5 Hidden Costs of Retail Checkout Friction (And How to Eliminate Them)

Retail checkout friction is one of the most costly and overlooked challenges in retail. In fact, it is often invisible until it becomes expensive. It creeps in quietly through frozen lanes, failed scans, stockouts, and self-checkout meltdowns. What appears to be a minor glitch is often an operational leak, draining revenue, shrinking margins, and frustrating your frontline one scan at a time.

Moreover, friction is not just technical. It’s emotional.

It wears down associates. It tests customer patience. According to Retail Dive 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts if the checkout process is too complicated, and 55% never return to the retailer’s site .

Because of this retail leaders are asking:

“Where, exactly, is friction costing us the most and how do we eliminate it?”

At IW Technologies and Datalogic, we’ve spent nearly 50 years inside the lanes, stockrooms, and checkout flows of retail’s most demanding environments. During this time, we have seen one truth emerge:

Frictionless isn’t the future. It’s the new retail standard.

However, you might not see them, but the Friction Gremlins are very real.

They lurk in aging POS systems, outdated scanners, and disconnected data silos sabotaging your efficiency, stealing your margins, and frustrating your customers without ever showing up on a KPI dashboard.

Meet the Friction Gremlins Sabotaging Checkout:

• Laggy Larry stalls your lanes when you can least afford it especially during peak.
• StuckScan turns barcodes into bottlenecks, forcing manual entry and delays.
• Shrinkasaurus thrives in self-checkout gaps, quietly feeding on unscanned items.
• OverstockOgre hides behind broken inventory sync, driving both stockouts and waste.
• SkipJack loves nothing more than a chaotic self-checkout experience that leaves both customers and associates guessing.

For years, they’ve been quietly embedded into retail workflows for years. But with the right tech and the right approach, they’re not just manageable. They’re evictable.

In this post, we’ll walk through five hidden costs of retail checkout friction, what’s really driving them, and how top-performing retailers are using smarter hardware and operational consulting to eliminate them and the gremlins behind them for good.

1. Lost Labor Hours from Manual Barcode Entry and Scanning Delays Caused by Retail Checkout Friction

What’s happening:

At first glance, what looks like a few seconds at the register is often a systemic drag caused by retail checkout friction and scanning inefficiencies. As a result, evet time, an associate manually keys in a barcode, rescans a damaged label, or navigates around a slow device, time is lost not in isolation, but at scale.

In high-volume environments, these micro-delays compound quickly. According to IHL Group’s 2023 research, manual barcode entry can reduce lane efficiency by up to 9%. In grocery and general merchandise, where margins are already thin, that delta translates into hundreds of labor hours lost per store, per year.

Therefore, it’s not just about speed. It’s about transactional fluidity, labor optimization, and customer flow continuity the operational KPIs that directly affect store performance.

The Gremlin behind it: StuckScan – a manifestation of hardware lag, inconsistent read rates, and legacy infrastructure friction that too often flies under the radar.

What forward-thinking retailers are doing:

Rather than seeing scanner performance as just a tech upgrade, they’re treating it as a strategic lever for throughput, payroll efficiency, and associate enablement. They’re evaluating first-pass scan rates, ergonomic effectiveness, and scanner-POS interoperability especially during peak cycles.

As a result, modernizing scanning hardware isn’t just about speed. It’s about throughput, payroll efficiency, and enhanced capabilityas we explored in How Mobile POS Enhances (Not Replaces) Your Fixed POS System.

In addition, the leaders aren’t just replacing devices. They’re conducting lane-level friction audits, piloting against real-world use cases, and aligning hardware capabilities with workforce planning models.

Because in today’s labor environment, efficiency isn’t a feature. It’s a cost-avoidance strategy.

2. Shrink from Self-Checkout Errors and Loss Events

What’s happening:
Today, shrink is no longer a static metric tied to theft alone. Instead, it’s a dynamic risk category shaped by how well your systems, processes, and people perform at the point of sale.

