Love it or hate it, self-checkout is here to stay. But it’s going through a reckoning

Shoppers at a Uniqlo store in New York use self-checkout. Self-checkout faces a reckoning of sorts just as retailers are in the midst of their busiest time of the year. — AP

NEW YORK: The promise of self-checkout was alluring: Customers could avoid long lines by scanning and bagging their own items, workers could be freed of doing those monotonous tasks themselves and retailers could save on labor costs.

All that has happened since the rollout of self-checkout but so has this: Customers griping about clunky technology that spits out mysterious error codes, workers having to stand around and monitor both humans and machines, and retailers contending with theft.