This just happened to me with limes. They did indeed have those little stickers on them, inside the produce bag, which the scanner detected.
There is little I relish about the checkout line experience in general. Human cashiers can give you attitude, or worse, make small talk. Scanners generally take longer than human cashiers and frequently require human intervention for a variety of things.
I love self-checkout and always have. My primary concern is getting out of the store as quickly as possible.
But in California, you can’t buy alcohol that way, so I sometimes need to use the cashier. At the local supermarket, the cashier at the express lane at the hours I’m usually there is mute, and possibly deaf. It’s fantastic. No chit-chat, and she gets by just fine with intuitive hand signals. And she’s fast. I’d like conventional checkouts more if they were all like that.
I was at Target today, and one of the self-checkout areas had a line about 10 deep.
The cashiers, meanwhile (3 of them)? You could just walk right up, get checked out, and leave.
I don’t get it either.
I’ve never seen that at my local store. Of course, the self checkouts are for 20 items of less, so anyone who has more is forced to go through a lane.
And there is usually just one or two lanes open, unless it’s a particularly busy time, in which they may be as many as 4.
If I do self checkout, even with a line, I’m out the door within 5 minutes of queueing up. If I go through a lane, it’s close to a half hour.
The problem I have here in California is that my local grocery store has bought into self-checkout in a big way. They typically have one cashier working a register, and 6 lanes of self checkout. This means that if you want to pick up a six pack with your vegetables, you have to use the manned register. If my unscientific sampling is at all accurate, about half the shoppers in the store have the same problem. This means I am standing in line for 15 minutes with 6 people ahead of me, and six behind while a dozen people cycle through the self checkout.
I find this an incentive to go a couple of miles down the road to the Safeway to buy my groceries.
Or give up drinking…
All the little tags have tiny bar codes on them. Unless you are picking up produce that has not been tagged, scanning should be quite easy.
I understand the general objection to self-scanning, especially at Wal-Mart, but I prefer them to the days when one could walk into a busy Wal-Mart and see 500,00 UNUSED CHECKOUT LANES with two overworked and under trained cashiers.
I agree that this is a lame aspect of them (though really the problem is the law). I dunno, seems like they could use face recognition or something to verify age. Register once with an attendant checking ID, then use facial recognition to handle the rest. Pretty easy these days (especially just comparing against a reference image). Maybe require scanning the license as an extra check.
As you say it’s the law in California. So that means that if the store wants my money, they need to have someone there to take it.
That is interesting. In Virginia you can use the self-checkout but then the attendant has to come over to verify. If they are not busy, this takes only a moment, so it does not slow you down as much as it would waiting in line.
//i\\
That’s the way it in most places I’ve been in the US. But not California.
I can’t blame the store for following the law, but I wish they would make it more convenient for me by staffing up a couple of more manned registers. I wonder what percentage of their customers want to buy beer or wine (or rum, gin or whiskey - this being California) and how much money they are leaving on the table by short sighted economy in having more self-checkout lines and fewer manned registers.
Same here in Ohio, so whenever I have an alcohol purchase, I always scan that first, so that the attendant has usually come over before I finish my checkout.
I also pull out my ID and have it ready, rather than fumbling in my wallet as though this is the first time I’ve ever been carded, even though they usually don’t even look at it.
This showed up on my news feed the other day.
I’m highly skeptical this is a realistic problem.
It isn’t. Our loss prevention doesn’t confront anyone unless they’ve watched them, in real-time and without interruption, select an item off the shelf and attempt to leave without paying for it. Anything less than that and we’d be risking a lawsuit. Absolutely nobody in LP is going to be poring over hours of footage from months ago and track you down unless the amount of stuff you’re stealing is in the tens of thousands.
Also, I feel like this doesn’t need saying since this is the Post and the Post isn’t fit to line your birdcage with, but the sourcing on this article doesn’t amount to much more than “You guys, you have GOT to watch this TikTok I just saw”.
I’ve often wondered how I could get a job as a “journalist” where all I do is describe someone else’s TikTok video, or compile other people’s Tweets. Seems like a pretty easy gig.
While I was searching for that worthless “article” to link for everybody to express disgust over, I also found this more interesting and I think more valid article:
In this case, an AG tried to over-charge a woman under some kind of computer crimes law when she used a self-checkout to steal $80 worth of merchandise. It was overturned on appeal.
But I found this tidbit relevant to some earlier discussion here regarding scanning the wrong item, etc.
In one survey conducted by a coupon company of 2,634 shoppers, nearly 20% admitted to having stolen at a self-checkout — half said it was because detection was so unlikely.
Which is why bots & folks from Bumfuckistan working for pennies a day do it. Not comfortable housewives from your town using this one weird trick to earn mad money.
You’d have to watch a lot of TikTok videos. I’d rather dig ditches myself.
There’s a TikTok video about that.
I prefer them, but I’m a geek. I know the UI at most of the local stores as well as most of the employees by now.
Our local chain (Giant) did have two nasty bugs early on. If you tapped “OK” repeatedly, it would crash the program and produce a dump, and you’d get to rescan your stuff. That got fixed reasonably quickly, presumably because it was producing dumps. But it was easy to do because the terminals were so slow that you’d tap “OK” and think it didn’t take, so you’d hit it again.
The second took much longer to fix. If you put some produce on the scale, it would take forever to weigh it. Not being one to stand around, I always had my card (pre-Google Pay; heck, pre-EMV!) in my hand, and while it was weighing, I’d swipe it. That would wedge the machine hard, requiring a power-cycle. Since it wouldn’t produce a dump, IBM (the software provider) didn’t notice it. I would show it to a manager when things were slow and I had time; it took most of a year to fix. And meanwhile, I’d do it repeatedly, not (just?) because I’m a jerk but because it was an automatic reflect to swipe instead of standing there.
I told one manager who kinda knew me that if it would help, I could come in at 5:30PM and bork all the machines; he laughed but asked me not to, promised he’d report it. And it did get fixed shortly thereafter.
As a geek and software guy, both made me laugh every time.
The latest trend of asking you 27 questions after you’re done scanning is hella irritating. (OK, not quite 27, but: Any coupons? How many bags? Want to donate to charity?) I just want to get my receipt and get outta there!