Im surprised how many people here hate self checkout. I am much faster at scanning and bagging my own items than most cashiers. I almost never get errors, and if I do I know what to do to clear them typically. I always look at self check first, and then human lines second. Plus, none if that “how’s your day? Want to apply for a store credit card?” talk from a bored looking cashier.
It is not the self checkout that bothers me but the occasional check after you are done scanning.
What? This is crazy.
Is this american?
Edit: reading the thread seems the uk is the only place that likes these. Huh
They better have some pretty specific definitions of “theft” vs “errors”. I think everyone has had the experience of missing something, wondering if you should go back and scan it or if that would get security called on you, etc.
Then you hear the stories like Walmart keeping a running tab and if you go over “$x” it’s grand theft and that’s when they arrest you.
It is the stores job and responsibility to make sure their stuff is all scanned, and rung up correctly. Not the consumer’s. You can’t just offload the labor costs and also shift the risk on the customer.
That’s why I hate self checkout, at least.
“things have gotten so bad that it has made many people need to steal, so we can’t keep self checkouts open”
They’d rather change their operations than lobby for the poorest to have enough money and not have to steal.
I’m here with your regular reminder that is you see someone stealing food, no you didn’t.
I don’t understand. I’ve never seen someone steal food in a grocery store. I’ve helped plenty of people get more food from a grocery store than what they thought they had in their cart though.
Also you didn’t see me at the grocery store and if you did it wasn’t me
What country is this? They seem to becoming more prevalent here. (Canada) My observation is that people generally look at the cashier lines. If there’s too long a wait, they head for the self-checkout. Or, if they only have a few items, they head to the self-checkout.
As someone who finds interacting with register attendants painful, and doesn’t steal, this is unfortunate news.
I’m a introvert and hate dealing with people, but for some reason I don’t like using the self-checkout. I don’t know why. But anyway, I recommend moving to Finland. My interactions are as follows:
A very quick eye contact with a nod as a hello.
I pay, receive the change, say thank you.
I go away.
There is no small talk or push for registering for their bonus card systems, etc, here. You go in, do your thing, say thank you, go away. And saying anything is optional. I do it because I feel like that’s the least I can do for the poor person who has to deal with humans all day. But often I see people not even look at the checkout person, just stare at the register until it gives out a number, pay and bugger off.
There is no small talk or push for registering for their bonus card systems, etc, here. You go in, do your thing, say thank you, go away
As it should be! The exaggerated fake politeness I’ve encountered in the US is fucking horrible and makes everything worse.
They aren’t bringing back cashiers, they’ll have one cashier with a massive line as a deterrent to get you to download the scan as you go app on your phone so you supply the bar code scanner at your expense and they track your phone and change the digital price tags based on your Palantir profile as you walk up.
Or the other option is Walmart has started remodeling their stores into primarily warehouses. The main entrance is badged only for picker workers to hand orders to Doordash or put app orders in people’s cars. The legacy experience entrance will be a temporary secondary option until they get enough robots to make the building fully lights out and automated. Shambling automatons will emerge from the black hell portal in the surface of The Edifice with your tampons and then run facial recognition on you and sniff your car for drug and explosive residue.
Shitty thing is they won’t hire more cashiers when they shut these off.
Self checkout was great for me because I’d have like 3 items and breeze on out. Now people come to them with overloaded carts because they don’t have any actual checkouts.
Self Checkout hat serious drawbacks:
- the cashiers are not free to be transferred to more important work, they are fired. this is objectively bad.
- regardless if you are scanning the items when putting them into the cart, or you are scanning them at the checkout point - you are now doing the cashiers work, but you are not compensated for your work. the price you pay is the same. you are now an employee, but without being paid. this is objectively bad.
- when a scanning error happens, you are now responsible for it. the industry word for it is theft. you are a thief if your scan isn’t correct. the responsibility shifted away from a worker with (depending on locale, forget the US for a moment) insurance and workers rights, allowing for smaller mistakes. But the retailer isn’t picking up the responsibility, it just heaps it on the customer. As they did with the work. this is objectively bad.
- depending on the efficiency of this system, the retailer chains (not stores, the chains) are increasing profits. the workers and the customers don’t see a dime of that. this is objectively bad.
A store near me in germany has recently switched a number of rows to self checkout. Absolute chaos, nobody wants it, long rows on the few chashier points. I saw it exactly one time, told me what i think, they tried to sell me the convenience, i told them what i wrote here plus that they are located in a commercial area, not a mixed housing/commerce area. Nobody goes there to buy a handful of stuff. People came for “Hamsterkäufe” (german colloquial, hamstering essentially: buying large quantities for reserve), self checkout is not convenient. I will not visit there anymore, there are other stores who don’t do this crap.
