Idk why people complain about self checkout. I absolutely despise having to interact with someone at the store. The fact that I have to be around all these people is bad enough please don’t make me talk to them.
I only complain about them when they get mad about me using my own unweighed bags or moving products around on the out feed table as I pack the bags.
its funny at one regional market here, the cashiers are fed up with people being stupid and neet help or are even stealing. so sadly its disabled most of the time. at a different place, there keeps being a loooong line, but literaly noone uses the self checkout. it is so useful. if i forgot something or just gotta get coffee beans, i quickly swing by that place because i know no matter how busy it is, i dont have to wait in line xD
There are two stores at the end of the road into my neighborhood. The one on the other side has several self checkout stations so I exclusively go there now. I haven’t had to speak to anyone in months. It’s awesome
Self-checkout is the best thing that happened to shops, I wish more had it. No waiting in long lines, no talking to people. Perfect.
Well wait in line then…
But there’s also a line for self checkout.
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Nobody at the self checkout is holding me up because they are having a chat with the cashier. No one in the self checkout is holding me up because they want to talk about every item I purchased like it’s some rare lost artifact. No one in self checkout is causing me to be “in the slow line” because one line feeds to multiple kiosks. No self checkout ever struck up an unwanted conversation with me, or caused me to roll my eyes in irritation with their inability to figure out how to pay wirh some obscure format, or wait for 10 mins for some stupid price check or price compare with a website or another store or whatever.
I get my shit, and I leave unbothered. I’m not working for the company any more than I am by picking my own food off the shelf. I am, however, unburdening myself of other people. I actively avoid places with no self checkout.
I absolutely agree with all those points and I’m glad self-check oot exists, however… When you stand in line for 10 minutes at the hardware store to get up to one of four kiosks, and something scans as an invalid UPC. Now you’re waiting for one cashier that servicing four registers. Or you’re at Target and there’s only four self checkouts open. Zero regular lanes and you’ve got a cart full of groceries You’ve just spend an hour curating. Each one of those checkouts is able to handle about two bags.
Each one of those checkouts is able to handle about two bags.
Fuck Walmart. With that said: the local one has huge flat spots (bigger than a normal checkout actually) with no scale for their self checkout, it’s perfect
Walmart is the only self checkout that constantly accuses me of stealing.
I’m not advocating for there to not be normal lanes. Both have their use cases and yeah if I have an assload of shit that I can’t be fucked to scan, I’ll go to a normal lane and deal. But an overwhelming amount of the time, I just want to enter, get my shit, and leave without being hassled.
Amen.
I use the self-checkout so I don’t have to talk to anyone.
That’s why they are so good.
Same
I tend to buy so much booze that self check out is a hassle.
It’s always a hassle for me. Items not scanning. The machine screaming about the item not weighing correctly. The machine screaming at you because you moved your item.
It’s great for quick purchases. But I’m going to a cashier if I have more than 10 items.
This isn’t problem too. If I have a couple things, fine self checkout might be better, but every store has replaced most of the regular lanes with self lanes and more often than not I have an order of sufficient size that the hassle of self checkout isn’t worth it for exactly the reasons you state. Code doesn’t scan, items being moved or bagged too soon or too late. Also the speed at which the scanners work is awful. I’ve worked as a cashier, and the scanning didn’t have any delay between items, but the self checkout is rate limited to an asinine level that, going back to my opening point, is frustrating for anything other than a few items.
“I don’t work here, and I refuse to be a class traitor.” Fuck corporate greed that kills jobs for more profit.
You can pull the self checkout option out of my rigid, dead, introverted hands.
Most times the corpos have the employees watching you like a damn criminal during self-checkout, I find talking to the cashier much less awkward
I haven’t had this experience, thankfully. I usually have the opposite problem where I need assistance, and I look around helplessly as I wait for someone to notice me.
Have you had that lovely experience where some giant camera overhead shows you it’s recording your face on the screen as some kind of deterrent?
That deterred me alright. From shopping there.
Yup! They put a big ass monitor at the entrace of the kiosks. Ridiculous.
Fuckin’ conversators with their ‘eye contact’ its just bullshit.
