My supermarket days ended a few years before self-checkout, but it would not have been a problem. Anyone besides the bag boys could work checkout, and for most of us checkout was a secondary responsibility. Not getting called up to the front to help checkout every 20 minutes all day every day would have been great. I could just stay in Produce or Dairy and actually get my work done.
I did see signs around the store bragging that it was powered by whiz-bang Amazon brand technology. So you’re probably exactly right. I know their silly machinery did a nice job of tallying the several items I dumped into pockets in my suitcase without a hitch.
I loved that ad when it came out. Gosh that had to have been 25 years ago now.
And once you’ve seen it once and know the twist ending it’s still good acting as the shoplifter / shopper does his various furtive moves & expressions. Just a great ad.
I agree w your pain. I have the same complaints. But …
Other lesser versions of SCO I’ve seen at airport newsstands / snack stalls are a ~18" square platform you lay your items out on and a camera looks down at your order to figure out what it is. Not looking at UPCs, looking at the raw packaging. And yes, it can tell oranges from apples from bananas.
They’re getting there.
To throw an apparently dissenting voice in here: I vastly prefer self-checkout. I will prioritize shopping at self-checkout stores over the alternative every time.
Now we have the added positions of curbside pickup for shopping; might be fewer cashiers, but there are definitely a lot of new “curbside shopper” positions, with the employees hauling carts around filling orders to be delivered outside!
Your comments are totally on topic and make it clear why the move toward ‘autonomous’ brick & mortar checkout are just a stalling action against completely online commerce. Why bother going to a store at all when you aren’t getting any service for it when an online ‘market’ gives you vastly more choices (albeit most of which are relatively insignificant) and the convenience of not having to go somewhere.
Having dealt with these systems over the past few years I’ll observe that they are nowhere as intuitive or reliable as your post would indicate. I had to check out at one one grocery which literally had no human cashiers available, and the station would not accept a chip or slide though card. The attendant spend several minutes trying to cantrip my card into ‘tapping’ acceptance, and then calling a manager over who also tried to magick their way into getting the fucking machine to work correctly before switching to another station that also had problems with taping before the manager finally worked some managerial magic to force it to accept a swiped card. This is a card I routinely use at gas stations and my normal grocery store without problems. I have also had problems with these automatic systems in confirming that all of my purchases have been accounted for, forcing me to hunt down an attendant to confirm that my purchases are all accounted for so I can “complete my transactions”. In several cases, like @Hari_Seldon, I’ve just walked away from a purchase when I couldn’t get aid or complete the transaction.
In theory, I would love a reliable automated cashier since I could care less about making small talk and dealing with whatever problems the cashier has. In reality, this technology sucks in its immaturity in dealing with even basic issues, much less actually being a replacement for a human cashier with some ability to figure out how to resolve issues or at least call a manager who can deal with problems.
Stranger
We had this in our office building for two years until they lockdown hit. They let the few folks who had to keep coming in run the food inventory down and then disassembled it and took it away.
The technology developer was testing it in controlled environments like single tenant office buildings and gyms. Places you couldn’t get into without being in a very well identified population.
Apparently they’re past the controlled population phase. This store I encountered was at the La Guardia airport in New York City. The clientele can’t possibly get too much more random and scheming than that crowd.
Sure, but there’s another critical factor: there are not a very large number of these in operation yet.
I would cite here Wolfpup’s Motto of Life #137: “There is no creature that has ever lived on this Earth or ever will, that has a greater cunning and inventive genius than the Common Thief”. 
These sorts of operations sound like a great idea, and in fact I’m sure they are, and I’d love to see them thrive, but I think retailers are likely in for some losses as these things gain greater acceptance and technologists have to counter the aforementioned cunning thieves!
I could be wrong, of course, and maybe these things are really locked down. But apparently the manufacturers of high-end pushbutton-start cars thought they had that locked down, too.
Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle also uses the Amazon cashierless tech for the concession stands. Amazon owns the naming rights to the arena. It’s very convenient. You can apparently link your palmprint to your Amazon account and just scan your hand at the turnstile instead of running a card, but the signup process wasn’t working when I tried to use it.
