Cashiers
Cashiers peaked in 2018 at 3.64 million; the 2025 count, 3.09 million, is the lowest this century. every figure cited
Drag the slider to travel 157 years of this work.
By February 1, 2026, all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in the United States have closed. Amazon shifts its grocery strategy to expanding Whole Foods Market locations and growing online grocery delivery. The announcement, made January 27, 2026, comes six months after Amazon had removed Just Walk Out technology from most of its full-size Fresh grocery stores (April 2024). The total closure covered 72 US locations. The "Just Walk Out" technology itself continues — Amazon is licensing it to third parties including sports stadium concessions. The cashierless retail format has not been abandoned; it has been repositioned from a standalone consumer retail format to an enterprise B2B technology product deployed in controlled environments.
The tools that defined the work
Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Open cash drawer + handwritten ledger (pre-register era)
Before James Ritty's invention, a store's cashier operated with a flat cash drawer, a ledger book, and their own arithmetic. Transactions were recorded by hand at the end of the day, or not at all. The post of "cashier" in this era was more like bookkeeper than register operator — it required literacy and numeracy, was associated with trust and some social standing, and was not yet the high-volume, low-skill work it would become after the mechanical register commoditized the function. Theft prevention relied entirely on supervision and character; no machine enforced the transaction record.
Ledger workPaper recordkeeping Mechanical cash register (Ritty 1879, NCR from 1884)
James Ritty patented the "Incorruptible Cashier" on November 4, 1879. John H. Patterson bought Ritty's patents in 1883 and renamed the company the National Cash Register Company in 1884; by the early 1900s NCR registers were in virtually every US retail and food-service establishment of any size. The register transformed the cashier's job in two ways: first, it mechanically enforced transaction recording, removing the embezzlement opportunity that had made the post precarious and the employer suspicious; second, it standardized the workflow into a repeatable machine-mediated sequence that could be performed by workers with very little training. NCR added the paper receipt and the cash drawer to the basic design, creating the transaction format that persisted for a century.
Effect on the workThe mechanical register commoditized the cashier role, reducing the skill and status requirement significantly. Before the register, the post required genuine arithmetic competence; after, it required knowing which keys to press. This transformation made the cashier workforce both larger (lower barriers to entry) and lower-paid (skills premium eliminated).
Work toolChanging equipment Electric cash register (NCR 1906, motor-driven, receipt-printing)
In 1906, NCR engineer Charles Kettering designed the first electric motor-driven cash register — the Class 1000 machine, which remained in production for nearly 40 years with only minor changes. The electric register was faster, reduced the physical effort of operating the crank mechanism, and allowed for more reliable receipt printing. The design Kettering created at NCR was the template for the checkout lane in every American supermarket, variety store, and department store through the mid-20th century. The cashier operated the electric register standing, typically in a fixed lane position, for the entirety of a shift. The physical demands were significant: long hours standing on hard floors, repetitive arm movements, and high-pace customer throughput during busy periods.
Work toolChanging equipment Magnetic-stripe credit card + manual imprinter (BankAmericard 1958, mass adoption 1970s)
Bank of America launched the BankAmericard in 1958 — the first general-purpose revolving credit card, precursor to Visa. More than 2 million Bank of America customers received the card via a mass mailing to Fresno, California. Mass consumer credit card adoption reached retail cashiers throughout the 1960s and 1970s via the manual imprinter ("knucklebuster") — a handheld device that pressed the raised card numbers onto a carbon-copy receipt. The cashier's job expanded: in addition to operating the register, they now had to run the imprinter, call a phone authorization number for large purchases, and manage the social complexity of declined transactions. Electronic POS terminals displaced the imprinter by the mid-1980s, but the credit-card workflow added a layer of complexity that persisted.
Work toolChanging equipment UPC barcode scanner (first commercial scan: Marsh Supermarket, Troy OH, June 26 1974)
At 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum at a Marsh Supermarket checkout lane in Troy, Ohio — the world's first commercial UPC barcode scan, using an NCR Electronic System 255. The price was 67 cents. Clyde Dawson, Marsh's Director of R&D, had deliberately chosen the gum to test whether a barcode could be printed on something so small. The pack is now in the Smithsonian. The scanner transformed the cashier's core skill: price memorization and manual key entry gave way to dragging items across a glass plate. Throughput per cashier increased substantially. The technology also laid the data infrastructure that would eventually enable self-checkout — the same barcode-to-price-database lookup that a cashier triggered with a scan could, in principle, be triggered by a customer.
Effect on the workScanner adoption in grocery dramatically increased throughput per cashier — studies in the early 1980s documented 15-25% improvements in items-per-minute speed at checkout. This meant fewer cashiers were needed to serve the same customer volume, moderating employment growth in grocery even as overall retail expanded. The scanner is the technological root of the self-checkout era that followed 18 years later.
