“Jasmine’s Rules” - #Whatever: Never give a machine money. It’s a credit card or nothing. I learned that “courtesy” of the vending machines in my high school.
I would not have been surprised to learn that at first the machines saved costs over paying clerks for old-fashioned manual checkout. But once the public at large learned how to exploit the gaps in the machines, it’d be “Katy bar the door” on rampant theft.
One of the side effects of social media is that secret knowledge that used to take ages to percolate around the world now takes a day at most. That great little restaurant that just opened, this one “life hack” that really works, the parking lot nobody knows about behind the [wherever]? Before you’d never learn of it until a friend told you one-on-one. