The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor The era of self-serve shopping has come to Flin Flon. The Co-op last week installed two self-serve tills, allowing customers to scan, pay for and bag their groceries without the aid of a cashier. 'You do everything yourself and it's actually quite neat,' said general manager Tom Therien. Standing roughly four feet high, the tills each feature a touch-screen monitor and slots that accept cash, including coins, as well as debit and credit cards. They can also scan coupons, provided there is a barcode. Following verbal directions, customers scan their own barcodes and weigh their own produce, inputting into the machine whether it is broccoli, bananas or another item. The tills are not completely unstaffed, as a service attendant is always standing by to assist customers and hand out receipts. The units were installed beside the Co-op's existing checkouts, giving the store seven lanes in total. 'The last thing we want is to have people wait in line for a lengthy period of time, so anything we can do to eliminate some of the lineups, some of the congestion, this was our goal,' Therien said. Therien called the units 'very consumer-friendly' even though some shoppers, he suspects, may be leery of them at first. The tills did not come cheap, costing about $100,000 with installation. But Therien, who brought the idea to the Co-op board, saw it as a worthwhile expense. 'Apparently (self-serve tills have been) quite successful wherever (they've) been,' he said. 'Everybody that has them has said you'd be amazed by the number of people who go through them, who want to go through them.' See 'First...' on pg. 7 Continued from pg. 1 The Co-op ordered the tills from Calgary late last year and had them up and running a week ago, on Jan. 16. They are apparently the first self-serve tills for any Co-op store in Manitoba, and certainly the first such tills Flin Flon and area has seen. Therien stressed the units are not a means to cut staff, as no employees have been laid off or had their hours reduced. 'It's just another added benefit to go along with everything else we have,' he said. While Therien believes other local businesses may now follow the Co-op's lead, his store has no plans for any more self-serve checkouts. Self-serve checkouts have grown increasingly common in developed nations over the last five-plus years. A 2008 article on the website for the news program A Current Affair said of the tills: 'The introduction of self-serve grocery checkouts follows in the footsteps of automated airline check-in and banking, which have revolutionized both industries. 'Whether self-serve grocery checkouts will do the same is unsure.' But some supermarket chains have been eliminating or reducing self-serve checkouts. As for the Co-op, the store turned a record profit in 2011 as its chief competitor, Extra Foods, closed and gas sales rose. After receiving a refund from Federated Co-operatives Ltd., its main supplier, the Co-op made $1.13 million in 2011, nearly doubling up on 2010. The 2012 sales figures will be released later this year, and many members expect they will be even better than those of 2011.
