The problem
What a checkout is actually costing you
A checkout is not one cost. It is five, spread across stock, loss, payments, footfall and payroll, and only one of them shows up as a line anyone owns.
01
Checkout labour
Checkout is a staffing line. Cash and returns keep their positions; the rest is payroll a till consumes.
02
Floor space that sells nothing
The only floor in the store earning nothing per square metre. You pay rent on it.
03
Queue abandonment
Two ways a queue costs you a sale. Only one leaves a number to look up.
They never join the line.
They see the queue from the floor, put the item down and leave. No transaction, so nothing reached your data.
They join, then leave it.
The basket is abandoned at the lane. Measurable, and almost nobody measures it.
Most of this loss is invisible in your own reporting. Someone measured it here, in this region.
04
Loss at the door
Goods leave unverified, because self-checkout asked the customer to scan honestly. A gate that verifies asks nobody.
05
Commission inside the transaction
A percentage of every card sale goes to somebody in the middle, on money already yours.
The obvious question
How is this different from self-checkout?
Self-checkout moved the scanning onto the customer, and the responsibility with it. A walk-out gate verifies what actually leaves the store, so nothing depends on a shopper choosing to scan correctly. The difference is not how carefully people are asked to behave. It is that nobody is being asked.
Three of those five are in the model, with the arithmetic shown. The last two are deliberately left out of it, and the model page says why.