The Self-Checkout Gripe We Have With Publix

If there is one thing to know about Southerners, it's that they love a trip to Publix. This grocery store has reached a level of critical acclaim and is well-known for many of its products, including its potato wedges, Supreme cakes, and its fresh and frozen meat section. While there is a lot to applaud this grocer for, there are also some things that are mildly annoying about shopping at it, namely its checkout lanes. While it's normal for grocery stores to offer the option for self-checkout lanes and to close those lanes down if there isn't enough staff to monitor them or because of persistent theft issues, many folks have taken to social media to share that Publix's lack of self-checkout lanes is quite annoying.

Folks have griped on Reddit that their locations do not offer self-checkout options (though many report that their locations haven't undergone any recent remodels). Others have shared frustration with Publix's existing self-checkout system, which they claim only offers a small bagging area, and when they move their full bags off the scale, it flags the employee — effectively wasting both the customer's and the employee's time. However, that has not stopped folks from pointing out that self-checkout lanes are not made for cartfuls of items, pointing out that large transactions should be handled in normal checkout lanes rather than self-checkout.

Regardless of where you personally stand on the self-checkout lane debacle, you can't help but admit that being able to scan a handful of items quickly and get out of the store by the time your fellow customers are stepping up to the belt in the normal checkout lane is valuable. Self-checkout is a hit among folks who don't want to interact with other people while they're grocery shopping (if you have a limited social battery, you get it).

However, from a company angle, self-checkout lanes aren't all they're cracked up to be. A lack of interaction with staff has been shown to decrease customer loyalty, according to research published in 2024 in the Journal of Business Research, and 2025 LendingTree data found that 27% of the population surveyed had purposefully taken an item from self-checkout without self-scanning, with many attributing their reasoning for doing so to the rising cost of groceries — amounting to big losses for grocery chains.

Publix isn't the only one rethinking its self-checkout strategy. Aldi is another grocery store that has reportedly removed self-checkout lanes, and some stores, like Trader Joe's, never installed them in the first place.