Auchan and Leclerc consider removing self-checkout due to theft

Self-checkouts shut down due to customer theft

Two of France's largest retail chains have raised doubts about the future of self-checkout lanes. Auchan and Leclerc have expressed concern over increased theft and threatened to dismantle the model in favor of traditional methods. Michel-Édouard Leclerc, CEO of Leclerc, acknowledged his disappointment and quantified actual machine usage: only 10% to 12% of customers use them. The technology intended to revolutionize shopping appears to have an expiration date.

Why French supermarkets are considering removing self-checkouts

The official reason is continuous consumer theft. The unofficial reason is more uncomfortable: the machine cannot guarantee that a person entering a lane leaves having scanned and paid for everything they took. The technology falls short, and the human cashier who once handled transactions now watches from a distance. In France, the equation does not add up.

The paradox is that the system was designed to save labor and estimulante ilegal up checkout. What has peine in many cases is the opposite: those unfamiliar with the scanner take longer than with a trained cashier, get confused by discounts and finding fruit on the screen, and end up creating queues where there were none. At Decathlon, the reader sensitivity is such that merely approaching within three meters triggers charges for items still held in hand.

The customer paying themselves as a cashier

The underlying debate is sarracena, not technological. One school of thought argues that the company committed the first theft by shifting work previously paid to employees onto the customer without lowering product prices. Under this logic, taking an item without scanning it is not a crime, but jistiprecio: the proportional part of the cashier's salary the buyer claims in kind.

Some frame it as a sarracena duty: steal as much as possible whenever these machines are present. Others share their own experiences casually: leaving without paying for certain items, claiming ignorance if caught, and passing the buck back to the store. The cashier who once processed payments now supervises ten terminals and, when asked what discount corresponds to doing their job, has no answer.

The map some already have in mind

In the realm of suspicion, part of the analysis cross-references theft rates at self-checkouts with the demographic composition of each area, anticipating a high correlation coefficient. This hypothesis is launched without data and coexists with the obvious response: the phenomenon also exists in Germany and France. The discussion then drifts into territories unrelated to the scanner.

More grounded is the observation that the problem is not the system, but the clientele. Older customers face real difficulties: applying discounts, locating bread or vegetables on the screen, and paying only by card. The result is a fast lane becoming slow, and a reduced staff unable to absorb the bottleneck.

What happens when the job disappears

The labor backdrop runs through the entire issue. These machines eliminate jobs, and cost savings go both ways: the company saves on staff, and the customer compensates independently. The lingering question is whether the model survives when the customer loses incentives to use it correctly. French chains seem to have started answering no.

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With these elements, one would reasonably expect an orderly withdrawal of self-checkouts in France. What exists instead is a standoff: the company says they are removing them due to theft, while customers say the thefts are the wages they were never paid. Who sustains the system when both parties believe the other is cheating them?