If that sounds like a small operational tweak, you need to look closer. It’s an admission. Between 2012 and 2015, Kmart moved its checkouts into the middle of stores and customers hated it (I could be projecting but I am surely not the only one). More than a decade later, they’re reversing the decision. That’s not a relay or a redesign. That’s a correction.

And it’s the second time in twenty years retail has had to walk back a “smarter” checkout experience.

Why This Feels Eerily Familiar

Self-checkout didn’t fail because the technology was bad, mind you, it certainly didn’t help. It failed because it solved a retailer problem (labour cost) while creating a customer problem (friction, suspicion, isolation). Multiply that by every store, every week, for two decades, and you get a generation of shoppers who associate “efficiency” with feeling like a suspect on their way out the door. Especially when certain retailers started not even being discreet that you were being watched, propping your less than glamorous looking if not just outright disheveled self onto the screen or my latest favourite, the camera monitors your basket and your movements and surmises particular human movements must align to that of a thief causing the whole thing to cause for pause whilst an employee encroaches what non-existent personal space those machines provide to monitor the recording in order to garner your guilt. I mean, tell me you don’t trust customers without telling me you don’t trust customers and if you really don’t trust them that much then give me a human to work with at the register and stop this whole ‘it’s for your benefit’ facade.

Kmart’s checkout move is the next chapter of the same story. They tried moving registers to the centre to drive “cross-shop” by getting people walking past more departments before they pay. Smart on paper. In practice, it broke something more important: the psychological bookend of a shopping trip. A welcome at the start, a clean exit at the end. Without that, the whole experience feels unresolved, like a conversation that ends mid-sentence.

Kmart’s own data backs this up. The new format isn’t just “nicer”, it’s delivering improved space allocation, better visual merchandising, and an enhanced beauty experience, and driving higher sales through increased cross-shop between departments, with shoppers buying more items per basket. Translation: when you fix the feeling of the experience, the commercial metrics follow. They didn’t sacrifice performance to fix the psychology. Fixing the psychology was the performance lever. Something often lost or ignored in modern CX projects.

Why This Could Be One of the Biggest Shifts We’ve Seen Since Self-Checkout

For twenty years, retail design has been optimised for cost-per-transaction. This is the first large-scale, data-backed signal that the pendulum is swinging back toward cost-per-experience and that the two aren’t the same thing. Kmart isn’t doing this out of nostalgia. I mean the evidence is showing that Gen Z are the biggest players here and they’d more than likely have no idea about the ‘good ol’ days’ of retail. They’re doing it because, as Kmart Group’s own Managing Director, Aleksandra Spaseska put it, “households are very much focused on cost of living” and shoppers have become more discerning and value-conscious, buying fewer items per trip. When customers are buying less, every interaction has to earn its place. There’s no longer room for friction that doesn’t pay its way.

That’s the bit every business, not just big retail needs to sit with. It has to be about the customer’s experience before it’s about the business’ spreadsheets.

Three Ways to Use This Shift to Review Your Own Customer Experience

1. Map the emotional bookends, not just the operational flow.

Most businesses map their customer journey as a sequence of tasks, their jobs to be done: browse, select, pay, leave. But customers experience it as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. If your “end” is abrupt, transactional, or makes someone feel watched (hello, self-checkout cameras), you’re leaving them on a sour note no matter how good the beginning or middle was. Walk your own first and last 60 seconds as a customer would. Where does the story resolve, and where does it just… stop?

2. Don’t let efficiency metrics quietly override experience metrics.

Self-checkout and mid-store registers were both justified by efficiency data, labour cost, throughput, footfall, heat maps. Both were reversed by experience data. If the only numbers on your dashboard are speed, cost, and conversion, you’re optimising half the equation. Add a simple measure of how people feel leaving an interaction with your business, even a one-question pulse check such as a satisfaction score or a customer effort score and track it alongside your operational KPIs. When the two diverge, believe the experience number first.

3. Treat your frontline teams as the human infrastructure, not a cost to automate away.

Every “efficiency” reversal in retail has shared a common thread: removing the human moved the cost from the balance sheet onto the customer’s nervous system. Before automating, isolating, or removing a human touch point, ask what psychological function that employee was quietly performing, welcome, reassurance, accountability, closure. If you can’t answer that, you’re not streamlining. You’re outsourcing stress to the customer and hoping they don’t react.

The Takeaway

As a business advisor and clinical psychotherapist, that’s the work I do: combining consumer psychology with practical business strategy to find exactly where your customer experience is quietly costing you, and what to do about it. If reading this made you mentally walk through your own front door and exit unsatisfied that’s usually where the real insight is. Let’s talk about what you’d find and how you can feel the Joy of CEHX in your organisation.

Aileen Day