This seems very US coded. In euro they’re doubling down even with self scan on the phone or with a tool they give me. I scan them as I put them in my cart and at checkout I just pay and leave. It’s awesome.
Same in Australia regarding doubling down. They’re giving trolleys with an ipad thing on them you scan everything with, and increasing the exit area security so you cannot leave without the staff opening it if you didn’t buy anything, and AI based cameras all over the store and gates that judge whether it should open for you after buying things.
It’s a mix of awesome and horrible.
This is why I don’t shop in stores anymore , I have to do all the work and be treated like a crim. I boycott any place with self checkout and prefer the aldi even though it’s slow with very few registers open.
They could have saved so much time and money by just paying the cashiers a living wage.
If you can’t develop the agency to acquire employment at a living wage or - here’s a fucky idear for ya - start your own (successful) business, then you deserve to succumb to entrapy, imo
I tried it twice at IKEA and it’s so fucking shit and they still need to have people there to assist when you have a problem, IT’S THE SAME FUCKING THING JUST SLOWER.
They’re not there to assist you. They are there to monitor you so you wouldn’t steal more € than the self-checkout is cheaper than the staff it replaces.
In one of my local supermarkets there were 4 normal checkouts but never more than 2 of them were open because they’re understaffed. They recently replaced 1 of them by 4 self checkout machines, it’s soooo much faster now and lines are a lot shorter when it’s shopping rush hour!
Fuck the fucking idiots who ruined this
Our species, at all times, consists of some probably relatively consistent percentage of what you’d probably call idiots.
I would say that if some social experiment like this is tried, and it fails because too great a percentage of people are “idiots”, it’s really the thing they’re trying that isn’t suitable for us. It seems a little upside down to blame the people something is made for being the ones poorly suited to it.
I had someone at target try to direct me to the self checkout… I politely declined with “I don’t work here”
If I’m doing the work, I should damn well get the employee discount.
I literally don’t see the point of the employee. Just scan your stuff, pay, leave. You only have to scan what you choose to buy and take, not other people’s stuff.
Those are great entry-level jobs I’d rather not be eliminated… People > Computers in all ways.
My question is: Why have the employee there?
Why is them scanning my few items and pushing a button better than me doing it? We’re doing the exact same thing and it takes very little work from me. It seems to me like them being there is just adding work for the sake of a job. Pointless. It’s quicker and easier without them in my experience.
Why not add an additional person to the check-outs to hand me my bags so I don’t have to pick them up from the counter? We can keep adding work for the sake of jobs.
As seen from what the company claims in the article, the employee is there, and it is better that they are, because people are both accidentally and intentionally bad at scanning everything and they’re losing their ass.
Because of just that alone, the idea seems to be dying without the previous poster’s philosophical argument, which is not invalid, even coming into play.
I’d rather have one employee per register, not one employee managing 8 registers… Because when something goes wrong, you’re standing around with your thumb-up your ass waiting until someone comes to check your ID or fix whatever went wrong…
Besides, I like employing people, especially people who need the employment and don’t have access to careers that require an education. Everyone needs the ability to work, and part of that is making sure there are jobs…
Right, but that’s what you, a customer, want. These guys are scaling back the self checkouts because there is excessive shrink happening due to customers being totally untrained and some of them shoplifting much more easily because they’re barely supervised. They’re claiming to be doing it of their own accord because it is hurting profits by way of shrink, though many consumers happen to get what they prefer by coincidence in this case.
I’m beyond giving a fuck what’s best for corporations.
I think this weird anti-self-checkout crowd is just young people who don’t remember the times before self-checkouts. Even if every checkout was manned it was still completely normal to wait upwards of ten minutes, even when it wasn’t that busy. I remember my Mum excitedly running to a checkout because there was only one person queueing there. Nowadays I totally expect there to be no queue at all and I feel hard done by if I have to queue for more than one minute.
Um, no. There are many other categories of people who have issues with self-checkouts. Like anyone who’s legally or by the store’s rules due a discount or tax waiver (people with Indigenous status aren’t required to pay sales taxes in some jurisdictions, for instance), since the software often fails to account for these. Anyone paying cash. Anyone who knows anything at all about UI design or has wrestled with a self-checkout that just doesn’t function properly.
I’ll wait in line rather than deal with a machine that’s broken by design, thanks. Fortunately, the stores around here mostly have reasonable staffing practices, so the wait isn’t long unless some idiot tries to price-match against a flyer or something else weird and unusual.
Jusy FYI - I think self-checkouts can accept cash, but sometimes and sporadically do not, because I often see signs, permanent as well as improvisory, that they don’t.
My problem with the self checkouts is they do require quite a bit of wrangling from the person on staff and that sometimes, depending on the time of day, that person has entirely fucked off to another corner of the store. I’ve abandoned a near-completed self-checkout for the safe harbor of a human-staffed register on more than one occassion.
