Should you’re on the lookout for a quicker method to get out and in of your favorite discount food market, you could be out of luck.
On Monday, Trader Joe’s president Jon Basalone responded to rumors that the grocery chain could be adding self-checkout lanes on a Q&A episode of the corporate’s in-house podcast.
“I even have a bunch of rumors that I would love to prove true or false,” interviewer Matt Sloan tells Basalone. “Are we ready? True or false, coming soon, self-checkout.”
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The president had a really clear-cut — and heartwarming — response.
“That is as false as false may be because we imagine in people, and we’re not attempting to do away with our crew members for efficiency’s sake or whatever [the] reasons are people put self-checkout in,” he said bluntly.
Basalone joked that he could never implement the technology because he personally has had difficulty using it when attempting to get out of a store.
“I could not get the thing to scan … after which the person got here over and was trying to clarify to me,” he laughed. “I’m like, I do that for a living, and I am unable to get this thing to work.”
Though self-checkout aisles won’t be hitting the front of Trader Joe’s stores anytime soon, Basalone did speak hopefully concerning the way forward for the grocery chain.
“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing, but we will grow. And so the novelty comes from the brand new customers we will have the option to succeed in, the brand new products that we will see on our shelves, the brand new opportunities for the crew members who get promoted and get to run those stores into the longer term,” he explained. “It isn’t crazy recent ideas just like the robot within the aisle that answers questions and helps to scrub up spills. It’s simpler than that and really more exciting than that.”
The California-based grocer has been under scrutiny currently after several recalls have forced stores to drag popular items off of shelves, including rock contamination in several cookie flavors and multigrain crackers containing metal.
The chain operates roughly 560 locations in the US across 40 states.
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