Sainsbury is to start a nationwide roll-out of self-service counters, to enable customers to scan and pack their own items before paying through interactive touch screens.

The supermarket group plans to introduce the technology at 14,400 checkouts in 700 of its stores, following the success of the tills at its US supermarket chain Shaw’s.

Sainsbury said it hoped to make the tills “a way of life in the UK and that in 10 years they will be as popular and common as ATMs”.

The retailer said that this new system would not result in redundancies “at least in the immediate future”.

Safeway, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose have introduced similar scanning technology in several stores over the last year, while Tesco is currently trialling such systems.