Question

Communication

Wholesome and Happy Foods is a farm-to-family grocery store located in the Pacific Northwest. The company recently installed four self-checkout lanes that allow customers to scan their own groceries and pay for their purchases using an automated checkout kiosk. The kiosks are monitored by a single attendant. In recent weeks, management has become concerned that some customers are not scanning all of the items that they bring through the self-checkout lanes.

Discuss your thoughts of the above, suggesting features and capabilities for the kiosks that would serve as control procedures, ensuring that all items brought through the self-checkout lanes are properly scanned and purchased. Further, do you think that the company will incur losses from people, who don't choose to scan one or two items here and there? Can the attendant even tell? Does management have a valid concern? How would they be able to tell that items have been stolen in this manner?

Answer 1

Automated checkout Kiosks are one of the best technique to reduce the manpower in the bussines. There are many advaantages like:

1. Improves Customer experience
2. Requires lesser amount of human interaction.
3. Easy and systematic way.
4. Can act as a game changer for business
5. Faster process

Where this technique helps in better management , it also has disadvantages :

1. Shop lifting : As mentioned in this case, where customers are not scanning all of the items that they bring through the self-checkout lanes
2. Reliability

If this shop lifting continues and becomes a practise then it can lead to losses for the company. For this company should have a regular random checks so that even the customer will have in mind that their bill might get checked. Similarly, the attendant should also have a regular check on the customers. With this the shop can also bin cards for managing the inventories. By this they will be able to check how many items are stolen.