Yeah, I sold my soul to the devil and let them scan my palm print at the Amazon Fresh store nearby for a whopping $10 account credit. It was worth it to not even have to pull out my wallet or phone to shop there.
I mainly work on the grocery floor and this is indeed a huge benefit. Before self-checkouts, I would often spend at least 2-3 hours of my shift in a checkstand whenever the lines got long, and I’d wind up having to stay an hour or two late to get my work done at the end of the night. These days, we almost never have to call floor clerks up to check unless it’s unusually busy or we have multiple callouts, and it’s been years since I had to put in OT because of it.
As @LSLGuy noted, I do not work for Walmart but I do work for a glorified big box grocery store.
Warning - a lot of detail to follow, but you have to expect that if you page me to a thread.
At my store/company there is no distinction as far as pay or company status between “regular cashier” and “self-checkout attendant”. They are all considered cashiers and they are all paid the same. Indeed, they are the same people. While one or two people are used at just one or the other (our top regular lane cashier only does regular lanes, we have another gal who only does self-check-out, both of those gals serve as trainers for people in those positions. In a pinch they could switch but that’s seldom asked) all of the rest of us work both positions.
Our company has now decided to use baggers at the regular checkouts. I think there is a perception that the baggers are different/lower status but again, they are all cashiers as well. That is their job title and pay, except for the one gal who transferred there due to a work injury that has so far prevented her from doing her prior duties, she’s just bagging because she’s there until her rehab ends. She’s still getting her regular rate of pay as well. Anyhow - cashiers are baggers, baggers are cashiers. We all rotate in and out of register/bagging duties throughout the day/week/as needed.
From my viewpoint, I don’t mind and I like that I’m not doing exactly the same thing over and over and over. Other people have different opinions, and different preferences. The two gals who don’t rotate have a strong preference for the tasks they’re doing and they excel at them to the point the management keeps them there. Some folks do have a strong preference, including that some people really do prefer to be the self-serve attendants - being paid the same probably helps with that, as it really comes down to preferences more than pay. Some people are now finding they prefer bagging.
One upside to rotating the duties is that with varying work tasks people are less likely to get repetitive stress injuries, because they aren’t doing the exact same motions for an 8 hour shift.
Over the past 9 years I have worked here the proportion of regular vs. self-checkouts have fluctuated, but outside of the very earliest hour of the day we always have both open. Some customers have VERY strong preferences, others not so much. Any jobs that would have been lost to self-checkouts have been gone for years. Now, the typical “front end” person is trained in using both and how much you do of either has also fluctuated.
At one point, due to customer demand, we reduced the number of self-serve spots. Then covid hit and between people shopping for the covidapocalypse and at times one third of our staff being off work due to quarantine rules we put in more self-serve to deal with the demand vs. staffing ability. In that case, the number of self-checkouts increased NOT because people were being let go but because we couldn’t hire in/keep well enough warm bodies to staff regular lanes. I have had people scoff at me when I told them this, but in the case of covid it was very much true. It is also true they have not changed things back yet, but there’s a cost to remodeling and the company may feel it’s more cost-effective to leave things as they are.
So… it can be a more complicated a question that it first appears, at least at our company. I’m sure this will vary from company to company, even store to store.
Also:
This is also, to some degree, true at my store. Well, we do have people who are full time with the job title “cashier”, but even folks outside that get register training and will be called up to the front to run a register during a rush of customers. In that case, they’re only trained on the full-service registers, with the full time cashiers rotating to self-serve if needed at those times (normally each group of 6 self-serve have just one attendant, but for really crowded times they might throw in an additional person). The only person who doesn’t do this is a middle-aged lady who, apparently, had a panic attack (not kidding) when put at a register, everyone else takes their turn when things get nutty.
Just want to point out that there are no exceptions here due to rank. Our head store director will also run a register and/or bag during customer rush periods.
I’ll also mention that about 1/3 of us full time cashiers have also taken turns out at the gas station associated with the main store. The gas station attendants also have the job title “cashier” and the same pay as the ones at the main store.
Only three of us cashiers work in the cash office. We’re still “cashiers” but we are at the salary cap for the position. Likewise, the people at the customer service desk are “cashiers” but are a subset with specific training for that. Both of those categories do get some time on regular and self-serve spots, as they have the training for it.
