Tesco has opened the doors to Britain’s first completely self-service store in Northampton.
The Tesco Express convenience store in the Kingsley area of the city has no manned checkouts. Instead there are five self-scan tills which are supervised by a single member of staff.
The retail giant said the aim of the new “assisted service store” was to improve efficiency and speed up shopping trips, but insisted there were no plans to open a large supermarket using the same format.
A Tesco spokesman said: “Customers like the fact that there are five checkouts available. Before, you could have four manned checkouts but only one person working the till.”
“It’s a lot quicker but some people have never used them before so a member of staff is there to assist.”
“If needs be there can be five members of staff assisting customers. We have had no negative feed back so far.”
Richard Dodd, of the British Retail Consortium, said he believed the move could be the end of staffed checkouts and the start of a technological revolution in supermarkets .
But critics of the move warned that it signalled the end of “basic human interaction” between shoppers and check-out staff and could ultimately result in thousands of job losses.
A spokesman for Asda said the company would definitely not follow Tesco’s lead, stressing that “hell would probably freeze over” before it opened a store with no customer interaction on the checkouts.
Sainsburys said it had no plans to introduce any exclusively self-service stores because its customers preferred a choice between automated and staffed checkouts.
