Seemingly very good news today… “Morrisons ditches self-checkouts in major change as boss says ‘we went too far'”.

The headline is a bit misleading, though. They will only “decrease the number of self-checkouts in its stores”, not actually do away with the infernal robo-tills. They also say…

“We have invested additional hours in manned checkouts and that’s been within the existing physical infrastructure [of the stores]. It’s not more checkouts, it’s more colleagues on checkouts.”

Which is a bit mealy-mouthed. Times, numbers, number of stores with more staff? We want specifics. The start-time is what I personally want to hear stated. Are they going to 100% guarantee at least one checkout till is staffed by 7am? Or are the staff still not going to get onto the tills until 8am or even 9am? In which case the changes will be useless for many early shoppers who have to get to work for 8am. They’ll still be forced to try to use the robo-tills, or else abandon their trolley and walk out on finding there are no staffed checkouts.