So… I guess the summary is that we have a bunch of people with the job title “cashier” whose training/ability encompasses more than just standing at one register all day. This allows the company to shift people around as needed, everyone stays employed, and some of us enjoy the change-up from unrelenting routine.
Finally - there are times they we have not needed people at the registers and full time cashiers have been given the option of rotating to other areas temporarily - I’ve gone back to stocking shelves for half a shift, for example. This is usually during very bad weather when we have fewer customers. Once or twice we’ve had to move a lot of stock onto the floor so bodies are drafted to do it. We also have had a cashier or two with food service training rotate to the deli or bakery if that was needed but that’s rare.
Note that this is just for one company and different companies do different things or have different outlooks. And it’s not even entirely company-wide even for my employer - some of our stores are union, and in a union store you do NOT float between jobs/titles like you do at the non-union stores.
Again, more complicated than things first appear, and you shouldn’t always assume a sharp distinction between “cashier”, “self-checkout attendant”, and “everyone else”.
Yeah, but how much is the store paying me to train to do all this labor? I’m not at a point in my life when I’m really up for learning produce codes, thanks.
The same amount they paid you to learn how to select your own items when Piggly Wiggly first introduced the self-service model in 1916, I assume. 
If it helps, produce codes are universal just like UPCs are - no matter what store you’re at, bananas will always be 4011, yellow onions will always be 4093, iceberg lettuce will always be 4061, et cetera. You don’t really need to know those numbers, though - just press the lookup button and start typing in the name and the button for the product will appear.
Seriously, though, a lot of the problems our customers seem to have with the SCOs could easily be resolved by just doing what the machine tells you. If the machine is telling you there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area, it’s probably because you put something on there that hasn’t been scanned and if you take it off the error will go away. Sometimes people seem to deliberately make things harder on themselves, even - instead of just putting an item on the bagging scale, they’ll put it back in their cart, wait 10 seconds until the “Skip bagging” button pops up, then do this over and over again for every item, which requires the attendant to override the terminal every fourth time they do that, and an order they could have rung up in 30 seconds winds up taking them five minutes because they just won’t obey the machine.
(Yes, I’m aware of how dystopian it sounds to tell people to “obey the machine”. I for one welcome our new self-checkout overlords.)
Personally, as a cashier, I don’t care - but then, where I work I can be called upon to work either a regular register or self-checkout and get paid the same either way.
I do find it a bit annoying when someone at one or the other starts pontificating about despising one or the other, or “off-loading labor onto the customers”. I mean, sure, those can be factors but I’m busy working here, I’m going to try to get you rung up (or help you ring yourself up), keep you happy, and get you out the door in a reasonable amount of time because that’s my job. I’m not really interested in discussing the nuances of labor decisions while on-shift (let’s keep that here on the forum 
)
Personally, I wouldn’t be adverse to offering a small discount to folks at the self-serve but I’m not sure how you would make that work. Not my decision, though.
At my company I will note that, unlike what I’ve seen at Walmart and some other places, our self-serve attendants WILL provide extensive help to someone who needs it. To the point that we have, at times, entirely done all the work of ringing someone up at the self-serve for the customer if that seems to be appropriate/needed. This is most common the first hour of the day when we might have ONLY the self-serve open and customers have no options, but also when some of our more frail elderly shop (fewer crowds) who are not technologically up to date and more needing of help, but we’ll do it any time it seems appropriate. I’ve noted that in some stores if you’re having trouble with the self-serve you’re on your own, tough luck. Not where I work. Sure, a lot of the time we’re “just standing around” if things are slow but we can and do do more than that. Again, this varies from store brand to store brand.
Correct. And in fact for the most part just using them as replacements for the old “express lane” is probably their best use. They are not, and never have been, intended for shopping orders of full cars or even multiple carts (though people have made it work).
I am not offended and do not care if a particular customer prefers self-serve for whatever reason (I did get a smile out of one on a day when he had to go to a regular lane when I offered to speak in a robotic voice if it would make him feel more comfortable - our self-serve was down due to needing some repairs so he was forced to interact with a human). I’m am not offended and do not care if a customer prefers the old fashioned full service lanes. I’m still employed full time and I get the same pay either way.
