Two numbers came out of ECR's 2026 self-checkout summits, and the second one is the interesting one.
The first is how long a self-checkout host takes to reach a customer who needs help, or who has not scanned something. That runs from fifteen to forty five seconds, and sometimes a good deal longer.
The second is how long the host takes to clear the intervention once they arrive. Under five seconds means nothing actually happened. Nobody spoke to the customer, nobody rescanned anything, somebody just cleared the screen. One Australian retailer took the share of interventions cleared in under five seconds down from 40% to 10%, on purpose, and their net promoter score improved.
Professor Matt Hopkins joins Colin Peacock to pull the highlights out of both summits, hosted by Walmart in Dallas and Waitrose in the UK. They cover what good self-checkout design actually does, why training hosts across hundreds of stores never finishes, the machine to host ratio nobody has solved yet, and what changes when self-checkout arrives in hardware and health and beauty stores.
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