At minimum, they'd need more staff to pick the items from the warehouse shelves. (And then where would they store that order, while they wait for the member to come pick it up?) Think about it: If one staff member takes 15 minutes to assemble this or that order, (Is it only food items? What about dry goods and cleaning supplies?), then it takes another 15 minutes to deliver it to the customer at the curb, it's two customers per hour. At the end of an eight hour shift, that person has served 16 members. Costco serves thousands of people every day. If the same person was manning a register in the store, they could serves dozens of members per hour. It's logistics like that that make Costco's business model impractical for curbside service.
The self-check registers I've seen where the customer has to find barcodes and scan their own items are abysmally slow, because the person doing the scanning has no idea what they're doing, and has no reason to be in a hurry. The most efficient self-check registers I've seen are those that are staffed by Costco employees with scanning guns. They can get through many orders an hour that way, get the lines down. The St.George Costco where we shop does it that way - they have six or eight self-check registers manned by Costco staffers. The lines move very quickly. They also have another six or eight full-service register lines open, and those tend to attract the customer with larger orders. It's a very well-run warehouse. I just wish it was a larger building, with more sku's.
Dave
