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.
Amen.
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.
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.
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.
“I don’t work here, and I refuse to be a class traitor.” Fuck corporate greed that kills jobs for more profit.
ah yes lets make things harder on service workers just because they exist. Make some random stocker that’s already been repeatedly threatened to be fired for not meeting targets stop what they’re doing and come ring you up and scan all your shit. If they’re lucky the boss will let them stay over and work off the clock to get their stuff done. As someone who has 2 degrees and is underemployed because our society is corrupt and broken: fuck this type of behavior. Fuck people who bully service workers. I suppose next there will be a meme about bullying fast food workers for being worthless members of society. ha. ha. where funny.
I use the self-checkout so I don’t have to talk to anyone.
That’s why they are so good.
Same
Nope, I gotta price match. I will wait for the cashier.
Any mistake during self-checkout and my local supermarkets will consider it shoplifting and pursue it all the way to court if needed. I’m not running that risk.
Lol as if…
Speak for yourself. I had a security guard who watched me scan then try to run up to me when I finished to recheck my stuff.
Like dude, you watched me from the beginning.
What colour is your skin?
Article in Danish where the head of public affairs for COOP, one of the largest retail chains in Denmark, explicitly states that they’ll report anyone who forgets to scan even the smallest item.
Yeah ok
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.
Self-check out makes it easier to steal from the mega corporation. 🤷🏻♂️
They’re the most surveilled places in the store and now stores are looking into face recognition tech to effectively ban thieves from stores
They might not care about small stuff, but repeatedly doing it will definitely put you on their radar
honestly no, you’d hypothetically probably be better off putting something in your bag than risk being one of those times the machine asks a worker over to scan shit
Lol, the cashier dgaf. They come over, input the code to canal the alert and go back to their chat, 90% of the time without even looking. The times they do look, they tell you what’s wrong and you fix it.
It’s not stealing, it’s getting paid to do the cashiers job. Honestly I underpay myself every day i go to work at the self checkout.
Why waste time in a queue? It’s quicker to self checkout and get back to my own thing.
Self checkout hate is plain stupid, it’s for the customers who wanna get in an out quick.
They are running lean enough many places that you actually wait in line to check yourself out. I have no problem checking myself out. Waiting in line to use a machine because they don’t have enough of them on the other hand… Literally some places run like one minder for 12 machines but they will have another 12 machines disabled because they don’t want to come off another minder.
No, you are wrong. Places like Walmart will only have self checkout open, forcing you to ring up your own cart of items while their employees stare blankly at you … either that or you just make eye contact with them and walk away from the cart and leave the store (usually what I do).
I don’t work for them.
The cashier at the self checkout is to
A) Do things that require intervention like verify your ID to sell alcohol
B) Help people having trouble
C) Keep people from literally paying for a banana and taking home TVs
They aren’t there to check you out. If you spend usually spend 15 minutes driving to the store, 15 minutes gathering a cart, and then walk away and spend 15 minutes driving home empty handed I believe the joke is on you. The employees get paid at this point $20 an hour to put away your shit while you wasted your own time and gas.
That’s wasted effort for both the seller and buyer. Hope it’s fixed.
Why do you think that is wasted effort? You can have one person monitor 12 machines where 12 people are checking out
Sorry to hear that you live in flyover country. Too bad your state “voted” for this.
Turn in your commie card, tiny tyrant.
I didn’t punish them. They punished themselves.
Voted for what? Self checkout lanes?
Corporate deregulation
Probably, those people who support this corpo BS
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Machines still cost money to purchase and operate lol. So fucking entitled.
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.
The self-checkout at Aldi is a godsend. Way too many times I’ve been on my lunch break trying to buy a sandwich and snack, only for some old git to be using the time at the till to have a chinwag with the cashier!
By all means, have a chat with the cashier, but not when there’s a massive queue of people waiting behind you! Also, you know those shelves near the window with the sign saying “Pack here”? That’s not a suggestion. Pack your shopping away from the tills so people can keep buying stuff.