Bedside monitoringVitals at a glance Electronic POS terminal + debit card (Verifone 1981, debit networks 1980s)
Verifone was founded in 1981 and introduced electronic POS card terminals that replaced the manual knucklebuster. Debit cards and POS networks (Cirrus launched 1982, Star 1984, Interlink 1985) enabled real-time point-of-sale debit authorization, adding another payment type to the cashier's workflow. By the late 1980s the cashier's transaction sequence had expanded considerably: scan items (barcode era), select payment method, swipe card, wait for authorization, print receipt. Each step was faster than its predecessor but the workflow was more complex. POS systems also integrated inventory management, enabling real-time stock depletion tracking — the backend infrastructure that would later power e-commerce order fulfillment from physical store inventory.
Work toolChanging equipment Self-checkout kiosk (first installation: Price Chopper, Clifton Park NY, August 1992)
The world's first commercial self-checkout system was installed in August 1992 at a Price Chopper supermarket in Clifton Park, New York, using a U-Scan system invented by Dr. Howard Schneider and commercialized by Optimal Robotics of Montreal. The machines went in, customers used them, and by the first accounts they crashed constantly. But the concept was viable: Kroger began deploying U-Scans in 1995; NCR introduced its FastLane self-checkout in 1998; and by the early 2000s Home Depot, Walmart, and Target were all rolling out self-checkout lanes. Home Depot had 760 stores with self-checkout by the end of Q3 2003, with over 40 million transactions completed that quarter alone. Self-checkout is the first technology in the history of the cashier occupation that directly substitutes for the cashier's primary function rather than augmenting it.
Effect on the workSelf-checkout adoption at major grocery and mass-merchandise chains directly reduced cashier headcount per store. By the early 2010s, major grocery chains typically operated 4-8 self-checkout lanes per store that previously required dedicated cashier staffing. One attendant supervising 4-8 self-checkout lanes replaced 4-8 cashiers — though the same attendant also handled exceptions, age verification, and theft monitoring that a dedicated cashier would not. The net labor reduction per high-volume store was meaningful but not as dramatic as early projections suggested, because exception handling and loss prevention requirements scale with throughput.
Work toolChanging equipment Contactless / NFC payment (Visa payWave 2007, Apple Pay 2014)
Visa launched Visa payWave contactless payment in 2007; Apple Pay launched in October 2014 as the first mass-market NFC mobile wallet, enabling any iPhone 6 or later to complete a transaction with a tap. By 2023, one in three Visa face-to-face transactions in the US was contactless, up from roughly 1% in 2017. Contactless payment dramatically reduced transaction time at the register — tap-and-go is typically 3-5 seconds versus 15-25 seconds for a chip card insertion. Faster transactions enable higher throughput per lane, which means fewer cashiers are needed for the same customer volume. Contactless also reduced the social friction of self-checkout by making payment easier for customers who were hesitant about the technology, accelerating self-checkout adoption.
Effect on the workCOVID-19 became the inflection point: contactless payment transaction share spiked in 2020-21 as customers and retailers alike tried to minimize physical contact. Retailers who had been slow to deploy self-checkout accelerated installations during the pandemic, and contactless payment made those installations more palatable to customers who had previously struggled with the interface.
Work toolChanging equipment Cashierless store — Amazon Go (opened January 22, 2018; all US locations closed by February 2026)
Amazon Go opened to the public in Seattle on January 22, 2018 — a convenience store with no checkout lanes and no cashiers, using computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning to charge customers automatically for whatever they picked up and carried out. The "Just Walk Out" technology was the most radical redesign of the cashier role since Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier: not an automation of the transaction but the elimination of it. Amazon expanded to roughly 25 Go locations at peak. The arc then reversed: Amazon closed eight stores in 2023, removed Just Walk Out from most Amazon Fresh grocery stores in April 2024, and announced in January 2026 that it would close all remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations. All stores were shuttered by February 1, 2026. The public rationale was a strategic shift toward Whole Foods and online grocery delivery. The structural explanation: the per-store infrastructure cost was extremely high, the format worked best in small office-district stores with controlled foot traffic, and customer satisfaction in high-traffic formats was not consistently better than a well-staffed human checkout experience.
Effect on the workAmazon Go never reached a scale sufficient to generate statistically detectable effects on BLS 41-2011 employment — the peak US fleet of ~25 stores was rounding error against 3+ million cashiers nationally. The psychological effect on the cashier labor market and on retailers' medium-term planning was far larger than the actual headcount impact. Amazon's retreat has been widely interpreted as evidence that full cashierless format is harder to profitably deploy at scale than 2018 coverage suggested — but it does not imply that the conventional self-checkout and mobile-ordering pressure on cashier employment has reversed.
