What To Do when Cash Isn't Accepted (2024)

Where’s the Cashier?

Retailers ask customers to place orders or check out on their own.

Fast-food restaurants want you to order your meal by entering it on a touch screen. Supermarkets would prefer that you scan your own groceries at checkout. Many parking garages have long abandoned attendants. The “cashless society” is one thing. But are you prepared for the “clerkless society”?

“It’s a long-standing effort to figure out how to peel away bits of labor cost and figure out how they can get customers to do more of the work,” says Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University and author ofThe Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.

Though some self-service systems accept cash through bill readers, the popularity of paying with credit cards, debit cards and other digital payments has made self-service more viable. But this doesn’t make it more desirable. Machines can be glitchy, items can be difficult to scan, and the systems are typically slower than human cashiers, Andrews says. When we’re waiting in line, “we’re keenly aware of time passing. When we’re physically doing things, time seems to move faster.” But, in fact, customers scan items more slowly than a cashier. “We don’t know where the UPC codes are, or we don’t have all the codes for the produce memorized,” Andrews says. “The human cashier is familiar with all of it.”

Though younger consumers are growing up with self-checkout and may expect it, “older Americans lived through this transition and are rightfully skeptical of it,” he says. “They say, ‘Wait a minute, is my food cheaper? What’s in this for me?’ ”

Retailers have deployed self-checkout with mixed results. Walmart has pushed many of its stores to primarily rely on such stations or scan-and-go apps, where customers use their phone to scan items as they shop. But Wegmans grocery stores shut down their scan-and-go option in late 2022 due to an increase in shoplifting.

Andrews says we’re unlikely to see self-checkout and robots taking over our shopping experiences entirely: “People put a value on being served by another person.”

—Lexi Pandell