Checking In on What's New With Self-Checkout

Customers come to True North convenience stores across Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan for the experience, said fourth-generation owner Colleen Lyden.

“They come because they’re clean. They come because we have beautiful stores,” said Lyden, who works on special projects and whose family started the business in 1919. “They come to have that interaction.”

As True North’s 185 company-owned-and-operated stores grew more sophisticated and the business wanted to shorten the time customers spent in line, the retailer wanted a self-checkout solution that maintained that guest experience, explained Colleen Lyden and fellow family owner Bailey Lyden, who is vice president of retail.

Last year, True North started deploying a self-checkout solution, but the Lydens prefer the term “assisted checkout” for their setup that still allows staff to interact with and assist customers even as the device, made by Mashgin, identifies the goods customers put down on it to purchase.

“We have a lot of local stores with local people that come in every single day and they want that experience,” Colleen Lyden said. “They see the same person behind the counter. They become friends.”

Companies like Mashgin, Diebold Nixdorf, Toshiba, Deligo and many others are offering solutions for self-checkout. With advances in AI and AI vision, in particular, the options retailers have will only increase in number and complexity. Meanwhile, the human touch remains essential.

'What Problems They're Solving'

Suppliers need to communicate to convenience store operators the additional value their product creates, according to Frank Beard, principal at Konbini Strategy, a marketing and public relations firm.

“With any of this new technology, vendors have to be crystal clear about what problems they’re solving, because you don’t want to be a solution that’s in search of a problem,” Beard said.

One limit self-checkout technology must consider for convenience stores is dealing with age-restricted products like alcohol or those in the backbar, Beard said.

Beard thinks an ideal setup for convenience store self-checkout would be having two or three devices at the counter just off to the side of one or two cash registers that can still be staffed.

“That way, even if someone is using the self-checkout machine and they decide they want a pack of cigarettes, you have someone behind the counter who is able to quickly assist with that, get them what they need, check their ID and make sure that everything is staying compliant,” Beard said.

Continue reading about self-checkout in the October 2026 issue of NACS Magazine article "Checking In on Checking Out." 

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