Work toolChanging equipment Mobile order-ahead + AI vision checkout (McDonald's / Starbucks kiosks, Mashgin, Standard Cognition, AiFi)
McDonald's touchscreen ordering kiosks, deployed across US locations from 2017-2019, allowed customers to order and pay without interacting with a cashier — converting the front-counter register role into a food-runner and exception-handler role. Starbucks mobile order-ahead (launched 2014, scaled significantly 2017+) reduced cashier interaction for a large fraction of transactions to near zero. AI-vision checkout systems from Mashgin (coffeeshops and convenience stores), AiFi (stadiums, pop-ups), and Standard Cognition (grocery) began commercial deployment from 2018-2023. As of 2025-26, these systems have not achieved mass-market scale comparable to conventional self-checkout, but Walmart's Sparky AI checkout vision system and deployments at airport terminals and corporate cafeterias demonstrate the technology is commercially viable in controlled environments. The cashier role that survives the current decade will be more exception-handler and theft-prevention specialist than transaction processor.
Work toolChanging equipment
What credible sources project
Scrub the slider past now to anchor each scenario on the scrubber. The spread is the range of futures credible sources project for this role.
What's shifting in the work right now
The historical view above shows how this role has moved. This is the present-day detail: which AI tools are picking up which tasks, where the edge still is, and the natural directions this work can grow.
What's changing in your day
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is taking this onScan customer purchases using a barcode scanner or register terminal, apply item-level promotions and loyalty pricing, total the transaction, and collect payment — the foundational checkout task that self-checkout terminals and cashierless ambient-intelligence stores now perform without a human operator for the majority of routine transactions.
Scan customer purchases using a barcode scanner or register terminal, apply item-level promotions and loyalty pricing, total the transaction, and collect payment — the foundational checkout task that self-checkout terminals and cashierless ambient-intelligence stores now perform without a human operator for the majority of routine transactions.[7],[2],[4]
This task is being automated at scale and the trend will not reverse. The career-protective move is not to become better at scanning faster — it is to develop the adjacent competencies that keep you employable in a store that has self-checkout: supervising the self-checkout bank, troubleshooting kiosk errors, and learning the loss-prevention and age-verification workflows that machines still cannot execute autonomously.
AI is taking this onAssist customers in Amazon Fresh, AiFi, or Standard Cognition ambient-intelligence stores — answering questions about the mobile app check-in process, directing customers on how items are tracked, managing entry gates for customers who cannot use the app or need age verification, and handling service exceptions that the automated system cannot resolve independently.
Assist customers in Amazon Fresh, AiFi, or Standard Cognition ambient-intelligence stores — answering questions about the mobile app check-in process, directing customers on how items are tracked, managing entry gates for customers who cannot use the app or need age verification, and handling service exceptions that the automated system cannot resolve independently.[12],[13]
In cashierless stores, the cashier role is already a store-service-associate role. The skill to cultivate here is broad retail competency — stocking, customer guidance, app troubleshooting — because the traditional transaction-processing function is gone. Cashierless deployments are most dense in convenience, airports, and stadiums; if you work at one, treat it as a training ground for retail operations skills.
AI is taking this onManage and support AI-vision checkout kiosks (Mashgin, Standard Cognition) that identify items by computer vision without barcodes — responding to kiosk error states, re-presenting items that the vision system could not identify, assisting customers with the unattended payment flow, and performing end-of-shift kiosk reconciliation.
Manage and support AI-vision checkout kiosks (Mashgin, Standard Cognition) that identify items by computer vision without barcodes — responding to kiosk error states, re-presenting items that the vision system could not identify, assisting customers with the unattended payment flow, and performing end-of-shift kiosk reconciliation.[14],[15]
Proficiency with vision-checkout kiosks positions you for the retail operations associate role that these systems create — not cashiering in the traditional sense, but kiosk management and service support. Airports, sports venues, and university campuses are the current deployment concentration; experience in these environments is increasingly marketable.
Where this role is heading
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
Retail Salespersons
Retail salesperson is the most natural lateral move from cashiering — same store, same environment, no new credentials required. The key difference is moving from a passive transaction role to an active selling role: approaching customers, answering product questions, making recommendations, and building the kind of in-store rapport that online shopping cannot replicate. The displacement risk is genuinely lower for salespersons: commissioned and product-specialist retail roles are significantly harder to replace than transaction-processing roles because they require product knowledge, customer-reading ability, and persuasive conversation. BLS projects retail salesperson employment as roughly flat through 2033 vs. −10% for cashiers. The move is available internally at almost every retail employer — ask for cross-training in a department where product knowledge matters (electronics, sporting goods, cosmetics, home improvement).
- · Product knowledge depth in a specific department or category (electronics, outdoor gear, cosmetics, home improvement, automotive)
- · Consultative selling: asking questions to understand what the customer needs before recommending a product
- · Handling product objections and comparisons without being pushy
- · Using POS and inventory lookup systems to answer "do you have this in a different size/color/model" questions confidently
- · Upselling and accessory recommendation — the specific skill that drives commission and makes you valuable to management
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