Are Self -Checkout lanes worth retailers ROI?

Self-Checkout lanes in supermarkets are becoming a common site in the US. The Wal-Mart store we visited in Fairfax, VA has them and I saw they were continously used, mostly by women though.

Evan Schuman writes in StorefrontBacktalk that while self-checkout lanes do save costs for retailers, they are responsible for substantially reducing purchase of impulse items.

The core of the problem is simply the way consumers interact with self-checkout systems. Typically, they have to pay much more attention to choosing a lane and to watching their products and scanning them, thereby leaving almost no time for browsing magazines or otherwise being tempted.

Read the full article here.