When these things were first showing up I was at a store with a friend. As we walked towards them he mentioned that he doesn’t like them because of all the problems he has with them. I shrugged my shoulders, got in line and started running my stuff across the scanner. All he had was a soda bottle, so I told him to scan that and toss it in the bag too…he got an error. He looked at me, ready to gloat and say ‘i told ya so’, but I stopped him to say 'you drank half of it already, that’s why it didn’t work.
But these things throw off the weight. Sure you know that you did everything right, but the computer dosen’t.
That must change from store to store. At the handful of stores I use self checkouts at, neither of those are an issue. There’s a scale right there for weighing things and scanning alcohol will flag someone to check your ID.
They haven’t made them difficult to use on purpose. It’s a newish technology so it’s going to continue to get easier, but more importantly, it has to work for everyone, all the time and in all kinds of circumstances.
Having said all that…the gripe most people seem to have can be easily solved by scanning an item and putting in the bagging area. Don’t move things around, don’t pick them back up, don’t take them out of the bagging area or put them over there without scanning them etc.
Also, I know at my store if you do move things around the error will clear itself as soon as the weight is back to what it expects it to be.
I’ll only use the self checkout if I have a couple of items that I know won’t cause me trouble. They’re only useful to me if they will be faster than a human. I fully expect to be able to scan and bag at a rate that’s at least as fast as an experienced cashier, but this never the case, because I’m vastly faster than the machine.
Luckily I don’t consume too many bottles or cans of sodas/beer, because those go into the recycle bin, where I lose 10¢ for each one I toss. The deposit return machines are simply too damned slow.
The self scan machines also lock up entirely if I’m purchasing wine or other alcohol. I understand that I need to have my ID checked before buying, but preventing me from continuing to scan while having to await the clerk is just intolerable.
To top it off, Kroger removed the express lines when it introduced its stupid Scan and Go. Meijer gets a lot more of my business now (although, if it were closer, it would have been my default anyway).
Maybe I’m just lucky, the machines at my local grocery store rarely kick back errors. If I’m buying alcohol, it doesn’t lock up, it lets me keep scanning and only locks up when I hit finish and pay. Then someone had to come and input my birthday or hit over 21 on that age restricted screen.
This seems to be an assumption everyone in this thread has implicitly accepted. I don’t. Why, outside of bulk or produce items specifically sold by weight, should the checkout machine weigh everything I buy?
That’s a user hostile “feature” installed simply to make it more difficult for customers. If I wanted to steal something, I wouldn’t check out in the first place. Or I’d slip the item into my pocket or purse. Or keep it in the cart until I’ve fully checked out and sneak it into a bag then. The only person this satisfies is the lowly executive who decided, without evidence, that an automated scale yelling at his customers was the only way to prevent theft.
And yes, produce and alcohol should be easy to purchase at self checkout lanes, but in my experience both take an inordinate amount of time, and purchasing alcohol also causes an uproar with the staff. Like they never in all their years expected a customer to actually buy an alcoholic beverage, so it always takes them several minutes to adjust to this surprising development. It should be easy and quick to scan produce codes and ID cards. Neither should require human intervention.
And another frustration: Why is the payment machine not integrated into the checkout machine? I have to click “pay”, switch to the card reader, go through all the steps there, then go back to the first machine and click “finish”. It’s really annoying. There’s no reason they couldn’t minimize the number of button presses required during this process. When I’m done scanning, I swipe my card. No buttons needed.
This is all minor stuff, of course, but it adds up to a deeply unsatisfying experience. Of course, that’s par for the course for a business that herds its customers through the building like cattle and manipulates them with ads, prices and placement tricks from beginning to end. This is why I make most of my purchases online. Yes, even many groceries nowadays. If I had the extra money I’d go with Instacart or some other grocery delivery service and say goodbye to brick and mortar stores of all kinds forever.
IME, that’s actually not usually the case. If the full-service lanes are swamped, then, yes, I can see why people would engage in this behavior. But, when I see someone spending ten minutes at the self-checkout register, it’s rarely the case that they would be in line for a full-service register for as long as they wind up spending checking themselves out.
I think they can be ‘tuned’ differently, and it’s a tradeoff between smooth working for the customer and make sure everything is correct (including reducing forms of theft). Where I am they have it set pretty easy for us and the bag/weight issue never or rarely happens (depending on store). Moving bags around doesn’t cause a error (though I recall them causing errors before).
remember that self-checkouts are not for the convenience of customers. they exist only to reduce the number of paid employees as far as possible. R and D and maintenance of the devices only need to be good enough to keep people out of regular checkout lanes. it sounds like yours need a tweaking.