In 2022, retail shrink surged to $112.1 billion, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). A growing portion of that loss now stems from systemic inefficiencies at self-checkout, where friction and inconsistency introduce silent vulnerabilities: mismatched weights, mis-scanned items, barcode swapping, and skipped inputs.

Ultimately, these aren’t isolated events. They’re the byproducts of unharmonized front-end infrastructure and growing transaction complexity.

The Gremlin behind it: Shrinkasaurus – the embodiment of every overlooked anomaly, mismatch, and exception that slips through gaps in your process.

What retail leaders are rethinking:

Rather than relying on traditional loss prevention playbooks, they’re shifting toward integrated checkout assurance strategies. These strategies align scanning logic, process design, and associate empowerment to proactively flag risk before it becomes loss.

Importantly, this isn’t about adding friction to catch fraud. It’s about designing friction out, so systems flow smoothly but intelligently.

For example, leading operators are implementing checkout validation frameworks that tie into exception reporting, escalation triggers, and intervention thresholds that are informed by store-level shrink data not generic thresholds.

As a result, the most progressive teams don’t see self-checkout as a standalone risk. They view it as a dynamic cost control point that, when properly configured, becomes a margin protector.

Because, ultimately, the true cost of shrink isn’t just the item that walks out. It’s the unseen erosion of trust, margin, and consistency across your network.

3. Customer Abandonment Driven by Retail Checkout Friction

What’s happening:

In modern retail, retail checkout friction directly impacts performance and is no longer just a throughput metric. It’s a critical inflection point in the customer journey. When checkout performance breaks down, brand trust often breaks down with it.

This isn’t only about queue lengths. Rather, it’s about perceived effort, transactional rhythm, and how confidently your infrastructure can handle peak load without customer-facing lag.

The Gremlin behind it: Laggy Larry – The friction that emerges when lane speed doesn’t match customer expectation, and operational latency becomes a reputational liability.

How retail leaders are responding:

Therefore, they’re shifting the lens from simply counting transactions per hour to designing for experience velocity. They are prioritizing first-pass scan success, checkout fluidity, and operational responsiveness across devices and formats.

Instead of  reacting to checkout bottlenecks, top-performing retailers are embedding friction audits into their POS lifecycle identifying micro-lags, device inconsistencies, and underperforming touchpoints across formats (front-end, self-checkout, curbside) and translating that into actionable uptime targets.

What’s emerging is a new front-end performance standard: one that blends technological reliability, ergonomics, and real-time diagnostics to create lanes that don’t just move faster but move smarter.

Because in a high-choice retail economy, speed isn’t a luxury. It’s a conversion enabler.

4. Inventory Blind Spots Leading to Stockouts and Overstock

What’s happening:
In retail, inventory visibility isn’t just a supply chain function. It’s also a frontline checkout issue. When POS systems operate independently from real-time stock data, the store floor becomes disconnected from the truth. And in retail, data latency is expensive.

For example, stockouts alone cost the global retail industry over $1 trillion annually. However, the financial loss doesn’t stop there. Overstock leads to shelf bloat, markdowns, and tied-up working capital. In both cases, inventory imprecision erodes margin and weakens replenishment strategies.

The root cause? In many cases, its siloed systems, inconsistent device usage, and a lack of live, two-way sync between store-level execution and enterprise planning.

The Gremlin behind it: OverstockOgre – thriving in environments where disjointed hardware, lagging inventory updates, and blind spot reporting allow inefficiency to grow unchecked.

What progressive retailers are doing:

Consequently, they’re treating inventory fidelity as a real-time performance metric, not a periodic reporting task. This means equipping teams, especially store-level associates with tools that support on-demand visibility, accurate stock reads, and mobile-driven replenishment workflows.

The shift, therefore, is from reactive counts to proactive, continuous inventory intelligence using live data to reduce replenishment lag, increase planogram compliance, and eliminate phantom stock.

But the real unlock comes when inventory transparency is embedded directly into the checkout and receiving processes…closing the loop between what’s scanned, what’s sold, and what’s expected next.

