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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is such a boomer take.
Nah fuck that, the machines are scabs, I want someone to earn a paycheck for work.
Nah fuck that ain’t having time to hang around the whole checkout lane bullshit just to luddite around.
It’s shit work that most people don’t want to do.
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.
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.
That fee is outside my experience. Was that a short-lived thing? Never heard of it, certainly never saw it or heard anyone complain. Weird.
ATMs are not cost free. They’re not merely a kiosk. You have to pay armed men to load/unload them. And not any dude with a pistol will do. I imagine the background check is damned exclusionary.
And then there’s the networking, video and storage, upkeep and updates, all that, it goes on. But of course that still tallies a lower cost than a human, or they wouldn’t do it!
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.
You can pull the self checkout option out of my rigid, dead, introverted hands.
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.
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.
OK Boomer.
Do you get the stuff off the shelf for yourself though, or give a list to the stock boy like when you were growing up?
Look at these plebs pumping their own gas
I mean… That is effectively what Instacart and Uber are.
lol do you see companies passing down the savings to consumers for doing work that was once done by workers.
It has nothing to do with boomer mentality, whatever that means.
Haven’t really needed to since COVID actually
Self-checkout gang here. I like my groceries bagged a certain way and it’s mildly infuriating to sort stuff on the conveyor belt only for the cashier and/or bagger to mix them randomly in the bags.
You can always bag yourself, they will absolutely let you do it.
Yeah, but then I’m holding up the line as everyone’s watching and waiting for me to finish bagging. I also have to go back to the terminal to pay after the cashier is done ringing up everything, then go back to bagging if I’m not done yet; all the while telling the cashier and/or bagger not to help. At least at the self-checkout, no one is specifically waiting for me to finish.
We are waiting for you at self check out as well Unless there is no line at all.
Eh, you’re technically waiting for a spot to open up, not a specific person at a specific self-checkout counter.
Same problem and I’d prefer we pay a cashier and a bagger. Not a computer and a slow bagger.
Having somebody bag your items is such a USA thing.
Eh, I come from a 3rd world country and baggers are common. In fact, it makes more sense that jobs like those are more common in places with cheaper labor.
Cashiers everywhere around here stopped to put things in the bags for at least 10 years now. I still remember the good times when the bags were carefully and properly put by them with all the items magically fitting. Good old times. Nowadays there’s barely a difference between self checkout and using a human operated one. The main difference is that on self checkout I’m not rushed and can take my time to put the items how I want in the bags.
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.
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.
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.
If I look at this topic the American skewedness is so obvious.
In Belgium the only thing you get by going the old fashioned way is they scan your shit and push it off at the end or you need to rush to put it in your cart. Same in The Netherlands. There are no baggers.
So yeah, let me just scan my items, put them in my bags like I want them, scan the thing at the self checkout, put scanner in tray, pay, walk out.
Every so often you get a bag check and if less people cheated on their scanning there would be less of that (is what they hope you think)
American here. Love going to Aldi. Cheap as hell and I can bag as I like it. (My first job was grocery bag boy, I know how I want it.)
I think Amazon tried that here and shut it down
This only works in a respectful society that isn’t exploited
So one in which Amazon doesn’t exist!
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.
Honestly with my social anxiety, self checkout works perfectly for me. I feel a hard to describe tension when being rung up by most folks that I don’t feel when ringing myself up, and if I’m just popping in for a few things I’d rather not stress myself out more than I need to.
Honestly, even without social anxiety, not having to spend the effort to do basic small talk and engage with someone makes it pretty convenient sometimes. The only time I really use the cashier line is when I have a lot of stuff or my kids with me.
My grocery store recently got rid of their self checkout machines, and I’m actually upset by it. It went from having 6 self checkout lines plus the cashiers to only the cashiers, and now it takes like three times longer to buy my shit.
Also I’m team self check out because I dont want to talk to people
The dollar store near me recently did the same. Almost.
The self checkout machine is still physically there. Presumably all the internals are as well. It’s just turned off and now, as you said, it takes three times longer to buy things.
