If you regularly shop at the Lidl store chain, you may have noticed a fairly major change recently that affects the level of service these stores provide. Lidl has started testing a completely new sales system, which should be able to do with a much smaller number of cashiers.
Do everything yourself
In some stores, he chose less busy hours when there simply aren’t as many people, and that’s when he started to completely close the classic cash registers with a belt, where someone serves you. At this time, only self-service cash registers with a single employee remain open. For the chain, this can bring significant savings, but the quality of the shopping experience is understandably frowned upon by many customers.
“A few days ago I went to Lidl for a big purchase, which I also made. However, when I reached the cash registers with my cart packed to the brim, not one of them was open. I asked the employee to open the register and I could put the goods on the counter,” Mr. Miroslav Žitný describes his unpleasant experience. “But they told me that they won’t open the cash register now and that I should mark it myself at the self-service checkout. Well, what can I tell you, it messed me up, I spent 15 minutes there marking. Something kept beeping and it didn’t work.“
In any case, it is a very strange approach of this chain of stores, which is also frequented by pensioners. They often do not understand self-service cash registers and look for classic ones even when there is a longer queue. In this case, however, they simply won’t have any other option. They simply have to serve themselves.
Customers will mature at the cash registers
Apparently, it is only a certain test, which will probably be subsequently evaluated and, accordingly, these procedures will be implemented across the board or not. But the truth is that self-service checkouts have been a rather controversial topic lately. The expectation that they would fully replace shop assistants has not been fulfilled and, for example, abroad, retail chains are abandoning them.
Among other things, also because customers have learned to bypass them and pay less for their purchases than they should. This also happens quite often in the Czech Republic. Another factor is the constant problems that customers have at these cash registers. Machines are not perfect, and humans are also not very good at handling them. The result is constant errors, which must then be corrected by the staff anyway.
Also read: That’s how it broke. Lidl has been doing an outrageous thing to the Czechs for years. How can he afford it?
Lidl is now apparently trying to reverse the whole matter once and for all and fully launch self-service checkouts in its operations. At the same time, it was one of the last chains that introduced them. It’s entirely possible that if they don’t do well in this stress test, they’ll end up scrapping them altogether.
Foto: Shutterstock
2024-02-23 11:00:00
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