October 21, 2003

Do It Yourself Catching On

America is becoming a self-serve society, with consumers taking on tasks that used to be performed for them by businesses. I

Kari Anderson is on the go. With two kids in elementary school and another in preschool, time is at a premium for the Eagan homemaker.

So after she dashed into the Home Depot recently for a few packages of screws and hooks and whatnot, she headed straight for one of the store's new self-checkout stations.

"It's very easy, and you usually don't have to stand in line," she said, scanning her items and swiping her credit card through the reader. "I have online banking, I do online groceries, I shop online. I do self-check-in at the airport.

"It saves me time. It's all about time."

America is becoming a self-serve society, with consumers taking on tasks that used to be performed for them by businesses. It started a generation ago with self-serve gas and automated teller (ATM) machines; now, growing numbers of Americans shop, bank and fly with little or no help from employees of the businesses they're patronizing.

Phyllis Heinsohn uses NWA's self-service check-in
Phyllis Heinsohn uses NWA's self-service check-in.
Glen Stubbe
Star Tribune

Consider:

� Nearly 80 percent of Northwest Airlines' Twin Cities passengers check themselves in, either at self-serve airport kiosks or on the Internet.

� About 30 percent of U.S. supermarkets offer self-scanning of groceries, up from 6 percent in 1999, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

� ATM transactions have doubled since 1990 and now total more than 13 billion a year, according to the American Bankers Association.

� Fast-food giants McDonald's and Burger King are testing do-it-yourself kiosks that will allow customers to place and pay for their orders. Convenience and drug stores also are making plans to install self-scan checkout systems.

� U.S. consumers spent about $65 billion online in 2002, with the average Internet shopper racking up nearly $1,100 in purchases, according to consulting firm NFO Business Intelligence.

Experts say the trend toward self-service figures only to get stronger.


"I think that there are a lot of things that people don't mind doing themselves and even prefer doing themselves, and the technology is making it easier to accommodate that," said Bruce Temkin, research director at Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm that specializes in technology issues. "I definitely see self-service in all these areas continuing to blossom."

Consumer control

At the heart of the self-service boom is consumer control, said Howard Liszt, former CEO of the Minneapolis ad agency Campbell Mithun and now a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

"As I go through my day, there are some services I choose to pay for and some I choose to do myself," Liszt said. "We're seeing these choices now show up in all kinds of venues we never saw them before. It's the convenience -- the speed with which you get the product and the flexibility it gives you to do it on your own time."

That's exactly what makes Bill Wirsbinski choose self-service.

"Airport check-in -- I do that," said the Eagan resident. "I haven't been inside a gas station in a long time. I'm not sure it's any faster, but I can control it."

Northwest Airlines is the industry leader in self-service; the Eagan-based company aggressively has promoted its self-serve options, believing they give it an advantage in a fiercely competitive business.

"The idea in Minneapolis is, we want our customers to breeze through the airport check-in process," said Robert Isom, Northwest's senior vice president for customer service. "We want them to get to security, get through as fast as they can and then get their seat with no hassle."

Many Northwest fliers give high marks to self-service. Rebecca DuRose of Burnsville flies once or twice a month to visit her fianc� in Alabama; she checks her own bags, gets her own boarding pass and selects her own seat.

"I like it a lot," she said. "You walk up, check your bag, and you don't have to stand in line. I think a 5-year-old could do it."

Cost to workers

But consumer convenience may come at a cost to workers. Earlier this year, Northwest laid off about 500 customer-service agents -- and 182 of those layoffs were because of self-service devices, said Bobby DePace, District 143 president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents about 15,300 Northwest workers.

"Northwest has made it clear that as it gets into these operations, they will cost jobs," DePace said. "It's no secret -- it's out there, point-blank."

Other businesses say they don't expect to replace workers with machines. Atlanta-based Home Depot has installed self-service checkout stations in about 800 of its 1,600 stores nationwide, but company spokesman John Simley said the labor savings barely amount to one full-time employee per store.

"We are taking those extra hours and putting them back onto the sales floor," he said. "The bottom line is, there's no head-count reduction."

Cub Foods offers self-service checkouts in five of its 44 Twin Cities area stores, with nearly 25 percent of Cub shoppers using the service when it's available. But the Stillwater-based company said the devices aren't meant to replace workers.

"Nobody has lost their job [to self-service], and that's never going to happen," said spokeswoman Nancy Fjerkenstad.

As consumers become more accustomed to serving themselves, businesses will need to offer a growing array of self-service options. That means Internet marketing will become more important, said Scott Litman, president of Minneapolis-based Digital@jwt,a division of the New York advertising giant J. Walter Thompson Co.

"What is it that made the ATM so successful?" Litman said. "Eventually, it became an easier mechanism for interacting with the bank than the teller. We look to do the same things online."

Research on automobile company Web sites, for example, shows that they now are the leading influencer of consumer buying decisions right up until the test drive, said Litman, whose firm built Ford Motor Company's Web site.

"You do a lot of the selection yourself," he said. "You start to do your research and create your own opinion. And if the test drive fulfills that, you become a very likely buyer."

In other words, the consumer is in the driver's seat, in more ways than one. And for a growing number of Americans, that's just how they want it.

"It's a technological age," said Mary Jo Aiken of Edina, a retired teacher who recently used Northwest's self-check-in for the first time. "If you don't learn these things, you're going to be standing still."

John Reinan is at [email protected].

Posted by Craig at October 21, 2003 02:36 PM