Look, saying “I don’t work here” to avoid using self-checkout completely misses the point. Technology has always evolved by shifting little tasks onto the user in exchange for speed and convenience. It’s not about “working for free,” it’s just self-service - like when grocery stores first let people grab stuff off shelves instead of asking a clerk behind a counter. At the time, some people probably whined about it too, but now nobody thinks twice because it’s way faster and gives you more control. Same thing with ATMs - you used to have to stand in line and talk to a bank teller just to get cash, now you punch a few buttons yourself. Are you ‘working for the bank’ when you use an ATM? No, you’re just getting your money faster without the hassle. Self-checkout is the same idea: a tiny bit of effort, way more convenience. Complaining about it like it’s some moral stand is honestly missing the bigger picture.
That’d be a great point if self-checkout was anywhere near as convenient as an ATM. But it’s not, it’s literally the same machine a cashier uses, bolted onto a card reader. There’s no added convenience unless you’re buying literally only one item. It’s not innovation, it’s outsourcing labor to the customer so the company can cut jobs and boost profits. You’re doing 100% of the work they used to pay Someone for.
You are completely wrong about this. The cashier UI is less friendly and has lots of functions. Many are designed to be used with a keyboard or with small touch targets.
The user UI can basically do nothing but add items and pay. It is drastically simplified with few larger buttons and a greater degree of thought put into UI as you don’t get to train every user to use your UI.
and the self checkout ui is worse because of the lack of keyboard
Yes because people who are using your system with the entirely wrong height to type anything absolutely need to be able to hit F3 instead of clicking pay. The whole shtick is having almost no functions. Add item, lookup items, pay
Not to mention the constant paranoia and assumption that you’re stealing from them whilst saving them an immense amount of labour costs. Cameras watching your every move and “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”.
Makes for such an enjoyable shopping experience…
People steal a LOT. It’s impossible to catch the folks who steal without watching everyone. You are being watched whilst you shop too.
Sounds like a you problem.
Ah, but you’re forgetting the emotional labor of forcing your lips to say “hi” while awkwardly shifting your eyes away from the cashier because after 20 years of life in your lonely, desolate suburban wasteland with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no people to see, you’ve grown unimaginably socially anxious and you’ve completely forgotten how to talk to anyone.
Frankly, I think you’re just a luddite, or something. You… hate… barcode scanners, just admit it.
Bad design, no effort for user ease. I wouldn’t use that.
Except self checkout isn’t faster. The professionals that check you out do this every day, they’re way faster than me.
Not to mention 100% of the time I use self checkout, the machine doesn’t realize I’ve put something in the bagging area and I need a staff member to sort out the broken machine, but because there’s 1 staff member doing this for a dozen machines, they’re constantly busy sorting out these broken machines so you often have to wait minutes for them to fix it.
Not sure about your lower-than-ideal scanning success rate machines, possibly a location issue. The machines i use work pretty much flawlessly and even if the process itself might be a little longer, the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier.
Cashiers are at minimum twice as fast as customers mainly because after doing it for a while they start knowing were the bar codes are in most products and don’t have to look around for them, know which are the awkward things to scan and how to do it, and are so used to the layout and sequence of the screens that they just go through them naturally.
You simply can’t be as fast at doing something you do once in a while, as somebody who spends hours every day doing it.
Also were I live the cashier doesn’t do bagging, the customer does, so whilst in a self-service checkout you’re doing both scanning and bagging, with a cashier they’re doing the scanning and you’re doing the bagging which also makes the whole thing much faster even if you’re making sure things are bagged the way you want it (for example, having all cold things in the same bag) because you can focus on bagging.
As for the lines being non-existent in self-service, that’s not quite so simple a judgement as it seems:
- First, I noticed that in stores where they introduced self-service checkout they invariably reduced the number of people manning the other checkouts in order to “induce” customers to use the self-checkout (because “the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier”).
- Second, once a store has fully transited to only self-checkout, you get lines at the self-checkout, mainly because as I pointed out above, customers are way slower at doing the checkout themselves than cashiers so even though there are more self-checkout tills that there were tills with cashiers before, people take longer to go through them, especially when they have lots of things to checkout, so effectively each self-checkout till has less capacity than a cashier till.
