New Proposal Would Give Shoppers 10% Off for Using Self-Checkout

For years, customers have joked that if stores expect them to do the cashier’s job, they ought to receive an employee discount.

A New York lawmaker has apparently decided the joke deserves a hearing.

A bill introduced by Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas would require supermarkets and other food retailers that offer self-checkout to give customers a 10% discount for scanning, bagging, and paying for their own groceries. The proposal argues that retailers save money by shifting work traditionally performed by paid employees onto shoppers, and that customers should receive a share of those savings.

Under the proposal, stores couldn’t simply thank customers for their “patience.”

They’d have to thank them with money.

The legislation applies specifically to food retailers that offer self-service checkout kiosks and would require a 10% reduction on purchases completed through those machines. The bill is currently sitting in committee and has not become law.

If something like this were ever adopted, it could have major implications for retailers including Walmart, Target, Kroger, Meijer, Stop & Shop, Wegmans, and countless regional grocery chains that have invested millions of dollars in self-checkout technology.

Stores embraced self-checkout as a way to speed transactions, reduce labor costs, and give shoppers another option. Critics, however, have long argued that customers are effectively doing unpaid work by scanning, weighing, bagging, and sometimes troubleshooting their own purchases.

Retailers would almost certainly argue that self-checkout is an optional convenience, not an unpaid job, and that a mandatory 10% discount would erase much of the financial benefit of installing the systems in the first place.

The proposal also arrives as many large retailers have begun scaling back their self-checkout experiments. Walmart has tested limiting self-checkout access in some stores, while Target has expanded “express” self-checkout lanes with item limits in an effort to reduce theft and improve customer flow.