Are billing counters obsolete?

Lenskart stores have no POS machines. I didn't realise this though I have visited the stores often, until I heard Amit Chaudhary, Cofounder of Lenskart.com discuss this conscious store design where every human is now a biller. The same tech at Lenskart powers both online and offline. Customers and customer service agents, once a purchase is finalised, can place orders using their phone or a tablet at the store.

A few months ago, we shopped at AZORTE, Reliance Retail's new stores targeted at Millennials and Genz that has Self-Checkout kiosks to reduces queue times. Sure the tech could have been more seamless, but that's a matter of time.

Walmart is credited with first making barcode scanners, now ubiquitous in offline retail, popular while cutting checkout times by ~40%, improving stock accuracy by 85%, and 3x faster replenishment. Online in-store checkouts make this even more efficient, coming in where the more expensive cashier-less stores failed to take off in the past few years.

With widespread adoption of QR codes, increasing manpower costs and customers having increasingly lower tolerance for long queues, I imagine POS-less billing will increasingly become more popular and ubiquitous very soon. Just makes so much sense