That said, self-checkout is faster for customers in stores with mixed systems (both self-checkout and cashiers) if you have only a few things to checkout.
With self checkout you do the bagging while scanning though.
Correct, which is why no matter how fast you are at the checkout part it’s still going to be slower, especially if you’re trying to bag things in any way other than “dump stuff into bag as fast as possible” - you can’t both be scanning an item and putting an item on the bag at the same time unless you’re just dropping it there without looking (which is a problem if anything you’re buying is in a glass bottle or jar).
you can’t both be scanning an item and putting an item on the bag at the same time unless you’re just dropping it there without looking (which is a problem if anything you’re buying is in a glass bottle or jar).
Yes, of course you can lol.
This is starting to sound more and more like a skill issue than anything else.
Either way, I don’t mind if you choose the regular checkouts. It keeps the self checkout queue free for the rest of us 😀
Read what I wrote:
unless you’re just dropping it there without looking
The only way you can just scan and put it in the bag in one movement is like cashiers do it - pass it in front of the scanner with the barcode facing it, them just let go of it, all as one movement.
If you’re actually placing it in a specific position in a specific bag you have look at it, pick it up, pass it in front of the scanner, look at where you’re going to place it and place it.
The last two steps are additional to what a cashier does around here (were they don’t do bagging) hence the process is slower if a single person is doing all those steps rather than just the first 3, and that won’t change no matter how elitez your unpaid cashier skillz are.
This is seriously basic stuff and the principle behind Industrial Assembly Lines.
But, hey, if you’re happy doing it that way, good for you.
I disagree with your assessment of lines unless the store is simply doing it wrong. I have 3 stores I use that are self checkout only, and the only times there are lines at all are “rush hours” such as when everyone is finishing work, and the lines used to be FAR worse at that time. It’s a line of like 5 people waiting at most, not per checkout, in total. Before self serve it was a minimum of 5 per checkout, so like 20+ people waiting total.
The fact is they’re able to fit 6 self checkouts in the space there used to be 2 manned checkouts, even if they’re being fairly inefficient with space. So they get rid of 4 manned and have 12 self serve (real example of 2 of them did), and people can be 3x as slow with no extra build up.
From what I’ve seen (in two different countries, so it’s probably not something specific about the way people are used to do something in a certain country), it mainly depends on the kind of store.
In supermarket type stores (were people, including families and old people, go buy a whole week worth of shopping) self-checkout makes things worse, especially if it’s in a country were there’s some kind of obligation to check somebody’s age when selling alcoholic drinks (because the person who is overseeing a whole lot of self-checkouts has to come around and pass their card to confirm your age has been checked, so you generally have to wait for them, especially if they’re helping somebody out).
Those tiny tills that replaced the big manned tills are hugely impractical for people buying lots of stuff and you loose the time saving in the long manned tills which comes from people moving their stuff from the shopping cart to the conveyor belt whilst the person in front of them is being served.
In IKEA stores, were most of what people buy are big packages, self-checkouts seem to slow things down a bit, or at best are neutral, possibly because the space per till is still the same so they’re not really adding any more tills by replacing tills with cashiers with self-checkouts hence the loss of speed from having an amateur (the customer) do the checkout is not made up for there being more open tills.
Were I’ve seen it improve service speed and reduce queues is in small stores were people are just buying a handful of things. This also includes mini-market type stores in inner cities were people tend to go often during the week and buy just a few things like bread and milk.
I’ve also seen it work in a big surface hardware store, possibly because they still had 1 long cashier till for people who were checking out big items and replaced the other 5 cashier tills with about 10 self-checkouts and most people just bought a handful of small things which are fast to checkout in the self-checkouts.
perhaps it’s because I’ve never been to a place with smaller than supermarket sized stores with normal food items (pork, beef, cheese, lettuce, bread), but self checkout seems to speed up the process because those buying only a few items use it.
I prefer to go to the bank and withdraw cash, now that my bank is ATM only I want lower card fees or something. The bank saves money on this deal at my expense.