Man I always hear such good things about Aldi. They started building one near us and I got excited. I was gonna see what the job situation was like because I heard they were kinda based.
Nah. It’s reportedly a Taylorist hamster wheel. Unrealistic productivity metrics that, if you really bust your butt, are rewarded with tighter metrics. Sucks, man.
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’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 it when a cashier checkout is available because everyone is doing the self-checkout and I can get my stuff bagged properly (I’m terrible at bagging up). I’ll even chat with them as they’re in the middle of the most boring shift imaginable.
Workers bagging your stuff at a store is so incredibly weird to me. In Sweden you have to bag your own stuff and afaik it has always been like that.
as a former cashier, fuck talking to people, the mind’s enough
Cashiers no longer pack bags in my area, unless you’re paying for the bag.
Shrinkflation you say?
Weird that the money supply can grow so fast, raising home values to ungodly levels, while we keep getting worse service; you cant even put an overhead bag or choose a seat on an airplane anymore, but nothing to see here inflation is only 2%.
Will they bag groceries into reusable bags, or are you using plastic bags?
At every store near me they’ll use your reusable bags if you have them.
My local grocery store self checkout after every single item:
Unexpected item in bagging area.
If they’re going to treat me like I’m stealing the groceries I’m paying for, making the process slow and inefficient, then I’m just going to go to the regular checkout and not deal with it.
Haven’t heard that in forever. It was hell for some time, but it seems a solved problem everywhere I’ve gone, for many years.
There’s a sensitivity setting that can be adjusted. At first most stores were set to +/- 1oz, so even legitimate items that have varying packing weights could set it off. My local stores have adjusted it so that you really have to put something heavy on there to trigger that alert. They also don’t seem to care if you take stuff off the scale anymore, which is nice because it’s never large enough even if you have an item limit.
Can we talk about how ridiculously tiny the shelf is. On both sides, but especially the first side when you begin to check out. It’s roomFor like a gallon of milk that’s it.
Maybe I should give the ones near me another try then - thanks for the heads up.
Yeah and if you have alcohol you wait eleven minutes for the one employee who is supposed to be helping, to actually notice there are people waiting. Then she realizes five people need help. Gets the cigarettes for the one guy but it takes three trips to the cage and back to get the right ones. Helps the lady with the coupons they grabbed the wrong items for. Helps the really old person who can’t even stand scan and bag all of their groceries (why were they in self checkout anyway?).
Finally comes over to my white-bearded ass after 20 minutes and they could just hit the “customer is over 40” button, but they want to see my id. Yeah I’ll just wait in line for the one cashier.
This problem is caused by shopping at busy times, not self-checkouts.
Not always. I usually shop right when they open because I often work 3rd shift. Sometimes they have half of the self checkouts closed and only one person there, and one register open and they’re just not paying attention because it’s always slow early in the morning. So by the time they notice people need help they have several people who need help. And almost everyone always needs help, those machines are an abomination and don’t really work. I’ve had to get help three times in one checkout because once it hits a flag it locks up.
Unexpected item in bagging area. Ugh.
I find it fascinating around here that all the self checkouts do that except Walmart which is actually pretty good. I usually go to the cashiers at other places because the self checkouts suck, and the cashiers bag stuff better than me.
Walmart’s self checkout probably doesn’t accuse you of stealing out loud. They want to wait until they can “prove” you’ve stolen over $1000 worth of goods over time so they can charge you with - I forget - either grand larceny or grand theft, which are felonies.
I hadn’t thought of that but that could be the case now that you mention it. I’m not stealing at any of the self checkouts, the grocery store ones though around here always think something got placed in the bagging area that wasn’t scanned which isn’t the case. I guess Walmarts just dont care which I like.
Cub foods has the worst self checkouts around here, unless I’m only buying under 3 items I won’t use it. They also don’t bag your items though if you go to a cashier, all around just kindve a shitty shopping experience at Cub.
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.
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
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.
