A quarter of shops will banish queues by 2021 as 'tap and go' technology replaces tills

Brits are well known for their love of queuing, but the prospect of standing in line while out shopping is soon to become a memory of a bygone era.

A quarter of shops are planning to do away with queuing altogether within four years, by letting customers pay for items using their smartphones by 2021, according to a survey of Britain's biggest retailers.

Transactions at traditional manned, stationary point of sale check-out are in freefall with the proportion falling from 71pc in 2012 to 52pc in 2017.

The move by stores is in part a response to Brexit, r etail consultants at Zebra, which conducted the research, said.

By getting rid of tills and staff retailers will be able to cut costs at a time when they are seeing their margins squeezed as a result of the falling value of the pound and rising commodity prices.

Household name stores including Waitrose and Zara are already installing high-tech payment and security systems which are likely to evolve into fully "queue-less" systems over the coming years.

Zara has installed high-tech clothes tags which let staff know where they are in stores, however these could eventually be used to let customers scan garments and pay for them using their smartphones.

Meanwhile Waitrose has rolled out handheld self-scanning devices in some stores which looks and feel like smartphones, and let customers upload their shopping lists.

The latest mobile devices for self-scanning use Bluetooth technology to detect what a customer has just scanned. This also allows the retailer to know where customers are in store and provide contextual information, such as “don’t forget, that product is part of a special offer.” 

Mark Thompson, director of retail and hospitality at Zebra Technologies, said: "In five years, a visit to the British high street will be massively different from today. Retailers want to put more power into the hands of shoppers, letting them pay with their mobiles as they browse, or giving them smart-carts with screens and built in scanning.

"The store itself will continue to get smarter as well. Retailers will be able to tell when and even where specific customers are in store. This technology will also save stores money, which is why the falling value of the pound, coupled with higher commodity prices will speed up its rollout as firms look to maintain their profits."