The pullback is broader than any one retailer's story
Walmart, Dollar General, Costco and Five Below have each scaled back unsupervised self-checkout since 2024, and the retreat is still running through 2026. That is four different retail formats, four different customer bases, and four different official explanations. Taken together, they describe the same underlying trade that self-checkout made and did not disclose: it moved labor cost off the retailer's books and moved loss-prevention risk onto nobody in particular.
Dollar General has been the most direct about it. CEO Todd Vasos told investors that "shrink continues to be the most significant headwind in our business," and the company has removed or limited self-checkout across roughly 12,000 stores since the initiative began, converting about 9,000 registers to assisted checkout, cutting self-checkout entirely at 300 of its highest-shrink locations, and capping it at five items or fewer elsewhere. Vasos has credited the company's own transaction-pattern analysis for identifying where the losses were concentrated.
Five Below made a similar call after what it described as higher-than-expected shrink, moving toward a target of 100 percent associate-assisted transactions in its highest-risk stores and adding receipt checks and store payroll to back it up. That is a company choosing to spend more on labor, the exact cost self-checkout was installed to avoid, because the alternative was costing more.
Walmart's version is more careful, and that is itself telling
Walmart has taken a different tone. The company announced on April 16, 2026 that it would remodel more than 650 stores nationwide, and self-checkout has already been removed at locations including its South Philadelphia Supercenter, with service reverting to staffed registers. Walmart's official statement attributes the changes to "feedback from associates and customers, local shopping patterns, and the needs of the business in each community," with the goal of enabling "more personalized customer service."
Notice what that statement does not say. Unlike Dollar General and Five Below, Walmart has not put a shrink number or a loss-prevention rationale on the record for the removals. It is possible the calculus differs by store format and volume. It is also possible a company as large and as publicly scrutinized as Walmart has more reason to frame a checkout change as a service upgrade than as an admission that a self-service model failed. Both things can be true, and the public record does not let a reader settle which one dominates.
What is consistent across Walmart's own disclosures is that it is not abandoning checkout automation, only the unsupervised version. The retailer is expanding an AI-based scanning tool, built with computer-vision technology, that recognizes items and flags mismatches at checkout, a supervision layer self-checkout never had.
Costco's fix is aimed at a different leak in the same system
Costco's problem was not shrink alone. In 2026 the warehouse chain began asking self-checkout customers to show a membership card with a photo, closing off a specific workaround where a shared or borrowed card let a non-member scan through unsupervised. Costco has also been rolling out scan-and-go, where members ring up items through the app while shopping and a staffer verifies the digital receipt on the way out, a model that keeps the self-service convenience but reinserts a human checkpoint at the exit.
The pattern is not "less automation." It is "no more automation without a checkpoint"
None of these four retailers is walking back technology at the register. Every one of them is adding a verification layer, whether that is a cashier, an AI vision system, a receipt check or a photo match, at the exact point where the unsupervised model removed one. Self-checkout's actual pitch was never really "customers prefer to scan their own groceries." It was labor arbitrage: fewer paid staff per lane. What none of these four companies budgeted accurately for was the size of the bill that arrangement generates elsewhere, whether that shows up on an income statement as shrink or in a police blotter as theft calls.
The interesting question for the rest of 2026 is not whether more retailers follow. It is whether any of them can build a supervision layer, human or algorithmic, cheap enough that self-checkout's original economics still work once it is added back in. If Walmart's AI scanning tool holds down shrink at a lower cost than staffing a cashier lane, that is the version of self-checkout that survives. If it does not, the technology that defined a decade of retail checkout design will keep shrinking toward the specialty formats, small baskets and low-shrink stores where the original bet still pencils out.
Sources
- Retail Dive, "Walmart removes self-checkout from some stores" - https://www.retaildive.com/news/walmart-removes-self-checkout-stores-experience/714306/
- Retail Dive, "Dollar General to eliminate 'vast majority' of self-checkout" - https://www.retaildive.com/news/dollar-general-eliminate-self-checkout-shrink/717520/
- CX Dive, "Dollar General to eliminate 'vast majority' of self-checkout, reduce new store openings" - https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/dollar-general-eliminate-self-checkout-shrink/717718/
- Retail Dive, "Five Below scales back self-checkout amid shrink" - https://www.retaildive.com/news/five-below-scales-back-self-checkout-shrink/710964/
- Fox Business, "Five Below fights back on theft by reducing self-checkout" - https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/five-below-fights-back-on-theft-reducing-self-checkout
- Kiosk Marketplace, "Costco shifting from self-checkout to scan-and-go, shoppers report" - https://www.kioskmarketplace.com/news/costco-shifting-from-self-checkout-to-scan-and-go-shoppers-report/
- Kiosk Industry, "Walmart Self Checkout 2025-2026, AI kiosks and Missed Scan Detection" - https://kioskindustry.org/walmart-self-checkout-2025/
- NewsNation, "Walmart phasing out self-checkout at some locations, starting in Philly" - https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/walmart-ends-self-checkout/