One interesting thing about Home Depot is their embrace of self-service check-out technology. The percentage of people using self-checkout at Home Depot was listed at 80% according to IHL Consulting Group. Home Depot's biggest competitor Lowe's self-service check-out was listed at 60%. If you think of the home improvement demographics, you would think that a store like CompUSA or BestBuy would be more ideal to get tech-savvy customers to use a new technology. However, it comes down to the simply fact that Home Depot invested the resources, partners, and most importantly business processes to do it right.

It takes an industry leader like Home Depot to lead the way before a new concept like self-service takes off. This will be a trend that will continue to pick up momentum. Self-service machines do not need breaks, health benefits, or training. As well, the service level is predictable from these machines. That being said, it would be wrong to eliminate the human touch from stores completely. However, these folks should be focused on customer satisfaction, assistance and market research. The low value aspect of scanning bar-codes and swiping credit cards is a good target for automation.

According to research firm IHL Consulting Group, self service is expected to be worth $1.2 trillion by 2009.