I have a preprinted grocery list I use, organized in the same layout as the store. I just print one every week and circle what I need. PLU codes are right next to the produce items so I never have to squint at the sticker or look them up. I do remember a few, including 4011; red peppers are 4088.
The only one that frequently infuriates me is when I’m buying some tiny item, and the machine pitches a fit because it isn’t calibrated quite right, and can’t recognize the tiny item, so it keeps telling me to place it in the bagging area.
That, and the ones where the card reader and scanning kiosk aren’t well integrated, and you can enter your card, pin, etc… but it wont’ finish until you go back and choose “Ready to Pay?” or “Pay by Card”. Seems like a fairly trivial thing to have the kiosk back-fill that piece of data if it receives a completion notice from the card reader, but it doesn’t seem to work like that.
I’ll use self-checkout (at the supermarket, mostly) and usually don’t encounter any significant problems, but it’s irritating to have the system assume users are all prospective crooks (getting “put the item in the bag, you no good” immediately on scanning doesn’t put me in a pleasant mood). I should be able to buy something lightweight like a newspaper and not have to ram it forcefully into the bag to have it register and not trigger an Incipient Thief Warning.
When the system results in enough confusion and errors that substantial real person input is required to straighten things out (while you wait for help to arrive), it defeats the purpose of having “automated” checkout.
It still beats waiting in line for the regular checker and winding up behind Ms. Super Coupon Saver.
The bagging area is also a scale. The computer knows how much each item weighs. So if there’s 15 pounds in the bagging area and you scan a gallon of milk, it expects the bagging scale to read 23 pounds.
This is done to make it harder to switch items. For example, if you scan a gallon of milk and then put a $45 lobster tail in the bagging area, it’s going to call for the cashier.
People use a lot of methods to steal stuff, including running it through the register.
It’s common for someone to steal something by intentionally causing the register (self serve or otherwise) to read the wrong amount. This is done so that if they get caught, they can say “Oh, wow, I had no idea. How much is it supposed to be? $100??? I can’t afford that, can you put it back…kthxbai”.
There was even an SNL commercial for a grocery store type price gun. The idea was that you could change the price on anything you wanted to practically nothing. It’s not a new concept. To this day, people will still attempt to move the price tag from something cheap to something expensive.
One that I commonly see in my store is to hide something expensive in their cart, say, under a coat or hidden in a reusable grocery bag. Again, when/if they get caught, every.single.time. they say they forgot about it, ask how much it was then say they don’t want it.
Luckily, in my state, they changed the laws regarding shoplifting. It used to be that we had to observe them conceal the item and not lose track of them until they made it outside (where the police would be waiting). Now it’s considered shoplifting as soon as the item is concealed.
The funny thing with that is, every time we catch someone doing it, I always think they wouldn’t have been caught if they had just shoved the items in their pockets and walked out. It’s that they spend all this extra time that gives me the opportunity to go check security tapes and get the cops on their way. But, as I mentioned, they hope the “I forgot” defense will work. It doesn’t, ever.
So, stores have cameras to watch for people concealing items, but the checkout still has to have a way to make sure you aren’t trying to get it to to give you a different price.
And, keep in mind, if that protection wasn’t there, people would walk off with the store.
All this talk about how people are annoyed that it’s a weight mechanism based on “don’t be a thief”, it’s morally repugnant, I’m an adult and should get to do whatever I want, yadda yadda - this is the sort of issues I always find in people. The problem is what it is. And no amount of griping here or being mad in public will make a single difference that the computer weighs what you put on it, and bases the entire checkout process on this. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it. What you think doesn’t matter at all! If you want it to work, then you have to deal with it as it is. (incidentally, whenever people had problems in math or science class it was always people fighting fact with what they thought it should be - this is useless. Things are as they are, and you need to solve the problem within the parameters or it’ll never be solved. So deal with it as it is.)
You can complain to corporate. That’s the only thing that might possibly change the fact that the computers do their job based on weights. In the meantime, the problem at hand is that it still uses weight. So get used to it and work within the weight parameters until your letters to corporate change something.
The scales at (the self checkouts at) our local Walmart stores were so error-prone that they recently removed them. The customers still scan their own items, but nothing is weighed.
I am not sure what they’re doing to catch thieves, now. My only guess is that they’re using cameras to keep an eye on things.
I don’t need to complain to anyone or “deal with what it is”. I’ll just go to Amazon. Stores need me, not vice versa. I’m happy to continue to ignore them if they continue to treat their customers as enemies.