Checking In on Self-Checkout

Call me "anti-social" (my mother does), but interpersonal interaction is overrated--from both sides of the equation. And in today's world of self-service banks, grocery stores, gas stations, airline check-ins, and the like, I don't have to deal with sometimes-surly attendents and they don't have to deal with me.

I'm not alone in this love of self-checkout. According to an IHL Group 2007 market study, 98 percent of respondents had used self checkout, with almost 50 percent having used it more than five times in the previous years, and 72 percent having readily accepted it. Count me as part of the 72 percent. The study also reported that for 2008, consumers will spend more than $230.7 billion on self-checkout transactions at retail stores, up 28 percent over 2007.

And now IBM has cranked up self-checkout a notch or two with what the company claims is the first-of-a-kind self-checkout technology that lets you shop for and check out purchases practically anywhere in a store. In short, the IBM AnyPlace Checkout system extends the capability of when and where retailers can offer self-service transactions.

On the hardware side, the new system is implemented as a small footprint (15-inch) kiosk, making it attractive to retailers that have limited floor space. IBM has also updated its IBM Checkout Environment for Consumer-Service (CHEC) self-checkout software. The systems are cashless, supporting only credit or debit cards, thereby speeding transactions.

The system runs on AMD 1.8-GHz dual-core processors with 80- or 160-GB hard disk, 512 MB to 4 GB of RAM, and a VIA Chrome9 Integrated Graphics Processor. On the software side, the system can run on Linux, Windows XP Professional, Windows Embedded for Point of Service, and Vista Business. Supported drivers include Windows OPOS and JavaPOS 6.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 12:43 PM  Permalink