Heading up to the checkouts themselves, we can really see just how elaborate this setup was, with the checkout numbers going all the way to 35. Ignoring self checkouts, this has to be the most I've personally seen in a store, at least recently! Of course, at this point, they only had one open, and I don't even think it was staffed full time, instead just having a worker that would come up to the front whenever someone actually wanted to check out (the type of setup you might expect in a convenience store or Rite Aid, and a far cry from what this store clearly once had!). Each of the register lights was accompanied with a red/green light system like what self checkouts once had (though I haven't seen this style of light at self checkouts for a while now), which must have been used to indicate to shoppers which register to go to back when they would have had many open at the same time.
I think the most registers I've seen at a store would either be Fry's or the West Beltway Auchan, the original Houston Auchan, which must have had at least 50 registers in a traditional format. That does not even count the registers they would have had in electronics or other specialized departments. Not only did they have that many registers, but often a good number of those were open as the store usually did pretty decent business. You can see the long line of registers, most of which are open, in this video: https://youtu.be/cl-s-tJn0Is
ReplyDeleteThose register lights were for the register queue system. In Fry's busier days, they would often have an employee keeping an eye on which registers were opening up and they'd help direct customers to the right checkout. In later days a few years ago, they put a computer monitor up that would tell customers which register to go to. In the last few months, they only had one register open anyway so that made things easy!
Wow, that's a lot of checkouts! I know some Walmart Supercenters and Super Targets had an insane number of registers too, but we don't have Super Targets around here and Walmart has been swapping normal registers out for self checkouts, so I doubt anything around here has anywhere near that number of checkouts anymore! Though now that I say that, I wonder if any Costcos have a huge number of checkouts like that -- thing is, they don't number them, and I've never counted.
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