Brennan Conley has spent five years bagging groceries and knows not to put the bread on the bottom and to use the cans of peaches to deftly craft a stable bag of groceries capable of standing on its own.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Jane Bircher of Highland Park checks out her groceries at a self-checkout at the Waterworks Mall Giant Eagle. In the background, Donna Sisca bags the groceries. Sisca works in the self-checkout area bagging groceries and teaching customers to use the self-checkout. Click photo for larger image. Related article Speed, placement make for the best baggers

The 20-year-old took fifth place in an annual statewide competition for best baggers last year, and is one of hundreds of Giant Eagle employees limbering up for the another test of speed and skill set for this evening at the O'Hara grocer's Monroeville store.

Yet as the baggers from three states gather, one can not help but wonder if they are members of an endangered species destined to go the way of the once-common gas station guys who pumped the gas and squeegeed every customer's car windows.

Giant Eagle installed its first self-checkout station the same year Conley started working for the grocer. Now, the technology is in approximately half of Giant Eagle stores, allowing local shoppers to join their counterparts at grocery chains from Albertsons to Kroger who are bagging their own goods as they check themselves out.

The technology has spread beyond the grocery. Wal-Mart has self-checkout stations in 1,325 of its 3,159 stores, and Home Depot began installing self checkout in 2003. More than 1,000 of its 1,900-plus locations offered the services at do-it-yourself lanes at the start of this year.

"We're surprised at how fast it's taking hold," said Dan Hopping, a retail consultant for IBM Corp.'s Retail Store Solutions Division in Raleigh, N.C.

There may still be a place for the service that baggers provide.

A Forrester Research report in late 2003 pointed out shoppers are love-hate on self-checkout. The research firm found 44 percent thought it was a great way to pay, while 42 percent would rather have a clerk handle the chore. "A considerable number of shoppers -- men and women alike -- say they don't know how to use or have never seen self-checkout in a store," the report said.

Conley has probably met a few of those people. The Monroeville store where he works does not offer self-checkout stations as an option. "Customers come to our store because we don't have them," he said.

Retailers have come to expect that sort of self-selection. Some people just decline to dabble in the dark arts of scanning bar codes and feeding dollar bills into a slot.

For some, it is a matter of preferring to be served after spending all that money. Some worry machines are taking away human jobs. Still others may have attempted to use self-checkout only to be befuddled by produce problems or embarrassed by a recording ordering them loudly to put that item back on the weigh station -- now.

The first two issues involved philosophical differences that could take hours of debate. That last problem is one retailers and vendors are eagerly working on with the view that building an easier-to-use self-checkout machine could mean a bigger payoff.

Home Depot calculates that adding self-checkout stations to a store carves out 40 hours a week in staff time that can be redeployed toward offering an employee to answer questions for the woman fixing her sink or the man choosing between fluorescent and halogen bulbs.

Among the lessons learned in the years since the first stations were installed is that people who use the machines are not always the people the inventors originally expected. Some young shoppers who grew up with high-tech gadgets shun the stations while older shoppers may like the sense of control.

Home Depot's stations are used heavily by contractors who may be in and out daily. "They know what they want. They know where it is. They just want to get in and out and back to the job site," said spokeswoman Paula Smith.

Interviews with more than 6,000 consumers and six retailers across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia last year found up to half of the stores's transactions were being done through self-checkout. The study by research firm IDC was funded by NCR Corp., a major manufacturer of self-checkout systems.

Makers of the self-checkout equipment have made changes after seeing how their machines work in the real world.

For example, the pads where consumers punch in how they will pay tend to be at the front of the line, instead of the end, where they were originally placed with the bags. "We found consumers were doing a lot of back-and-forth," said Heather Ludecke, NCR FastLane product manager in Atlanta.

Machines also have had to learn to adapt better to their human users. That has meant giving consumers different ways to start and end transactions. And the equipment has been taught such subtleties as the fact that potted plants weigh more in the morning after they've been watered.

IBM now has four or five versions of self-checkout machines, including small ones that retailers might set up in the photo department or the pharmacy. But customers trying to check out larger orders at the front of the store ran into problems with small stations that required payment before items left the weigh station.

Larger stations with conveyor belts have become the most popular for the main checkout area, said IBM's Hopping. At busy times, a number of grocers also use a store bagger at the self-checkout lanes to keep things moving -- proof that people still value the help.

Future self-checkout wizardry is on the way.

Giant Eagle, for instance, is trying a product called LaneHawk that promises to keep cashiers and customers from forgetting to ring up that soda case or dog food bag sitting under the basket. It's built around technology used to help soldiers recognize weapons in a crowd. California manufacturer Evolution Robotics adapted it, putting cameras down low so they can scan merchandise and ring it up.

At IBM, researchers are fine-tuning technology they call Veggie Vision that will recognize exactly which variety of tomatoes or grapes is sitting on the scanner and ring up the charge without forcing the consumer to punch in codes or remember whether he picked up Pink Lady apples or Macintosh.

And a few weeks ago, a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market store in Bentonville, Ark., launched a test that puts scanners into shoppers' hands as they wander the store. They bag the goods as they go along and then give the scanner with its information to a clerk to finish checking out.

Some retailers have been hesitant to embrace the self-checkout trend. Drugstore chain Walgreens tested the concept but has not gone forward with it. Hardware chain Lowe's is in the midst of testing but has not announced whether it will commit.

If half of consumers are willing to check themselves out, that still leaves a solid core of shoppers who will not, the thinking goes. So retailers for the foreseeable future will likely continue to offer traditional checkout, and grocers will still need people who know how to properly bag eggs and Pepsi.

Conley, who is now studying at the Community College of Allegheny County, certainly doesn't seem threatened by the checkout revolution. He does not even go out of his way to avoid the new systems. "When I do go to [another] Giant Eagle, I do check out myself," he said.