As I noted - it’s not always a matter of wanting to down-size staff these days. We really did install more self-serve during the pandemic because we simply could not keep a full complement of cashiers on hand (cashiers got a lot of covid because during a day we’re face-to-face with so many people, even with giant sneeze-guards, masks, and gallons of hand sanitizers. ALL of the cashiers got covid at least twice each.) We’re still having some trouble not only hiring people to work as cashiers but also keep them with the more volatile job market at present. Even so, outside the first hour of the workday Monday-Friday, we have at least one of each open (on weekends we have at least one of each from store open).
Not at my store. Sure, the first few hours - 6 am to 8 am - we often have just one of each, but starting at 8 am we have at least one person at Customer Service, and two (cashier and bagger, who will switch off during the shift) at the regular lanes. We start needing even more from around 10 or 11 am onward as things pick up. We have a lot of people who prefer (and can) shop during the “business hours” part of the day, including folks who are the shoppers for grocery apps (Shipt, Instacart, and Doordash) who may be filling up to three orders at once, and a couple of daycare centers whose orders might require 2-3 people and 20 minutes or more to ring up and get out the door.
By 2 pm we have three self-serve attendants, and 4 to 8 people doing the cashier/bagger combo for their entire shift.
Note to grumpy, impatient customers: the reason lane 16 hasn’t been used for two weeks now is because it is broken. It does not work. No funciona. Il ne marche pas. To nie działa. Es funktioniert nicht. We are waiting for parts. Please stop asking us to open it up. Sometimes a lane isn’t being used for a reason other than corporate spite or whatever theory you have at present.
Yep. This is true.
I have also seen times when the full service lane is standing idle because all the customers checking out at that time want to use the self-serve.
Again - outside of the first hour of the day my store has both options until closing. Options are good, right?
The intention, based on designs, is clearly that smaller orders go through the self-checkout. We still have some of the professional shoppers go through the self-checkout with full or even multiple carts, but those are people who shop for a living and they’re generally good at it. At a self serve they can keep their orders sorted and they can operate the machines as well as our staff can (although not having access to some functions due to not being our employees). They’re organized and not a problem.
Ordinary citizens showing up with a full cart (or two, and maybe a half dozen family members) can be a problem or three, but that’s part of being a self-serve attendant, and we can call for help if the task gets overwhelming or other people need help there, too. At which point a front end manager shows up, because frequently that situation is going to result in needing one anyway.
And yes, we DO get theft through the self-service lines. But please don’t point any yell “but they’re getting away!” Yes, we can see them going out the door. However, there is not one damn thing in this store worth anyone getting hurt, so if someone is determined to run out the door with an item we are NOT going to pursue them (actually, doing so can get you fired). Said individual will be on multiple cameras from the time they’re at the kiosk to when they go out the door, this will be turned over the first to “asset protection” and then to local law enforcement. You should not attempt to pursue them, either. We don’t want our legit customers getting hurt, either.
I’ve lost track of the amount of times I’ve had to bite my tongue and say “I can’t really get political while I’m working” to customers who think I want to hear their gripes about The System. And that applies to both sides of the aisle - I remember an incident a few years back where we had to call over the store manager to talk down an old man with a ponytail and a Grateful Dead shirt who decided to take a disagreement about the price of coffee and turn it into a shouty rant about gentrification, class warfare, and how we need to tell corporate to shove their price increases up their ass. (And here I thought Deadheads were supposed to be mellow.)
No, it can’t do that. Yes, the so-called “AI” is starting to be able to do that (although there is a reason we refer to it as “artificial stupidity” at work) but it’s not all the way there yet. Give it another few years. Don’t believe all the hype about AI in the media. I mean, sure, it sometimes can tell the difference between an apple and an onion, but not always. Currently, the screen offers a choice of the most likely options, and it’s getting better at it, but we’re not living in that particular future yet.
That won’t work for the company because it isn’t just about pricing, it’s also about inventory and knowing what is or isn’t selling and what does or doesn’t need to be ordered. Want your Granny Smith or Honeycrisp or Fuji to be there when you want it? Then we’re going to need to know when to re-order, and currently that’s done by knowing what’s going out the door.
