Suppose a major retailer replaced some of the traditional checkout stands with automated self-checkout facilities.

After making the change in some test stores, the company performed a study to determine whether the average purchase through a self-checkout facility was less than the average purchase at the traditional checkout stand.

To conduct the test, a random sample of 125 customer transactions at the self-checkout was obtained, and a second random sample of 125 transactions from customers using the traditional checkout process was obtained. The following statistics were computed from each sample:

Self-Checkout Traditional Checkout x1 = +45.68 x2 = +78.49 s1 = +58.20 s2 = +62.45 n1 = 125 n2 = 125 Based on these sample data, assuming equal population variances, what should be concluded with respect to the average transaction amount for the two checkout processes? Test using an a = 0.05 level.