outages are the leading culprits (along with theft), but this begs questions: How did brands so renowned for scale fail to anticipate the challenges these systems would create? Did they push the envelope on innovation too far, too fast? Were the devices too immature? Were customers unprepared for such a sudden shift?
Whatever the specific answer to these questions, we think they all share a root concern: Device management.
Why Did Self-Checkout Emerge in Retail?
Retail is one of the most dynamic and volatile industries in the world. Customer loyalty earned over years can be lost in seconds. Delivering value is an “every minute of every day” concern across all facets of the business. In the past five years, the cost and availability of labor, the ubiquity of online retail, and supply chain challenges have all tested retailers like never before. Confronting this ‘new normal’ has meant rapid transformation and innovation for the industry, and self-checkout has become a strategic cornerstone of that movement.
SCO’s promise of reduced waiting times, greater privacy, and enhanced trust were immediately intuitive to shoppers. For retail operators, increased average spend, unlocked operational flexibility, and new opportunities to build customer loyalty looked like slam dunks. And when SCO works, these benefits readily materialize, to the delight of customers and staff alike. With such outcomes in mind, investments in SCO were enthusiastically pursued.
For many retailers, implementing an SCO technology stack was treated little differently than a new generation of POS rollout. Vendors were compared, POCs validated, solutions lab-tested, and then soft-launched to test stores. But unlike many tried-and-true POS systems — which use extremely standard peripherals, connectivity, and interfaces operated solely by trained employees — SCO was built on brand-new, customer-driven technology platforms that were largely untested in the wild. When regional and national rollouts began, cracks quickly began to show.
What Were the Risks of Self-Checkout Devices?
Rows of SCO machines out of service for days — even weeks or months. Floor staff manually attending every SCO customer to avoid frustrating errors and code-lock conditions. Payment terminals failing to connect. Interfaces glitching and UI flows confusing customers. Loyalty cards failing to scan. We saw it all as SCO began to proliferate widely.
Instead of automating the shopping experience and freeing staff for other tasks, some retail employees spent as much time rebooting SCO machines and clearing customer errors as they would running checkout at a manned register. In the meantime, customer goodwill was evaporating, and trust in SCO was being destroyed before it could even be earned.
We’ve heard from retailers just how frustrating these SCO scenarios are, because they leave customers, employees, and business and technical stakeholders feeling powerless. A customer does not understand or care that a recent update introduced a performance regression that causes a device to freeze unexpectedly, and that rolling back this update will require a technician to come to the store and reset each device manually. The customer cares about getting home to feed their family. When problems like these start popping up in dozens or even hundreds of stores, very difficult decisions (like disabling SCO entirely) often have to be made.
Why Did Self-Checkout Struggle at Scale?
What was happening? Why weren’t these challenges with the rollout of self-checkout anticipated?
In truth, many of them likely were. The brands facing these sorts of issues with their SCO fleets employ immensely talented IT and operations teams. These teams were very aware of many of the issues SCO would face in the field — but were often powerless to address them once the machines were deployed. The reason, above all else? A lack of control. Here are some common reasons these issues with SCO devices occur:
- Device configuration has drifted out of policy, with no automatic correction (no drift management)
- Peripheral Bluetooth connectivity breaks and will not automatically retry connection (poor device policy controls)
- Recent app or content update breaks functionality and can’t easily be rolled back (no control over content / OTA process, no version control, no staging)
Without centralized command and control of your full fleet of SCO devices — the ability to monitor, update, roll back, remotely view and control, and intelligently manage drift — you will forever be chasing problems, not driving customer experience innovation.
Technical decision makers need to intensely advocate for a scalable, sustainable management solution to support these innovation initiatives. When a revenue-critical device fails to behave as it should in the field, there needs to be an immediate, identifiable, and (ideally) automated path to restoring function. Put simply: If you, as a business decision maker, choose to hit “go” and ask your teams to deploy devices that require a technician to physically show up to a store to reconfigure or update to address issues, you’ve set your SCO strategy up to fail.
How do you avoid these pitfalls? Better infrastructure, of course. But what does better infrastructure really mean?
How to Make Self-Checkout Devices Scale Sustainably
Much of this article is written in the past tense — because many of the worst growing pains experienced during the initial self-checkout boom have passed. Peripherals generally play nicely with modern systems, interfaces have stabilized, and, most importantly, customers have grown familiar with the devices and their usage. But updating, troubleshooting, and monitoring those devices hasn’t actually become any easier, because most retailers are still using the same brittle legacy infrastructure to manage them today that they did ten years ago. This means that when challenges do emerge, the same problems in addressing them will just continue to rear their ugly heads.
A next-generation SCO strategy requires a next-generation technical solution for managing those devices, the content that gets delivered to them, and the teams who support them. Such a solution should allow you to:
- Set device policy once. And ensure that policy automatically self-corrects when it drifts.
- Define device configuration on your terms. Define as many configuration blueprints as you need, and group by device type, region, and individual store.
- Deploy content and app updates on demand. Achieve real-time visibility into your rollouts, including testing your updates in stages.
- Get real-time monitoring and alerts. Identify and address out-of-compliance devices before they cause a customer complaint.
- Remotely view and even control your SCO devices. Recreate or resolve issues live without needing to send an on-site technician.
- Achieve deep integration. Build management into your existing toolchains and workflows. Build your own custom device behavior and experiences.
If the above list sounds like something beyond your wildest dreams, we understand: Legacy MDM tooling sets expectations incredibly low. But we’re not just here to give you an empty wish list — Esper is the only next-generation MDM designed to meet the challenge of managing your self-checkout fleet now and years into the future, whether it’s hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of devices. Esper Blueprints, Pipelines, our single pane of glass UI with built-in device grouping, monitoring, and remote control can help your SCO strategy scale sustainably.
How Can We Keep Moving Retail Innovation Forward?
The incredibly competitive nature of the retail landscape doesn’t give you time to second-guess new means to grow revenue, increase customer retention, or enhance operational efficiency. And if you aren’t taking those chances, someone else will — potentially, at your expense.
Like so many things in life, the key to remaining competitive is building a strong foundation upon which to seize opportunities as they arise. In a word, preparedness. Building your retail device innovation strategy on top of a duct-taped patchwork of legacy management, policy, and content delivery tooling puts you at a competitive disadvantage when such opportunities present themselves. You move slowly, you make mistakes, and you take too long to fix things.
While we won’t claim to know what the next big device innovation in retail is, we know it will have one thing in common with every device innovation: That innovation will need to scale, and scale will demand control. Esper is a platform built to give you that control, now and far into the future. Find out why.
FAQ
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