AI cashiers conspire to drive down retail worker numbers

A shopper picks up items and walks out without paying at the checkout at Emart24 Smart Coex branch in southern Seoul. [YONHAP]

AI-inspired job losses are hitting Korea’s retail and sales sectors hard as more kiosks and automated cashiers replace human staff.

The number of people working as cashiers and other sales staff reduced by around 453,000 to hit 2.6 million last year compared to 2013, according to Statistics Korea. The figures cover cashiers at supermarket chains and smaller shops and salespeople for financial products, cosmetics and cars.

Compared to the previous year, 2022, the number of retail workers shrank by 2.2 percent or 60,000 people as the figure has been on the decline since 2014.

With people’s affinity to purchase goods online, more retailers are introducing automated self-checkout systems to reduce costs.

The shift accelerated as the Covid-19-driven fear of contagion prompted more shoppers to head for the self-checkout lines or even forgo brick-and-mortar markets altogether, which led to the large-scale closures of retail shops.

For instance, the head counts sharply dropped by 4.4 percent or 133,000 people between 2019 and 2020, the year Covid-19 broke out. Losses came to 131,000 between 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic continued to spread around the globe.

By retail chain, E-mart saw its workforce fall from 25,000 in June 2019, the pre-pandemic period, to 23,000 in the same month of last year. The head counts at Homeplus went from 23,000 to 20,000 during the same period while those at Lotte Mart decreased from 13,000 to 10,900.

Cosmetics shops are also closing doors. The number of Innisfree stores, a beauty brand owned by Amorepacific, plunged from 657 in 2020 to 434 in 2022, while Missha closed 111 stores to leave only 296 stores remaining, during the same period.

Conversely, there is rising adoption of self-checkout kiosks. Lotte Mart has installed around 1,000 units in 110 branches and Emart at 149 outlets or 96 percent of the entire branch. Homeplus operates 500 machines at 90 branches.

Although human cashiers work alongside the kiosks at large supermarket chains, convenience stores are experimenting with a more drastic format of the entirely unmanned outlet. GS25 operated 82 unmanned stores last year, up 1,071 percent from 2019’s 7.

GS25 and Emart24 also introduced grab-and-go stores where consumers grab items and exit with an automatic payment made through the authenticated card.

Experts project that the job losses will continue to accelerate, calling on the government to take measures to minimize the impact on the workforce.

“It is somewhat inevitable to see the shrinking number of low-skilled jobs, affected by the advancement of automation and artificial intelligence,” said Cho Hyuk-jin, a researcher at Korea Labor Institute.

“On one side, there are a bunch of people being laid off while on the other, severe labor shortage exists,” he said, “We need a mechanism to match workers properly and a job training system to better close the mismatch trend.”

BY PARK EUN-JEE, YONHAP [park.eunjee@joongang.co.kr]