Grocery chain Waitrose has announced its intentions to install self-checkout services in all of its stores across the country.

The brand has announced that the self-checkouts will be introduced in every Waitrose store within the next two years, after a successful trial run of 175 self-checkout machines  in 37 of its branches.

The self-checkouts have proven to be particularly successful in the Canary Wharf branch, whereby the self-checkout machines account for 20 per cent of transactions and 13 per cent of total branch sales.

Graham Heald, director of retail services at Waitrose, told the Wincor Nixdorf Executive Briefing in New York: “Particularly at lunch time [in Canary Wharf], we get a huge influx that we could not accommodate with traditional checkout lanes. Self-checkouts work incredibly well. ”

Heald added that by combining self-checkouts with the store’s already established Quick Check /Quick Pay technology, whereby customers can scan their own products as they shop to monitor their spend, Waitrose could remove up to £7million in costs, as well as providing a rapid return-on-investment for installing both Quick Check/Quick Pay and self-checkouts in all of its stores.

He said: “The model only works for us when you bring the two together, so by the end of 2013 a branch without self-checkout and Quick Check will be quite rare.”