checkout machine at Bin Dawood's Hypermarket. (SG photos by Mohannad Sharawi) HAVE you become weary of waiting for long periods of time in the cashier's queues at supermarkets? Now you don't have to wait such a long time after self-checkout machines introduced by the Bin Dawood Group for the first time in the Kingdom. At a special event held recently, a newly-implemented self checkout machine made by NCR Corporation (an American technology company specializing in products for retail and automated teller machines) has been announced to be used for the first time in the Kingdom. Ahmad Abdul Razzaq Bin Dawood, the chairman of the administration board at Bin Dawood Group told Saudi Gazette that the machine has six ways of interacting with customers including dealing with both paper money and coins in addition to a full interface panel in Arabic and English. The machine is very accurate at busting the fake money and banknotes. “Around five years of research and field surveys have been carried out by our retail and customer services department; we have reached out with this unique and modern service to reduce queues at cashier points,” he stated. “Questionnaires we sent out recently revealed that 70 percent of our customers are annoyed with and tired of waiting so long fto check out with their purchases. As a result, our team in the R&D department has decided to import this new technology – which is already in use in the West – into the Kingdom. In fact, our customers these days are more inclined to use modern technologies in different kinds of services including retail-customer transactions,” Bin Dawood noted. He added that the self-checkout machines will initially be operated in the new Bin Dawood Hypermarket located on Hera Street in Jeddah and then in all Bin Dawood outlets within three months. “Moreover, the self-checkout service will also be implemented in the Danube chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets. The first three months will be a soft launch of this service and as the demand of the service increases, we will implement more machines.” Bin Dawood said that the company has achieved a percentage of 60 percent of Saudization in the group. “We also are one of first supermarkets who employed female Saudi cashiers and now as you enter this new hypermarket, you can see five Saudi female cashiers on your right and five Saudi male cashiers on the left,” he said.
