The future of retail was once symbolised by self-checkout: speed, convenience, and labor cost savings. But in 2025, nine big retail chains are ditching these systems, ending a decade-long trend. The reason is harsh: self-checkout has become a thief magnet, an operational headache, and a customer frustration machine. Retailers like Dollar General and Five Below report that their shrink rates skyrocket directly due to self-checkout lanes, requiring a costly rethink.
The affective irony is unavoidable- technology designed to liberate consumers now undermines trust and profitability. The tectonic upheaval challenges the automation narrative of progress, thereby setting the stage for a retail renaissance centered on human connection and safety.
1. Dollar General’s Bold Retreat
Dollar General’s rollback is the most extreme. Having tried 100% self-checkout stores, it took self-checkout out of approximately 12,000 stores in early 2025, reserving remaining lanes for customers with five items or fewer.
CEO Todd Vasos credited rampant shrinkage in inventory lost to theft or error as the primary stimulus. The reversal represents a strategic turn: reinvesting in associates as crime preventers and customer service agents.
The lesson is severe but clear-technology cannot replace the finicky eye of human cashiers in risk environments. The retreat of Dollar General is a warning to retailers chasing after automation without considering human nature.
2. Five Below’s High-Risk Locations
Five Below, a discount retailer, quietly removed self-checkout from its highest-risk stores, admitting that shrinkage was significantly higher where these lanes operated. CEO Joel Anderson revealed that the company’s most effective shrink mitigation was replacing self-checkout with staffed registers and limiting open kiosks.
This case exemplifies a paradox: self-checkout’s promise of efficiency is undercut by the very losses it enables. Five Below’s experience underscores the need for retailers to tailor checkout strategies to store risk profiles, balancing convenience with a loss prevention, nuanced approach often missing in the rush to digitize.
3. Walmart and Costco
Retail behemoths Costco and Walmart also reduced the use of self-checkout due to shoplifting and efficiency loss. Walmart restricted self-checkout lanes for Walmart+ members and delivery staff to avoid abuse, and Costco expanded more employees in self-checkout lanes after discovering non-members exploited membership cards on kiosks.
Those steps reflect a telling fact: the impersonality of self-checkout encourages abuse, especially in big-box stores. Customer complaints about slow and unpredictable equipment still move the needle. Walmart and Costco’s makeover highlights the tension between high-tech convenience and the complexity of retail security and customer experience.
4. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” Withdrawal
Amazon’s decision to withdraw its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from Amazon Go stores is a landmark moment in retail ingenuity. Following extravagant investment, the technology could not cope with inventory shrinkage and even fell short of fulfilling customer expectations at scale.
The reversal indicates the vulnerability of completely automated retail environments, where the lack of human oversight is prone to generating operational inefficiencies and losses.
Amazon’s high-profile experiment confirms that no matter how advanced AI-powered checkout systems are, they still cannot replicate the consistency, adaptability, and judgment human workers bring to ever-changing retail spaces. Human touch is still required to offer accountability and satisfaction.
5. Sam’s Club
Sam’s Club is implementing one of the most radical self-check revamps in 2025, eliminating all traditional and self-check lanes in its nearly 600 stores across the country. The store is substituting them with its app-based “Scan & Go” system, where customers scan items in the store and pay using the app.
The model replaces human receipt examiners and cashiers with AI-fortified image classification and a camera network to verify purchases leaving. Vowing faster checkout and operational efficiency, this transformation kindles concerns over privacy, ease of use for those less adept at technology, and employee loss. Sam’s Club will support customers through associates with tablets to enable the transition.
6. Safeway
Sam’s Club is introducing one of the most radical self-check makeovers in 2025, eliminating all traditional and self-check lanes at its nearly 600 stores across the country. The store is replacing them with its “Scan & Go” app-based system, where customers scan items in the store and pay through the app.
This prototype replaces AI-enforced image-based classification and a web of cameras for human receipt examiners and cashiers to verify purchases leaving. The promise of faster checkout and operating efficiency, this revolution raises concerns of privacy, ease for the less technological, and worker loss. Sam’s Club will transition customers through associates using tablets.
7. Booths
Booths is a well-known supermarket chain in the UK, which has got rid of self-checkout machines from most of its supermarkets by the end of 2023, with the trend to continue into 2025. Repeated theft, technical glitches, and customer grievances prompted the move.
Booths found that self-checkout tills slowed down shopping during busy periods and alienated those shoppers who appreciated human interaction. The chain’s experience highlights a broader skepticism in the UK market about the efficacy of self-checkout in balancing convenience and security. Booths’ retreat suggests that even small, community-focused retailers are backing away from self-checkout when it comes at the expense of operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
8. Target’s Strategic Limitation and Truscan Technology
Target’s strategy is the middle ground-capping self-checkout to shoppers with 10 or fewer items and introducing TruScan, a computer vision-based solution aimed at detecting unscanned items. The hybrid model acknowledges self-checkout’s popularity but confronts its vulnerabilities directly.
By blending human judgment with sophisticated technology, Target aims to shrink without slowing. The strategy reflects a broader industry shift toward blending automation with human judgment, recognizing that either alone is insufficient. Target’s experiment can serve as a benchmark for efficiency, security, and customer satisfaction in the post-self-checkout era.
9. The Retail Renaissance Beyond Self-Checkout
Nine major retailers’ collective abandonment of self-checkout in 2025 is a turning point. It explodes the myth of automation as unalloyed good and re-establishes the role of human judgment in retailing. This shift will have ripple effects throughout labor markets, technological innovation, and consumer culture.
Those retailers who establish this balance correctly will thrive; those clinging to flawed automation myths will suffer more losses. Lastly, the trend represents a retail renaissance-one that pays respect to the subtle dance among human nature, technology, and commerce that constructs a stronger, safer, and more customer-centric future.
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