While nearly two-thirds of consumers frequently use self-checkout machines at the grocery store, nearly 75% stated difficulty in entering goods and frequent overrides were their biggest concerns with the technology. And 90 percent of consumers desire self-checkout machines that can automatically identify items. The survey conducted over SurveyMonkey and sponsored by advanced weighing technology leader Shekel Brainweigh Ltd. (ASX: SBW), takes consumers’ pulse on checkout, vending machines, convenience and autonomous store technologies. Nearly 80 percent of survey respondents were between the ages of 18-60 years old and 62% were female.
Key findings of the survey include:
Self-Checkout
- Nearly 80 percent of consumers needed assistance at least once during their self-checkout experience, and almost 30 percent of consumers using self-checkout were pulled aside by store personnel to check their purchases.
- Nearly 60% were more likely to use self-checkout if technology improvements (system simplification, automated entries and more accuracy) were deployed.
- Nearly 90% of respondents visit convenience stores at least once a week for grocery items
- Nearly 25% said the fastest possible checkout would also significantly improve their experience.
Autonomous Micro Market:
- Less than 15% of survey respondents have visited a fully autonomous micro market; but those that have visited a micro market cited convenience, speed, selection variety and pricing as the main benefits of these locations.
Vending
- Nearly 50% would purchase healthy food items from a vending machine if readily available.
- Nearly 50% of consumers cited lack of selection and fresh products in today’s vending machines as frustrations.
Yoram Ben Porat, CEO of Shekel Brainweigh said, “The results of our Consumer survey are coherent to the market trends as we know for some time, and well represent the major desires of consumers for improvement of their unattended shopping: better and faster shopping experience, availability of stores and variety of products.”
For more than 40 years, Shekel has led the global market in developing scale and weighing technology. The company provides weighing solutions to the highly regulated retail and healthcare markets via global giants such as Toshiba, Fujitsu, Diebold Nixdorf and others. Utilizing its experience in weighing technology, Shekel Brainweigh introduced a suite of world-first new products aimed at meeting the challenges that traditional retailers face today, such as store automation and operational excellence – including overstock and understock issues, loss prevention and enhancing the consumer experience. By leveraging its unique technologies integrating IoT load sensors, embedded smart shelf software, AI and deep-learning algorithms, Shekel enlightens retail shelves into actionable insights. With its ability to identify products by weight, Shekel digitally transforms the store into a real-time, data-services-based business.
At NRF, Shekel launched the world’s first framework solution for autonomous micro-market in partnership with Hitachi and announced it will be a key part in Intel’s Edge-X and Hitachi’s revolutionary machine-learning, cloud-free systems. Shekel will have the full survey results, as well as several breakthrough retail technology solutions at NRF Vision 2020 in Booth #5880.
