Costco CEO Craig Jelinek is eliminating self-service checkout from stores because he says his employees do a better job.
“They are great for low-volume warehouses, but we don’t want to be in the low-volume warehouse business,” he told Brad Stone at Bloomberg Businessweek.
Costco has tested self-checkout in the past. Jelinek told Businessweek that human cashiers are more efficient.
His decision comes at a time when competitor Wal-Mart is adding 10,000 self-service checkout systems to stores.
Self-service checkouts have traditionally been seen as a threat to retail cashiers because they're cheaper than manpower. It's not clear whether Wal-Mart's machines will displace workers.
Retailers in general “see their employees as a cost to be minimized and typically end up under investing in them,” Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told Businessweek.
Costco is known for having among the happiest employees in the retail industry because of its superior wages and benefits.
SEE ALSO: Costco's Unorthodox Strategy To Survive The Big Box Apocalypse >
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