Same thing with self checkout at the groceries stores, they save a lot of money while I do the work. I could only accept it if I got like a 5-10% discount.
Why would you want to wait in line and only be able to access your money during 9-5 M-F
I don’t want to pay the same amount of money for less product or service. Also, I think it’s nice that a secondary effect is a sort of solidarity with those who lose their jobs to a machine.
Machines still cost money to purchase and operate lol. So fucking entitled.
Why do everyone - from factories to grocery - stores want to automate if not to save money through laying off people?
I’m entitled enough to take my business elsewhere.
If the bank can pay for a teller and not charge you extra, an unmanned machine which is at most a high upfront cost with low service fees should be even easier for the bank.
This is such a boomer take.
Nah fuck that, the machines are scabs, I want someone to earn a paycheck for work.
I’d rather they do a more fun and fulfilling job than to do menial tasks just because it has always been like that.
Shit jobs disappearing is a good thing.
It is a mistake to assume that “shit jobs” disappearing will coincide with better jobs becoming available.
It’s shit work that most people don’t want to do.
Nah fuck that ain’t having time to hang around the whole checkout lane bullshit just to luddite around.
Why? To maintain capitalism as something we can pretend is viable for one more generation, just long enough for you to die before you might have to change?
To maintain capitalism
…Seriously? This is your defense? Do you for some reason think that if we all used the self-checkout system that capitalism would vanish? Is OP the one at the helm of whether or not capitalism lives or dies? It all rests on his shoulders, not the status quo or the endless pursuit of profit by billionaires and politicians?
If supermarkets were autonomous, you’d be homeless living in the ally next to them, capitalism alive and well.
Do I think self checkouts are the one thing stopping capitalism? No. But I do think it’s going to have to get a whole lot worse before things change. We need all fast food workers, all wait staff, all grocery workers, all packaging workers to lose jobs. Needs to be impossible to ignore.
Alley*
All that’s going to do is pull employees from other areas of the store when it gets busy and the rest of the time they will have like 2 cashiers. Even if they did switch back to registers they won’t hire a significant amount of people.
When I worked at Walmart I absolutely hated being sent up to the register. I hated talking to customers and I didn’t like that it took me away from finishing my job and my manager would argue with me about why my area wasn’t done when they sent me up to the register for 6 hours and therefore did not have the time to finish my work.
I have never met a machine that offered to weigh your bags before you start that didn’t immediately fuck everything up if you accepted that offer
Then you will pay higher prices.
I load garden shit at Lowe’s. Sometimes we get blown out and people bitch for faster service. OK. We can always hire more people, any given business’ top expense. Then we charge more. Then the customer bitches about prices and goes to Home Depot. Where they don’t have as much staff. Rinse and repeat.
Banks had no problem slapping a “Teller transaction” fee on withdrawals when ATMs became ubiquitous, to encourage people to use the ATM for free.
I want
shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work lessto pay more to compensate actual human beings doing actual work and I’m not kidding.
I love self checkout. It allows me to scan avocados for my daily avocado toast as russet potatoes. Only 50 more years of that and I’ll be able to afford a house!
I pictured the people overseeing self checkout calling you the potato guy amongst themselves
We 100% know and 95% of us don’t care lol.
Also, if any readers want to try this, the people most likely to care are older workers, but they’re also the least likely to notice.
Going “beep” (optional) and just pocketing every other item does the trick too. At least at Aldi. They skimp on security.
I work in a secure area that requires every person entering to have and show id to security, whether you’re recognized or not. They have these scanners that tell them if you’re allowed or not. sometimes the scanner doesn’t work, so they’ll have printed sheets of paper that I’m sure is the equivalent, just takes longer.
One day I came in, gave my ID, heard a “beep”, got it back and continued on. About 10 seconds later my brain caught up to the very obvious vocal “beep” that came from the security guy. I have no idea if they just decided to say fuck it that day and let all the fun people in, or if just the speaker wasn’t working and they were just having some fun.
If I worked for a self-checkout manufacturing company I’d record myself saying “beep” as the beep. And “Ruh-roh” if it didn’t scan.
Your aldi has self checkout? None of the ones around me do.
