Dear Sir,
I’d like to make my disappointment and disgust known about the new self service tills installed in Tesco on our town centre. Half the tills where people WORKED have gone and replaced with machines.
A multi billion pound empire like Tesco has no excuse for not helping ease this area’s crippling unemployment. I’m sure plenty of people on the town are struggling for income and would appreciate a job in a successful supermarket.
I can understand a smaller company doing this if they are struggling to pay staff but Tesco has no excuse.  It all boils down to this society’s ‘I want it and want it NOW’ culture.
If people want to support peoples’ jobs then they should have a little patience and stand in a queue. How many people these machines replaced and how many remaining staff work part time or who are on the Job Centre’s so called ‘Work Programme’ hoping to be kept on?  ‘Kept on’ until another machine replaces them? I for one will be queing to be served by an employee from now on.
Claire Glendenning

“No Job Losses”  says Tesco Manager

We have been live with our new Scan as You Shop system since Wednesday and the new Self Serve tills have been open a full week. The new Self Service tills have been superbly received in the main with positive comments from customers outweighing any negative ones. We have had Self Service checkouts instore for 10 years and they have grown in popularity. They were slow and needed replacement.The six were replaced with ten and a much improved queing sytem. 41% of transactions used them last week which is only slightly up from the old style ones, however it was a much quicker and slicker system for our customers.
As far as the Scan and You Shop is concerned we signed up over 1500 customers to use this service between Wednesday and Sunday and in fact many of these customers who shop regulary have been back and used it again. The feedback has been superb and very positive from all customers. I would re-iterate that no one has to use this service as there will always be a mainbank checkout open unless it is overnight where we generally would use Self Service (unless someone specifically requests a manned till to be opened).
As far as Staffing is concerned no one has lost their job and there is no plan to do so in relation to these new services.We removed six checkouts to make space for the two new services. Since Tesco and JS in Bishop Auckland and Aldi opened we have never used the full bank of tills apart from seasonal busy periods.
Staff have been re-deployed elsewhere, but I understand how that assumption of job losses was made.
Martin Butcher, Manager