Self-service kiosks save time for shoppers, costs for stores

Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — Bryon Wiebold does self-checkout at the supermarket, self-check-in at the airport and self-banking at ATMs.

And last year, when the 43-year-old McKinney resident discovered self-service DVD rentals for $1 at Redbox kiosks, he was all over that, too.

“Anything I can automate, I do for the sake of time,” Wiebold said. “It’s not that I want people totally eliminated, but I appreciate the option if I’m in a hurry or in a bad mood.”

Do-it-yourself customer service continues to creep into everyday life via kiosks, smart-phone applications and the Internet. Consumers are using touch-screens everywhere from supermarket delis to hospital check-in stations. There are even machines that give vision exams and scan feet to produce custom insoles.

Kiosk transactions are expected to surpass $775 billion this year, up from $607 billion in 2008, according to IHL Group, which tracks the self-service industry. The total could hit $1.6 trillion by 2013.

It’s not surprising that kiosks are rapidly taking hold in the movie rental business. Six years after the first Redbox test in Denver in 2004, kiosks could account for nearly 30 percent of the U.S. market in 2010, according to NPD Group. Dallas-based Blockbuster Inc. said this month that it would close as many as 960 unprofitable stores by the end of next year and install 10,000 kiosks in their place.

The tipping point for kiosks came in 2001, when Kroger and Home Depot installed self-checkouts, said Lee Holman, lead retail analyst for IHL Group. “After some hand-holding, consumers have embraced it. Now there’s a perception ... that ‘I can do this quicker.’”

In a 2008 IHL survey, almost 90 percent of consumers said they used self-checkout “even if they don’t like it,” Holman said.

But it took a long time for Americans to make the leap, starting with ATMs and paying at the pump in the 1980s.

Airports were next. Today, 77 percent of Southwest Airlines passengers obtain their boarding passes online — 13 percent via airport kiosks and 64 percent from southwest.com as they turn their own computers into kiosks.

Hertz first put a kiosk, fluent in several languages, at Orlando International Airport in 2007, and now about 80 percent of the car-rental firm’s transactions there take place at kiosks.

Kroger has installed 10 kiosks at Dallas-area deli counters. Consumers use a touch-screen to select the product, thickness and quantity, then keep shopping until they’re ready to pick up their items. On average, about 400 people per store use the service each week, said Gary Huddleston, a Kroger spokesman.

For stores, the self-checkouts cut costs, with one associate able to monitor up to six scanning counters, Huddleston said.

To be sure, self-service options are adding to the millions of jobs already lost to automation. The average Blockbuster store has 10 employees, so the mass closures will have an impact, even if the company shifts some workers to other locations.

More broadly, U.S. statisticians forecast that ticket-agent employment will rise only 1 percent from 2006 to 2016, even as a growing population travels more. And they expect the number of cashiers to decline 3 percent over the same period as online shopping and self-checkouts increase.