When talking about Aldi you should know which one you’re talking about. It’s either Aldi Nord or Aldi Süd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
It’s 2 different stores both using the Aldi name.
In the US, it is Aldi and Trader Joe’s
Neither of the messages in the comment chain implies the US.
But aren’t you terribly glad to be informed of this fact about the US now?
I literally posted the Wikipedia page for it.
Not the person you replied to but they recently started adding self-checkout to the ones in Aus. I think the voice sounds like Mr Handy from Fallout.
Aldo near me, in Aus, has good security. They do bag checks at the manned checkouts and the self checkouts and watch for mis-identified fruits and veg. I’ve only been caught “forgetting” to scan some items in my trolley twice, both at Aldi.
If you move to SF you’ll have to learn credit card fraud
(not all SF^, and in SF it’s only certain neighborhoods that do this)
Especially if they play this hand
sidebar
hmm I guess nobody reading here today would ever steal for fun, just out of necessity (b/c otherwise this security escalation is annoying: lots of waiting, maybe fine by me but not overworked/mobility impaired folks etc)
Anyway, learned that liquor stores in India might operate exclusively with this method!
PS: UBI when!!
I live in Germany. No locks here except for expensive stuff like laptops. Everything else is protected solely by the honor system. I’ve even pinched some of their e paper price tags for tech projects. They really can’t be bothered.
My local Kroger now will say the name of the item you just keyed in very loudly. “Put your bananas in the bagging area!”
“PUT YOUR HEMORRHOID CREAM IN THE BAGGING AREA!”
That’s not where it goes!
I imagine it’s just the items you select from a menu not the scannable ones
To me, this has always been more of a boomer complaint.
The things boomers complain about aren’t always wrong. I ain’t their damn employee.
I’m also not an employee of the vending machine company. I’m also not an employee of the gas station.
I don’t really see what added value a cashier checking out my items for me has.
There was also a time when people would get pay to press an elevator button for you. But we don’t do that anymore because those things are super easy and having someone doing it for you won’t make the process faster.
On the other hand, the thing that pisses me off the most about the self-checkout is that people take forever to scan their stuff. When I was working as a cashier I would have an average of 50 clients/hour. There ain’t no way those self checkout are more efficient considering the time people take.
From what I’ve seen, the slower average time is made up for by having more of the stations. Depending on arrangement, you can fit three self checkouts in the same area as one traditional checkout. In my experience, the self checkout line is always moving faster overall.
They are quite a bit more efficient when you consider that there’s only 1 staffed register open, but 8 self checkouts open.
And why is that? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the business benefits by making the customers the employees, too? Would a business be in any way incentivized to make paying customers also perform labor for them?
Of course they are. What of it?
So? I get through checkout faster because I don’t have to wait behind old people who take a fucking eternity to find their wallet. For me it’s a win/win. It sucks that some people will lose their job to it, sure. But that’s what happens literally every single time society progresses. I’m also not sad about the manual telephone exchange lady losing her job.
I don’t have to wait behind old people who take a fucking eternity to find their wallet.
She’s still there, she’s just stuck at one of the six kiosks while Americans finally figured out how to queue in one line.
And this answers the question.
Someone who isn’t experienced with doing this scanning regularly takes longer. Especially if you have to put in codes for produce or something else with label or scanning problems.
The majority of these self checkouts also rate limit you intentionally or otherwise (likely due to weight checking on the bagging area). I know I can scan a lot faster than they let me given a proper setup
That’s not an apples to apples comparison. I am buying a single thing at a pump: fuel. I boop my card. I stick nozzle in hole. I pull lever until it stops. Vending machines? Second verse same as the first. I boop card. I push button. I take chippies, I walk away. Vending machines specifically are purpose-built for self-service.
I spend maybe 30 seconds to 3 minutes at these things. The only work I do is tapping my payment and pressing a button or two. Groceries are a whole different animal. It’s scanning, weighing, coding, bagging, loading, and paying. It’s a fuckton more involvement by the customer. I don’t think you can in good faith compare self-checkout to a vending machine.
