Walmart has been quietly removing self-checkout machines from stores and restoring traditional cashier lanes, with a South Philadelphia location the latest to make the switch. The retail giant's retreat comes as a growing number of state and city lawmakers push legislation to regulate or restrict the self-service systems that have frustrated shoppers and fueled theft for years.
A Walmart spokesperson framed the move in customer-service terms, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer the changes aim to "improve the checkout experience and enable associates to provide more personalized customer service." But retail analysts and survey data tell a blunter story: self-checkout has become a theft magnet, and the cost of that experiment is finally catching up with the companies that embraced it.
The numbers are hard to argue with. A December 2025 LendingTree survey found that 69 percent of self-checkout users believe the machines make it easier to steal. Twenty-seven percent admitted they had purposefully taken an item without scanning it. Another 36 percent said they accidentally left with an unscanned item, and 61 percent of those who did kept it, the New York Post reported.
Walmart is not alone. Dollar General pulled self-checkout from 12,000 stores nationwide in 2024. Sam's Club, a Walmart subsidiary, announced last year that it would ditch self-checkout entirely in favor of AI-powered "scan and go" technology. Costco has begun rolling out similar scanning tools, though it reportedly does not plan to eliminate self-checkout altogether.
Costco's own recent moves to have employees take over scanning duties at some locations signal how broad the rethinking has become.
Matt Schulz, LendingTree's chief consumer finance analyst, did not mince words about the incentive problem self-checkout creates.
"Largely unattended self-checkouts provide a potential opportunity for folks to help themselves. Even though people know that stealing is wrong and most understand the risk they're taking, tough times require tough choices, and lots of people are clearly willing to take a risk."
Retail expert Neil Saunders agreed that the machines have driven higher rates of theft, both deliberate and through what he called "accidental mistakes." His conclusion was direct.
"Forcing more customers to use manned checkouts resolves a lot of these issues and saves retailers money."
Bryan Gildenberg, another retail expert, told the Daily Mail that Walmart reviews individual stores based on theft data and customer experience, then removes self-checkout from the highest-theft locations. He cautioned against reading too much into the trend beyond that practical calculus.
Giant Food, a grocery chain operating 165 stores, offers a case study in how severe the problem has become. The company's president, Ira Kress, told the Washington Post that shoplifting at its stores has risen roughly tenfold in five years.
"To say [theft has] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement."
Giant Food responded by capping self-checkout at 20 items, adding security guards, and locking certain products in alert-enabled dispensers. Kress was blunt about the stakes, as the Washington Free Beacon reported: "The last thing I want to do is close stores. But I've got to be able to run them safely and profitably."
That is the bind facing retailers across the country. Self-checkout was supposed to cut labor costs. Instead, it created a low-supervision environment that invited theft, and the losses now threaten the viability of stores in the very communities that can least afford to lose them.
Walmart's own recent settlement requiring new checkout disclosures at all 4,600 stores shows the company is recalibrating its register operations on multiple fronts.
While retailers pull back on their own, legislators in at least seven states, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Washington, have been working on bills to regulate self-checkout systems. The proposed laws generally aim to require a balance between self-checkout stations and staffed registers, mandate a minimum number of employees per self-checkout lane, or limit the items customers can bring through self-service lines.
New York City Council member Amanda FarÃas, a Bronx Democrat, introduced an amendment to the city code earlier this year that would impose a 15-item limit for shoppers using self-checkout in supermarkets and pharmacies. The measure would also require stores to station one employee for every three self-checkout machines.
FarÃas framed the issue in terms of safety and oversight.
"We've seen the consequences of removing workers from these spaces: increased retail theft, less oversight, fewer protections for both workers and customers and generally decreased safety."
The proposed 15-item cap in New York City reflects a broader pattern: politicians stepping in to mandate staffing levels and checkout rules that retailers are already moving toward on their own.
There is something telling about the timing. Walmart, Dollar General, and others started reversing course before any of these bills became law. The market, punished by theft losses, customer complaints, and bad checkout experiences, corrected itself. Now legislators want credit for fixing a problem the private sector is already addressing.
That does not mean every proposed regulation is pointless. Requiring adequate staffing near self-checkout lanes is common sense, and stores that refuse to staff registers properly do invite problems. But the instinct to layer mandates on top of a market correction that is already underway is a familiar one. It lets politicians claim they acted while doing little the market had not already forced.
The deeper question is why self-checkout spread so aggressively in the first place. Retailers chased labor savings and pushed the work of scanning and bagging onto customers. Shoppers tolerated it, barely, until the machines became associated with long waits, error screens, and the uncomfortable feeling of being treated like a potential thief by a weight sensor. Meanwhile, actual thieves discovered the easiest shoplifting environment in retail history.
Walmart's broader modernization push, including its move to replace paper price tags with digital displays across all U.S. stores, shows the company is not retreating from technology. It is retreating from a specific technology that failed.
The Walmart spokesperson's careful language, citing "feedback from associates and customers, local shopping patterns, and the needs of the business in each community", avoids the word "theft." But the analysts quoted in the same reporting say it plainly. Gildenberg said Walmart pulls self-checkout from "their highest theft stores." Schulz pointed to the opportunity self-checkout creates for people to "help themselves." Saunders said manned checkouts "save retailers money" by cutting theft losses.
Meanwhile, Costco has been testing new scanning technology as it reconsiders how much responsibility to hand customers at the register.
The cost of widespread retail theft does not land on corporate balance sheets alone. It lands on honest customers who pay higher prices to cover shrinkage. It lands on store employees who face confrontations with shoplifters in understaffed environments. It lands on neighborhoods that lose stores entirely when theft makes a location unprofitable.
Giant Food's Kress made that point as directly as any executive has: he does not want to close stores, but he has to run them safely and profitably. When a grocery chain president says theft has risen tenfold, the people who suffer most are the law-abiding shoppers in those communities, not the corporate office.
Self-checkout was sold as progress. It turned out to be an invitation, one that cost retailers billions, cost customers their patience, and cost communities the staffed, supervised stores they deserved all along.
The market figured it out. Whether the politicians now racing to pass self-checkout regulations will add anything useful, or just add compliance costs to a correction already in motion, remains the open question.
Sometimes the best thing government can do is get out of the way while the private sector cleans up its own mess. This looks like one of those times.