They've been very well received with shoppers and people don't have problems with the new technology. We wanted to give customers a choice at the front end so that they could pay and leave quickly. The self-checkout has also allowed us to move staff away from registers and improve service in other areas of the store.
Our feeling is that it was an incorrect interpretation and it weakens the state's environmental statutes. We have quite a few of these things. The experience indicates that customers make fewer trips of a shorter distance over time. That's a significant reduction in road miles. They're going to one place instead of 14 places to get what they need. We think that's relevant.
People don't really look for the sticker on the product anymore. In the rest of the country, people have gotten conditioned to do without it, to no apparent ill effect.
It's true that it doesn't make sense straight off the bat that someone would shop for a Valentine's Day gift at Home Depot. But we do see a high volume of traffic just before the holiday.
We believe that recent and imminent technological advances will require a modernization of the item pricing law in the near future.
If we're going to make this work, the price must be transparent to the consumer.
This is an issue that faces every retailer in the state of Michigan.
When you look at a store, there are multiple quantities of 100,000 items. You are talking about millions of items on hand. They move through the store very quickly and that makes it enormously difficult and costly. But it is the law in Michigan, and we are bound to comply with it.
The self-checkout has reduced length of lines by a third and the time spent in lines by a third. We estimate that 30 percent of all sales are made through self-checkout at stores equipped with them.
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