It's true that it doesn't make sense straight off the bat that someone would shop for a Valentine's Day gift at Home Depot. But we do see a high volume of traffic just before the holiday.

They've been very well received with shoppers and people don't have problems with the new technology. We wanted to give customers a choice at the front end so that they could pay and leave quickly. The self-checkout has also allowed us to move staff away from registers and improve service in other areas of the store.

This is an issue that faces every retailer in the state of Michigan.

You're finding more and more stealth applications because of zoning restrictions (on conventional towers). And sometimes, frankly, they're the only way to get service into an area.

People don't really look for the sticker on the product anymore. In the rest of the country, people have gotten conditioned to do without it, to no apparent ill effect.

The self-checkout has reduced length of lines by a third and the time spent in lines by a third. We estimate that 30 percent of all sales are made through self-checkout at stores equipped with them.

There's no indication that any number of employees have not shown up for work. Monday is traditionally a slower day for business.

We are still waiting and seeing at this point.

When you look at a store, there are multiple quantities of 100,000 items. You are talking about millions of items on hand. They move through the store very quickly and that makes it enormously difficult and costly. But it is the law in Michigan, and we are bound to comply with it.

Wal-Mart has been at the forefront of that effort. Our company was among the first retailers in the industry to screen current associates with sex offender registries in every state that allows it.