Dollar General is taking checkout back out of your hands because of theft

• Dollar General is pulling self-checkout options out of 300 stores.
• The dollar store is also getting employees involved again at thousands more.
• Theft and other losses spurred the about-face, Dollar General's CEO said.

Dollar General is taking a big step away from self-checkout as a reckoning over the concept continues.

The dollar store chain is cutting self-checkout completely at 300 stores where theft and inventory loss is particularly high, CEO Todd Vasos said on Thursday. About 14,000 of Dollar General's 20,000 stores offer self-checkout.

The retailer is also converting self-checkout stands to hybrid ones with an assisted-checkout option at 9,000 locations, intended "to drive traffic first to our staffed registers, with assisted-checkout options available as second or third options to reduce lines during high-volume times," he said.

Meantime, at the remaining stores with self-checkout customers will be limited to buying five items at a time, Vasos said.

The changes are meant to get employees more involved again in ringing customers up — and curb theft in the process, according to Vasos.

"We believe there is truly no substitute for an employee presence at the front end of the store to greet customers and provide excellent customer service, including at checkout," the CEO said.

Dollar General isn't alone in reassessing its options. Other retailers have implemented or experimented with a 10-item limit for self-checkout transactions. Walmart has started limiting self-checkout at some stores to its Walmart+ members and Spark drivers.

Dollar General and others have wrestled for years with "shrink," or losses due to theft, damaged goods, or unsold inventory that has to be discounted or written off.

Rival dollar store chain Dollar Tree said Wednesday that it would close 1,000 stores under its Family Dollar brand, citing theft as one of the factors it considered when deciding which stores to close.

Vasos first teased that Dollar General was rethinking its approach to self-checkout in December. At the time, he said the chain would dedicate more staff to checkout to curb theft and errors.

Since then, Dollar General has used AI to evaluate its self-checkouts, he said. The technology confirmed that it contributed to the company's shrink problem — not just because some customers stole products but also because others were bagging items that seemed to ring up but didn't.

The AI inspired the hybrid checkout model the company is now rolling out at 9,000 stores. "That should immediately do a lot for us" to combat theft and other losses from shrink, Vasos added.

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