The grocery store here got rid of 2 out of 5 cashier lines to introduce self-checkout stations. They were in full operation for two months or so. Since then they’ve been mostly closed for whatever reason. Now half of the self-checkouts are back open, but they hung up a sign that you’re only supposed to use them, if you have 10 items or less. Who goes to a grocery store to buy only 10 items? Yeah, I really don’t know what they’re doing. Were they experiencing a massive spike in theft or why did they introduce these self-checkouts only to then nerf them out of usefulness?
If you don’t trust me to the point where you’re going to point 2 security cameras at me while I checkout, and this is your idea of “more efficient”, then I can grocery shop somewhere else.
8 hous at $15 an hour is $120
Two security cameras. At most $2000
Assuming the register is basically the same price
Do you want to pay a person to stand and scan groceries for 2 weeks for $1200?
Or do you want to spend $1200 on cameras that will last years?
30k+ a year vs. $1200 once
People could steal 29k worth of stuff, and the company would still makes the same profit.
The cameras are basically security theater anyways. No one is ever going to watch the footage unless needed.
The efficiency is definitely there
Cameras are there to lower insurance premiums. That’s why for years and years every security camera video looked like it was filmed on a potato because there was no incentive to upgrade. The rise of phone cameras has caused the price of 4k cameras to plummet though so they are getting better.
Computer-vision has been a thing for years, though it’s now bundled under the moniker “AI”. I know that the self-checkout cameras at the store where I go use AI to “watch” customers. I would assume most of them do, now. Heck, the cheap camera that I bought to point out my front window for fun pretty reliably detects animals, vehicles, and people.
Sure, what you’ve described is cost efficiency for the store. I think the person you’re replying to is more concerned with efficiency in their shopping experience, which won’t be improved by lower costs given that the savings will just be funneled to corporate execs and board members (depending where you’re shopping).
Would you rather have 2-3 lines with cashiers or 6+ self checkouts?
I would say I would get out of the store way faster doing self checkout. I call that efficient.
Places like Sam’s Club with their Scan and Go checkout. I can scan all my groceries with my phone as I put them into my cart. Then I just walk under an arch with cameras that scans what barcodes it can. Then I walk out the door. I don’t even have to wait in line or go to a self checkout.
Cashiers aren’t efficient
If the company had to pay cashiers, then the prices of goods are just going to go up. Corporate execs and board members want the money.
So, do you let the Corporate execs and board members save money and hope not to raise prices (maybe lower them), or make them pay a cashier so they are going to raise prices.
Even though I hate the “please place the item in the bag!” “Unscaned item in bagging area!”. Self checkouts are efficient, and the future.
Hate to tell you but there are cameras on the “regular” checkout lanes too and they think everyone is stealing all the time.
Not only do I not work here, I wish to spend as little time here as possible.
So I’ll hand the scanning and bagging task to someone who has been doing it every day for years and can get that done quickly, in the lane where they provide enough table space to actually work, two people to do the two jobs of scanning and bagging… and all that without the extra steps of weighing every individual item, stopping for assistance if you look at it funny, and stopping to upsell you on the fucking loyalty program.
Grocery pickup > normal checkout > self checkout.
They aren’t nearly as motivated to go as fast as I am, and they can only bag one person at a time and have lines, while usually there are 4-6 machines wide open for me to jump onto immediately.
I fucking hate going to the grocery store though.
EDIT: also lonely old people will stop and chit chat sometimes slowing shit even more.
Probably just different grocery stores with different patterns and workflows.
My experience is a normal checkout line is usually a reasonable wait so unless someone bought three carts of groceries they’ll get through before too long.
In contrast the self checkout is a clusterfuck of idiots who don’t know how to use it, people not sure where to stand while they wait because there aren’t really lines, and 1 frazzled attendant trying to cover 6-8 people simultaneously screwing up their self-checkout.
I fucking hate going to the grocery store though.
On this we agree!
Ugh, yeah, i hate customers that take their damn time. if there’s no line, i may go to a traditional register, but i highly prefer waitig for self check out rather than waiting for a cashier
