Has Costco Finally Cracked Its Checkout Line Problem?

Self-checkout promised retailers faster lines, lower labor costs, and happier customers. At Costco, it fell short on all three. Moving members through a register when a single cart holds a flat-screen television, three flats of sparkling water, and a 72-pound wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano demands a different kind of solution than a kiosk. The system Costco is piloting now is a bet that, with the right technology, they can speed up bulk buying with even faster checkout. 

The Self-Checkout Experiment

In 2013 Costco first rolled out self-checkout. They aimed to address congested weekend lines and to keep members with a few items from getting stuck behind loaded flatbed carts. Self-checkout was working at grocery chains and drugstores across the country, and Costco saw customers' expectations (and patience thresholds) shifting.

Then-CEO Craig Jelinek pulled the machines the same year and said, “They are great for low-volume warehouses, but we don't want to be in the low-volume warehouse business.” Sam's Club took a different path entirely, launching its Scan and Go app in 2016 so members could scan as they shopped and pay before ever reaching a register.

Costco eventually returned to self-checkout in 2019. The technology had improved, its lines had gotten longer, and the problems followed anyway. Theft got worse, and non-members were using borrowed cards at the kiosks. Costco's own management admitted shrink had grown "in part we believe due to the rollout of self-checkout.”

Every stumble made the next attempt a harder sell to members who had already lost patience. 

By 2025, the American Customer Satisfaction Index found that Costco had taken one of the largest satisfaction hits among major grocers, dropping 5% and landing behind Sam's Club for the first time, with checkout speed ranking among the worst-performing benchmarks in the entire sector.

A New Approach, Entry to Exit

Costco's latest attempt comes amid declining satisfaction scores and Sam's Club's widening lead in the race for a better checkout experience. What's different about this program is that it addresses every stage of a customer's in-store experience.

The overhaul starts at the door. Costco has been rolling out membership card scanners at store entrances to verify members before they reach the floor, closing a loophole that card sharing at self-checkout had left wide open.

From there, employees move through the line and pre-scan cart contents while members wait, so by the time someone reaches the register, the work is already done. Current CEO Ron Vachris described it on the fourth-quarter earnings call as “speeding up the checkout process by allowing our employees to scan small and medium-sized transactions while the member is still in line. So upon reaching the cashier, nothing has to be removed from the cart, and only payment is needed.” The automated pay stations handle payment in about eight seconds.

 Then there is the exit, where time can seem to stand still. Costco is testing a digital option in some locations that generates a QR code after payment, letting members scan out through a dedicated lane instead of waiting for a manual receipt check. For a company promising eight-second transactions, the exit line, where two employees manually count every item in every cart, has long been an awkward footnote. The QR code pilot is Costco's acknowledgement that the checkout experience extends past the register.

So Far, So Uneven

The latest rollout has not been without bumps. When the system went live in some warehouses over Easter weekend, employees took to Reddit to share their frustrations.

They didn’t hold back either. “We implemented it at 2pm on good friday and its been such a f--king disaster,” one wrote on r/CostcoEmployee. “Our GM is now bragging about how much better our prescan numbers [are] but now lines are even worse and both members and employees are pissed.”

Accuracy has been its own problem. Missed items and double charges have surfaced repeatedly, and when they do, fixing them requires a manager and eats up the time the system was supposed to save. As one Costco member observed after watching it play out over several months, “The shoppers didn't know before paying because there is no shopper screen and cashier couldn't help. So now they have to engage a manager and spend their time while Costco fixes their error.”

The complaints share a common thread. Pre-scanning works when there are enough employees to staff it, when traffic is high enough to justify it, and when members understand which lane they are supposed to be in. One employee captured the tension simply: “Prescanning should only be used in times of heavy store traffic.” Another pointed out that converting kiosks to pre-scan only lanes while leaving a single employee to do the scanning just pushed the bottleneck earlier in the line rather than eliminating it.

The stores where the prescanning is having the most success tend to be ones in areas with above-average foot traffic. “Here in NYC pre scan is the absolute best,” one employee wrote on r/CostcoEmployee. “The long lines move so much quicker.”

One member on r/Seattle cut through the eight-second promise directly: ”So eight seconds is bs. Thats the time to pay only. But to get there, you are still in a line. Still waiting for a scanner person to show up. Waiting for those ahead of you. Waiting in that awful line to check receipts.”

The Sam's Club comparison keeps surfacing in the same threads. “Truly, this is where Sam's Club shines," one member wrote. "Costco's customers have been BEGGING for a similar scan-and-go system for ages."

The Tech of It All

Costco's automated pay stations are the kind of connected endpoints that hold the whole system together. When one goes offline, or a pre-scan fails to sync with the register, or an accuracy error slips through undetected, someone needs to know immediately and fix it without sending a technician to every affected warehouse. At one location, that is a manageable problem. Across 640 warehouses on a busy Saturday, it’s a taller operational order.

The eight-second transaction is what members see. Behind it is a layer of device monitoring, remote management, and real-time visibility that most people never think about. That infrastructure is what separates a checkout system that delivers on its promise from one that looks good on an earnings call.

Costco has spent over a decade trying to get checkout right. The technology has improved each time. Whether the systems behind it can keep pace with the ambition is the question the next few years will answer.