WITH the promise of ending long checkout queues and freeing up more staff to actually assist customers, the sales pitch for the new dawn of self-checkout was a convincing one.

That coupled with the store owners being able to cut overheads, never having to worry about staff sick days or pay rises, found many owners rubbing their grubby little hands in glee.

However the reality for both shopper and shopkeeper has been far from the sale of the century, so much so that the tech – lauded as the future – could soon be consigned to the discount bin.

We’ve all been there, frantically trying to scan a barcode, or attempting to flag down that lone member of staff to take the alarm off your steak, or the dreaded wrong item in the bagging area – and we haven’t even mentioned buying loose fruit or bakery products.

New stories have emerged that shoppers are even being asked to queue up to show staff members their receipts after they have checked out themselves, or perhaps even more wildly that some self-checkouts are now asking for a tip!

It’s a dystopian nightmare that only an introvert, or a teen buying a marrow and some lube, could possibly enjoy.

This scenario and distasteful experience is being echoed by many across the globe.

“From the get go, customers detested them. The rationale was economics based, and not focused on the customer” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has researched self-checkouts, told CNN.

What skeleton staff remain have been thrown to the lions. “This should be your fucking job, not mine” one customer reportedly told a shop-worker, a report in the Guardian claimed.

In a recent survey 67 per cent of people questioned have had one fail when using it and 25 per cent said they would choose not to because they’ve had bad experiences.

So why have we persisted with this flaky futurism?

Most people would think the greedy grocery stores are milking their golden goose and the self-checkouts are stuffing the pockets of their insatiable shareholders, but in fact a different reality is at play for owners.

Firstly the machines cost an absolute bomb to install, a four checkout set-up can cost in excess of £100,000 and many stores easily have ten or more machines.

Of course the theory goes, lay out the money upfront and it pays for itself in due course, but this theory hasn’t quite panned out as shops are discovering a whole wealth of costs they were not expecting.

While the machines will ‘always be at work’ – as you will well know, on any given day there may be all manner of reasons why ‘computer says no’.

It has materialised that the nascent technology was both buggy and unreliable. It also required regular and expensive maintenance proving a costly headache for owners.

Then research showed that self-checkout incurred higher wastage and of course mind-boggling levels of theft.

The supermarkets refer to it as ‘external shrinkage’, you might know this as common thievery, the people on the take say – ‘the supermarkets deserve it.’

“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” read one hardened commenter on Reddit.

“There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.” barked another.

As a result of the new breed of theft, a whole new lingo has cropped up.

Ringing up your premium meat as a single piece of fruit is known as the ‘the banana trick’, a product making into the bagging area without being scanned is called ‘the pass around’.

Slightly more complicated is the ‘The switcheroo’ – swapping a barcode sticker off a cheaper product onto a more expensive one.

Such is the proliferation of theft and mis-scans thanks to self-checkout, a phenomenon that has tragically snowballed in the burgeoning cost of living crisis, individual supermarkets are sometimes losing up to £1million a year.

In 2015, criminologists from the University of Leicester conducted a study on self-checkouts, which uncovered widespread evidence of theft.

After scrutinising a million self-checkout transactions spanning a year and amounting to £17million in sales, they discovered that goods valued at almost £700,000 were leaving the store without being scanned or paid for.

The research also shockingly revealed that the self-service tills are also inspiring a new breed of people to steal, ones who wouldn’t have even considered it before.

So big is the problem that some US supermarkets have begun to turn the tide on self-checkout. Walmart, America’s largest grocer, is stripping some stores of self-checkout lanes and bringing back cashiers, citing theft as a major issue.

None of this counts for a total pedal back of the self-checkout dream, but it is a strong indication it hasn’t quite panned out as everyone expected.

Certainly retailers appear to be recognising that they might have gone too far in embracing the unmanned checkout, and are now reintroducing additional human workers into the checkout process.

So where does the future take us?

Amazon have of course been trialling their Go stores, which once you are logged in allows you to leave without scanning or checking out, with an aim to being almost frictionless.

But this too has been a bumpy ride for Amazon, with floods of complaints claiming it has been flawed from the start.

Perhaps it is time to recognise that not everything is about enhancing the shareholders’ wallets and if stores want good customer retention, it might be time to put them first.

Aisle believe it when I see it though.