Because whether you’re dealing with overstock or out-of-stock, the cost is the same: a lost sale you never saw coming.

5. Staff Frustration and Training Drag

What’s happening:
In many cases, friction doesn’t just frustrate customers. It also wears down your frontline.

When checkout systems are disjointed, scan feedback is inconsistent, and interfaces are unintuitive, operational drag quickly builds at the associate level. In fast-paced retail environments, this translates to longer onboarding cycles, higher cognitive load, and increased turnover risk — especially among part-time or seasonal staff.

Every mis-scan, every unresponsive terminal, every time an employee has to guess what’s gone wrong, it all adds up. Not just in seconds lost, but in morale depleted and confidence eroded.

The Gremlin behind it: SkipJack – thriving in environments where system complexity and user ambiguity undermine productivity.

What retail leaders are rethinking:
They’re no longer viewing checkout tech as a one-time deployment. They’re evaluating it as a core component of workforce enablement. The shift is toward designing systems that reduce friction not just for customers, but for associates as well.

This includes:

• User-centric UX design that reduces training overhead
• Consistent scan logic and clear feedback loops that build trust in the tools
• Workflow-tuned configurations that reflect how the store actually operates across express lanes, full-service checkouts, and backroom receiving alike

Progressive retailers are also building training resilience into their hardware strategy recognizing that the most effective solutions are those that require less time to learn and fewer steps to recover when things go wrong.

Above all, an empowered associate doesn’t just move the line faster.
They become a brand advocate, a problem-solver, and a differentiator in a highly commoditized retail landscape.

Real-World Retailers Are Already Fighting Retail Checkout Friction (and Winning)

Retailers across grocery and general merchandise are proving that retail checkout friction isn’t inevitable. It’s fixable. And the results speak for themselves.

At El Mandado Supermarket, a North Carolina-based grocer operating in a high-volume, culturally diverse market, friction showed up in two places: inconsistent barcode entry at checkout and inefficient inventory management. The result? Slow throughput, inventory discrepancies, and operational drag.

By modernizing its tech stack including rugged mobile devices and integrated scanning systems—El Mandado saw measurable results:

• Inventory updates are now performed directly in-aisle by associates using mobile scanners
• Checkout speed improved with seamless barcode scanning no more reorienting or rescanning
• Employees now rely less on manual data entry, improving accuracy across the board

“Inventory data is now much easier to update using handheld scanners that can be used in the aisles.”
– Karla Brantner, VP, El Mandado Supermarket

In Southern Italy, Decò Supermarkets (part of the Multicedi Group) tackled friction from a customer experience lens targeting queue times, staff workload, and transaction speed. Their friction strategy involved deploying a multi-format checkout infrastructure across their Benevento flagship: self-scan, self-checkout, and traditional lanes all powered by synchronized scanning and mobility tools.

The impact was immediate:

• Reduced wait times and line abandonment
• Redistributed labor for higher-value tasks across the store
• Shoppers empowered to scan, pack, and pay with full autonomy

“With Datalogic, we relied on a single partner to solve all our needs… the solution offers consumers an innovative and fast shopping experience that respects their habits and needs.”
– Antonio Messina, Director, Medi Store Group (Decò)

See What Friction Is Costing You…And How Much You Could Save

Retailers like El Mandado and Decò aren’t just solving for speed. They’re quantifying results.
Want to benchmark your own checkout efficiency?

At IW Technologies and Datalogic, we work with retailers to evaluate front-end performance, map friction points, and identify the gaps holding back throughput, margin, and NPS.

Start with a Checkout Friction Audit

We offer a quick discovery process designed to:

• Benchmark your current checkout performance
• Identify friction hotspots across scan speed, shrink, and staff workflows
• Model ROI and payback for targeted modernization

No pitch. No generic playbook. Just actionable insight store by store. Schedule Your Checkout Friction Audit

By IW Technologies & Datalogic – Trusted Retail Technology Partners.iw