Imagine you’ve wrapped up a long, fun-filled weekend in Las Vegas and are now at the airport heading home. You’re tired, cranky—maybe a little hungover—and all you want is a snack and a drink for the flight. The last thing you feel like doing is interacting with anyone.
Then you spot a Hudson News with no checkout counter. There is an attendant standing outside the entrance, but they’re not monitoring shoppers or manning a register. You swipe your credit card to enter, grab a bag of nuts and a bottle of iced tea, and simply walk out. There’s no checkout line. No small talk. No friction.
“There is one employee that stands outside in case anyone needs help,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “It’s got a very limited selection, so somebody standing at the turnstile can easily watch everything that’s going on in the store.”
That kind of kiosk already exists today—and it represents a future many retailers have been chasing: stores that are unattended, where checkout is virtually effortless for consumers. The appeal is obvious on both sides. Merchants like the idea of reducing labor costs, while shoppers appreciate the speed, convenience, and efficiency.
So why hasn’t unattended checkout taken off beyond a handful of convenience stores in tightly controlled environments? The idea has encountered challenges everywhere it’s been tested, yet retailers continue to experiment with it. If it works for a tiny airport shop, could it scale to a fully stocked grocery—or are the roadblocks too immovable for widespread adoption?
Vending Machines: The First Unattended
In some ways, unattended checkout has existed for more than a century. Vending machines, which first appeared in London in the 1880s, have been dispensing cigarettes, snacks, and hot and cold drinks.
Globally, Grand View Research has estimated that the vending machine market surpassed $70 billion in 2024, with more than half of that revenue coming from the Asia Pacific region.
While vending machines have traditionally been limited to low-cost items, that’s beginning to change. Nearly three-quarters of vending machine revenue now comes from cashless transactions, eliminating the need for coins altogether. And as machines selling headphones and other electronics have demonstrated, consumers are increasingly willing to spend real money in unattended retail environments.
“I would have no problem sticking my card in a Best Buy machine and buying a set of earbuds for $100,” Apgar said. “You know the merchant, you know the product, so it’s not complicated. Coming out from that angle, people are saying, ‘Where else can we sell in an unattended environment? Where else is there a fit?”
One answer was service stations, where drivers evolved from paying an attendant to pump their gas to handling the entire chore on their own, from fueling to payment. The modern self-serve station dates to 1964, when attendants inside the store could activate the pumps outside. Paying at the pump followed in 1973, first introduced at a station in Abilene, Texas.
Moving Forward from Self-Checkout
From there, it was a short step to self-checkout lanes, which first appeared at a Kroger store in Atlanta in 1986. Their spread seemed to point toward an even more radical idea: stores without attendants at all, where shoppers did all the work themselves. But while some retailers experimented with fully unattended shopping, several major chains ultimately pulled back from self-checkout.
In 2022, Dollar General went all in on self-checkout at some locations, only to reverse course within two years after theft losses mounted. Target followed with a more cautious approach, limiting self-checkout to customers with 10 items or fewer, while discount gift retailer Five Below adopted a hybrid model it calls “shopper-assisted checkout,” in which customers scan items but a clerk completes the transaction.
Even as these retailers scaled back, others pushed ahead with cashierless concepts. The most ambitious effort came from Amazon, which unveiled its Amazon Go stores—fully cashierless outlets where shoppers scan the Amazon app when entering and technology tracks the items they take from the shelves.
That vision dimmed when it was revealed that Amazon’s proprietary Just Walk Out technology relied on approximately 1,000 workers in India, who were manually reviewing the transactions. After peaking at 30 locations, the number of Amazon Go stores has since dwindled to around 15. Much of the Just Walk Out technology has been supplanted by the Amazon Dash Cart, which allows consumers to scan items as they shop, pay, and leave without interacting with an employee.
A similar fate befell Presto Automation, an artificial intelligence-powered drive-thru company that promised automated ordering for fast food restaurants like Hardee’s and Del Taco. Regulatory filings later showed that 70% of orders had to be completed by off-site human workers.
A Success Story in Germany
One area where cashierless stores have found a home is in Germany. Since the opening of the country’s first modern unattended store in July 2019, unmanned smart stores have rapidly expanded, with roughly 600 locations now operating nationwide.
One key to their success has been placing them in rural areas where there was not enough demand to support full-service supermarkets. Around 270 of these stores are found in rural Germany, according to a data from Stephan Rüschen, a German food retailing professor. There are also roughly 150 direct farm retail stores that enable local farmers to sell directly to consumers. These models stand in contrast to the U.S. landscape, where unattended stores are concentrated in urban areas.
But as in the U.S., Europe has seen its share of hiccups. For instance, German supermarket chain Aldi introduced its Shop and Go stores in the UK as a cashierless grocery concept. Customers complained about a required £10 deposit upon entering; if they spent less, the money was refunded, sometimes taking several days. Shoppers who pressed the entry button multiple times before entering were sometimes charged multiple times.
Three Thorny Issues
Completely unattended stores have struggled to find a foothold outside of small, tightly controlled environments. Even in those cases, an attendant if often required to hover just outside the store.
There are essentially three unresolved challenges. The first is safety. One potential advantage of a cashierless store is the ability to operate around the clock. But would a lone shopper feel comfortable entering an empty store at 3 a.m.?
The second issue is security. Shoppers are already stealing from self-checkout lanes, even with attendants nearby. Research from Lending Tree found that 27% of respondents admitted to intentionally taking something from a self-checkout without paying, and another 36% accidentally left with an unscanned item.
In a fully unattended store, what would stop someone from walking out with armfuls of goods? Theoretically, requiring a card swipe to enter could leave a paper trail, but this could spark an ongoing technological arms race between retailers and thieves.
The third concern is customer service. What happens if the internet goes down while a shopper is in the store, or the technology doesn’t work for some other reason? Without staff to help, the value of an unattended store could quickly diminish.
For stores more complex than a simple convenience outlet, customers may need help finding items or answering questions. When Target reduced its checkout clerks to focus on self-checkout lanes, it found that the best way to invest the savings was to place more associates on the sales floor to assist customers while they shopped.
“All that laying off cashier staff did was irritate the customer,” said Apgar. “Instead of laying those people off, the store would be better off having them do different things. That was a discovery process on behalf of the merchants. It wasn’t obvious that was the right path.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
Optimists about the future of unattended retail can point to several success stories. Self-serve airport bodegas and airline kiosks, where travelers check in and tag their own bags, demonstrate that automation can work in certain contexts.
“The European model is not a foregone conclusion,” said Apgar. “That’s an experimental phase, and they may very well determine that they need to have at least one person in the store when it’s when it’s available. We don’t have to staff at the same level as a regular store, as the Hudson News showed. But they can’t leave it empty.”
The challenge is designing a format that gives shoppers the convenience they want while remaining profitable for retailers. The technology itself isn’t the problem—it’s the comfort level. What shoppers think they want from unattended checkout may not match what they are actually willing to use in their everyday lives.
“Not every choice is best made by the consumer,” Apgar said. “Sometimes we, as consumers, are our own worst enemies too.”