Also, I very much doubt that you want us to average the price of your $1.00/pound Red Delicious with our $5.00 Organic Honeycrisp. And even if you’d be OK with that I doubt many our other customers would.
In my state? A lot of it has to do with the law. So feel free to speak to the guys and gals in Indianapolis (or your own state capital) who make these decisions. Rules around alcohol sales are entirely out of our control. We have zero leeway and zero ability to make exceptions. Sorry about that.
The other reason is that the machine is shit at identifying bogus or altered ID’s, and then there’s the problem of matching the face on the ID with the human holding it. We do not have access to face-matching software of that sophistication. Again, we are not living in that particular future yet, please give it a few more years. And a change in the law. I can not emphasize that enough - this is a matter of law, not corporate policy, at least at the time of writing this.
There has been a little sticker with a scan code on every piece of produce where I have shopped for years. I’ve never seen one where you need to look up a code.
That’s because if they weren’t corded some of them would wind up going home with the customers. Our store has only wireless hand scanners. Yes, occasionally one does get mixed up with the customer’s purchases. Sometimes the customer will even bring them back to the store, which is nice.
Actually, it can matter. Not the orientation but the location. The pickup for the chip in the card is not the entire screen/unit. Some stores have the pickup for this marked. Some do not. As it happens, my store does not, so sometimes (because apparently ours don’t have a long range) we have direct someone to the correct spot on the unit for their information to be picked up.
Also, all of this:
Really, I am gobsmacked at the number of people who do not know how to operate a debit card these days, much less anything more involved like a self-checkout station.
And no one reads the signs you put up. Hell, we even tape a sign OVER the money slots saying “NO CASH” and people will remove the signs and attempt to pay in cash. It’s nuts.
Hey, if you prefer self-checkout have at it. As I’ve said, I’m good either way.
You are right about the curbside shopper thing - they jobs don’t go away at this point, they just shift around and change. And our curbside people also get drafted to run cash registers during rush times when we need more warm bodies in the full service lanes. A few of them can also fill in on the self-serve, too, as they started as cashiers before moving to “curbside”.
I’m convinced we will never be entirely online commerce. Too many people still want to go in person. Some people actually do like to shop and wander around a brick-and-mortar store in person. There is a significant chunk of the population that has neither computers nor smartphones and thus are not engaged in online anything. For some people having to physically go somewhere is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Right now people have a wide range of options: full service, self-service, curbside pickup, and home delivery. I think that’s great, options are good. All of the above are desired for various reasons, all valid. It’s like the range from handbasket, small cart, large cart, and mobile scooter with basket on the front - there are different reasons to choose any of them and all those reasons are valid.
We do lose more to shoplifting through the self-serve stations than the check-outs with human beings running them. I suppose it’s a matter of labor-costs vs. theft-costs. Not my department.
In my previous life as a fast food manager, we once had to close the restaurant over the weekend to have a new grease trap installed under the parking lot. I still had to go in on Monday morning to do inventory, though. The lot was literally torn up and excavated and full of heavy machinery, and the entrances to the lot were coned up and had traffic tape blocking them - and yet, while I was in my office, the only person inside the store, entering my inventory into the computer, I heard the drive-thru indicator ding from someone who had moved the cones and tape and driven up to the order box.
I don’t recall the exact words I had for them once I found a headset, but there was probably swearing involved.
Our local Walmart tried an interesting experiment for a while. They had a cashier wandering in front of the checkout lanes, looking for people who appeared to be ready to check out with only a few small items in their cart.
This person was equipped with a wireless handheld scanner/card reader. A small, wireless receipt printer hung on one side of a belt around the cashier’s waist and small roll of shopping bags hung on the other side of the belt.
They’d walk up and ask if you were ready to check out and if so, were you paying by card. If the answer to both questions was yes, this mobile cashier would scan your items, bag them, scan your card and print out your receipt, right there in the aisle! Bingo bango, you were out the door without having to do SCO or go thru any line. Very cool idea, but I only saw it a couple of times, too bad it apparently work out.