Aldi has the speediest self-checkout machines of all the major supermarkets, according to analysis by DebugBear.
Slow-motion video of a customer’s interaction with machines at eight retailers in Lancaster was captured to measure to the millisecond the latency between manually entering a product on the screen and the next screen loading.
The time between completing a shop and being able to pay was also measured, with Aldi’s machines achieving the lowest maximum latency on that metric too.
“The micro-delays of a few hundred milliseconds are fine. It becomes more of a problem when they are less ‘micro’, with shoppers having to wait a second or more. At that point delays become more noticeable,” DebugBear founder Matt Zeunert told The Grocer.
“A second or two’s delay might not seem like much,” he added, “but it all adds up when you’re checking out a basketful of items and the screen appears to momentarily go to sleep after every single touch.”
The machines at Aldi in Morecambe Road, Lancaster proved the swiftest in Zeunert’s study, with every interaction taking under 270 milliseconds.
Asda’s machines saw the longest time between product selection screens – the maximum wait being 1,270 milliseconds – and among the slowest between checkout screens.
On both of Zeunert’s speed measures combined, Aldi ranked fastest, followed by Lidl, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S, TG Jones and Asda, with Boots the slowest.
Among the worst offenders in the speed test – which didn’t include Morrisons – was Boots in St Nicholas Arcades, where the machine froze for more than three seconds after ‘I don’t have an Advantage Card’ was tapped.
At TG Jones (formerly WH Smith) in Marketgate Shopping Centre, a 1.5-second delay was suffered after declining a Premier League trading card promotion. And at Asda’s superstore, the self-checkout “stalled” for more than a second every time he selected a quantity or opted out of carrier bags.
“When a screen is slow to respond, customers often assume it’s frozen and start pressing repeatedly in frustration,” Zeunert said. “It can make people lose confidence in the self-checkout process altogether.”
The study also recorded a count of the additional on-screen questions that “slow down the checkout process” such as ‘Do you have a membership card?’, ‘Do you want to purchase promotion items?’, and ‘Do you want to round up for a charity donation?’.
The speedier stores in the study were found to remind customers to scan their membership card using visual and auditory alerts, without an explicit on-screen confirmation.
“These delays reduce throughput at the self-checkout. Adding an extra five to 10 seconds to the checkout process through slow interactions and unnecessary steps ultimately means longer queues,” Zeunert said.
“If input latency is your primary concern, Aldi is the best place to shop. Not only do the buttons there respond the fastest, but they also don’t bother asking if you want bags or showing you membership reminders. Those at the bottom of the league table are definitely in need of some improvement.”
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