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Costco started experimenting with something promising, where a staff member comes through and scans all your stuff while you're waiting in line. That way, once you scan your membership card at checkout, you jump straight to the payment step.
It's nice because its an ad hoc use of free staff that just speeds things along.
I think one of the biggest gaps in current grocery store is the lack of a "over 30 items line". I mean there are express lines for people with 5 items, but why not the reverse?
Like it should be a double-staffed / double-conveyor belt line to process those that have lots of items....I mean on the surface its kinda crazy this hasn't developed.
The guy with a six pack of beer and sandwhich bread gets to zoom thru the line, but the mom with a $350 basket of goods waits the most.....
That had never occurred to me but it's a great idea. It could even be as simple as giving the baggers scanning guns and having them parallel scanning the easy stuff.
A few months ago I was at a Costco in Carlsbad (near San Diego), long line and one person was scanning everyone's items which made checkout go faster and smoothly.
I don’t know why they don’t always have someone doing that. It speeds everything up so much
Tangent...
There are two companies that make absolute BANK
McDonalds and Costco
Both have interesting stories
Yeah, like all engineering challenges its just a series of tradeoffs. They would need more security staff to watch cameras of what was placed into carts vs what was scanned in app....so its just reshuffling staff around.
Another huge issue is: You have just placed your entire checkout process into the hands of Apple / Google for no apparent gain to your organization. Your entire business is now intimately bound up with them "approving each app version" and dealing with new iOS/Android versions, etc....
Its one of those ideas which sounds clever on the surface but the more you dig into it you realize why the world came up with the current solution.