I’ve followed Lidl’s development of scan & shop for years, from its secretive launch of a beta app in 2021 to the arrival of the service in my local store at the weekend.

It should therefore hardly come as a surprise. But having just used it for a full weekly shop for the first time, I still can’t quite believe it.

Yes, scan & shop is a commonplace experience in traditional supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, which have allowed customers to do it for years. But this is not Tesco, Sainsbury’s or Waitrose. It’s a discounter, with tighter margins to protect – the first discounter in the UK to offer scan & shop – and that’s what makes the experience feel so incongruous.

Called Lidl & Go, the service launched as a ‘friends & family’ trial for staff in four stores in September last year, before going live to the public for the first time in May.

As of last weekend, it is in about 40 outlets, including Shoreham-by-Sea, my local store.

The idea, if it needs explaining, is that you scan your shopping as you go, using the Lidl Plus app. You must still go to a checkout, but here you only have to scan the app again – rather than all your shopping – before paying.

When I read in the terms & conditions last year that the shopping may also undergo a “quick rescan by a colleague”, I cynically thought ‘of course that’s what will happen’, rendering it all a pointless gimmick.

After all, Lidl took no chances with self-checkouts, only rolling them out across its estate as recently as 2024. They came with new one-way barriers, one at the store entrance and another as you leave the self-checkout area, requiring a receipt to be scanned – inconvenient, but clearly a measure to limit inventory loss.

With that in mind, I made absolutely certain to make no scanning errors as I tried Lidl & Go, so that I at least would not have to apologise when an assistant inevitably rescanned the shopping.

But this is not how it panned out. The experience was flawless. First you must either scan a QR code on a sign at the entrance or allow the app to access your location. Then you turn on the scanner in the app, show it a barcode and the item is added to your digital basket.

Loose veg must be placed on a weighing scale, which gives you a barcode on screen, along with an optional print out.

With a few items, including mushrooms and baked potatoes, the app asked me to specify a quantity after I scanned the barcode, though this should have been unnecessary as they were packaged.

Only once did I have to ask an assistant for help, after finding a single bulb of loose garlic was not recognised by the weighing scale. I was directed to scan a code on the shelf instead.

I proceeded to a self-checkout with a small trolley-full of over £50-worth of shopping – 25 items in total, ranging in size from a family pack of loo roll to small but relatively expensive items such as batteries. I scanned the app, paid with a card, and left. The barrier even bleeped as I went through – not because I was stealing something, but because I hadn’t scanned my paper receipt, instead following another shopper through as the barrier swung to close – but the assistant said only “go on”.

Estimates from ECR Retail Loss suggest that some 43% of scan & shop baskets contain scanning errors; that such errors become near certain in large baskets; and that losses can reach almost 5% of sales value.

After all, people make mistakes. That’s why, in two London stores last year, Lidl began a trialling cameras at self-checkouts that can spot when a shopper fails to scan an item and play back the footage to show them.

And yet here they are saying: it’s OK, we trust you. All while Aldi keeps up the pressure on prices and margins with hundreds of products reduced this year.

It’s hardly surprising that it’s a cautious rollout, with the 40 stores representing a fraction of Lidl’s UK estate of 1,000-plus. It will be interesting to see how quickly it rolls out widely across the estate, and whether staff remain as trusting on subsequent visits.

At the same time, the convenience of not having to remove anything from your trolley until you get to your vehicle is a serious draw, and I will not be the only shopper to see it as a new reason to choose Lidl.

Topics