The business is incentivized to trick you into performing labor for them. Part of the cost of my groceries is for someone to have a job doing that. If I’m gonna do that labor for the store, I should get an employee discount, at least.
scan as you cart and self checkout is like the others.
I don’t think you can in good faith compare…
Ooh, that’s just one of my pet peeves. Such a stupid fucking phrase. The only way to know if you “can’t compare” two things is to do a comparison between them and come to the conclusion that the two things are very different. I can compare self checkout to a kumquat if I want to.
Now for some actually useful conversation, let’s compare number of steps for vending machine vs self checkout (since that’s the closer of my two examples).
Vending machine:
- insert payment
- push button to select items
- pick up item
- repeat all steps until you have the number of items desired
Self checkout:
- scan item or place item on scanner/scale and push buttons for item type. This only counts as one step, because you are never doing both to the same item
- repeat first step until you have all items desired
- insert payment
- pick up items
It’s the same steps in a different order.
is to do a comparison between them and come to the conclusion that the two things are very different.
Mate, they did that. That’s exactly what they did, and they told us how.
repeat all steps until you have the number of items desired
Holllld the fuck. My self checkout has a loose limit of 25 items, who the hell is getting 20 items from a vending machine?
Imo, they’re only there for the company to promote ad programs and discourage stealing by being there. Otherwise, they just make the store experience worse? Unless they give me a discount for using a cashier, I ain’t doing in.
Like most things, the answer lies in the middle. You should be able to choose either.
I always wonder if people complained about stores when we started to get the merchandise out of the warehouse ourselves.
Something like, “why isn’t there a clerk getting the groceries on my list for me, I don’t work here, I shouldn’t have to go into the back and get my own shit.”
I prefer bagging my own shit anyways when I go shopping. I don’t break shit and at least in my area it looks like they disabled the weight shit or set the tolerances higher so I’m not constantly told to bag something I already did or getting told I bagged something without scanning .
Now it’s pretty good actually.
I mean, sure, I’m not there employee either, but I’m also not going to be snarky with a similar response.
People working those jobs aren’t from a passion for registers or retail commerce. They don’t have many options or can only work part time to accept a low paying job with few responsibilities other than keeping accurate count when making change. I’ll prefer cashiers until we have better social support for people that need those jobs.
I agree 100%.
Those self checkout lanes are only there so they can cut jobs while charging more for groceries.
I’ll defer to @whotookkarl 's comment as they put it best. No one “wants” those jobs.
I don’t “want” my job either, but I do it to make a living. If local jobs disappear from the community so some rich guy can add another million dollars to his pile, that reduces the number of entry level jobs available locally to people getting into the job market with no safety net in place for them. Just so they can not pass the savings along to us.
The grocery store in which I used to work has been desperate to hire cashiers for years, really since the start of the pandemic. There were some days that we had only two lanes open because that’s all the staff that we had. During busy times, the store manager, the store owners, and sometimes the managers-on-duty would go up to the front to do check-out. The store installed more self-checkout lanes out of necessity.
Nowadays, I go shop there only in the evenings, and there are enough cashiers because they’re all high school students. But the help-wanted sign at the front of the store is still offering open cashier jobs. They’re certainly not eliminating jobs that people desperately need.
I’m asking this sincerely: where are those people working now? They gotta be working something, right?
Sorry, I’m not in a position to know. It would be very interesting if an investigative journalist looked into the state of employment from the perspective of workers these days to put together a bigger picture than one store.
I mean we can agree on some things, no? I literally want to stand there while someone checks out my stuff. I have to work to pay for stuff? Oh sweaty.
If I have to self checkout, I should get a discount since an employee was not needed.
Sure, I’m not saying it’s exclusively a boomer complaint, just that boomers tend to complain about it more from my perspective.
I’m all for getting out of there as fast as possible. If I’m in line at self checkout and a cashier says “I can get you here”, I’m over there.
But generally, I prefer self checkout.
That discount is negated by the higher theft rate.
If you are worried about theft, don’t bake in opportunity.
That’s why they removed the self scan stations. It was a short lived experiment.
Where? My region has only gotten more.
Western Europe. Pretty rural place. Self scan seems to work better in cities around here.
