Dollar General joins growing list of retailers, including Target and Costco, to reverse course on self-checkout due to shoplifting and machine costs after adding them to more than half its 19,000 stores

Dollar General has joined the growing list of retailers turning their backs on self-checkouts, saying they drive losses through shoplifting and customer errors. 

Walmart, Shop-Rite, Costco, Five Below and Target have all cut back on the number of self-checkouts or reduced the amount of customers able to use them. 

Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said: ‘We had started to rely too much this year on self-checkout in our stores. We should be using self-checkout as a secondary checkout vehicle, not a primary.’

The company said self-checkouts fuel merchandise loss – or ‘shrink’ – through shoplifting, employee theft, damaged products, administrative errors and online fraud.

It comes just after the chain had massively expanded self-checkouts, adding them to more than half of its 19,000 stores. 

Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said moving away from self-checkouts would help the chain combat shrink

Dollar General joins a raft of companies moving away from self-checkouts

The company had also piloted self-checkout only stores with no cashier lanes, betting it would reduce labor costs and speed up checkout processes. 

And although it does save on employee costs, the company has reassigned more staff to ring customers up. 

Vasos said: ‘It helps on the sales line because we’ve got somebody to meet, greet and ring up the customer.

‘It also helps on the shrink line because (we’ve) got somebody at the front end of the store that is always there to monitor.’

He said the company had struggled with a ‘significant headwind from inventory shrink’ this year.

A 2016 study, by the University of Leicester in the UK, found that stores with self-checkouts lost nearly 4 percent of purchases, almost double the average store loss rate. 

Self-checkouts make it easier for customers to hide products, scan them incorrectly and shoplift.  

Shrink has been a growing problem for a number of retailers as a wave of shoplifting hits the country and Dollar General is just the latest company to move away from self-checkouts. 

Walmart recently removed self checkouts from some New Mexico stores and ShopRite pulled them from a Delaware store after customer complaints. 

A report by the National Retail Federation (NRF) found Los Angeles had the highest rate of ‘organized retail crime ‘ for the fifth consecutive year

Meanwhile some stores said they were increasing the number of staff working on self-checkouts to monitor customers or introduced measures to limit the number of customers who can use them. 

Target restricted self-checkouts to customers with less than ten items, while Costco announced it is adding more staff to checkout areas after people were fraudulently using membership cards. 

A recent report by the National Retail Federation (NRF) found that shrink – the total losses incurred by retailers – rose by $20 billion in a year to an eye-watering $112.2 billion in 2022.

And with up to 70 per cent of those losses accounted for by theft, it means firms shoplifters stole approximately $78.4 billion.

Retailers have always been vulnerable to shopliftings but there has recently been an emergence of coordinated and organized robberies at stores.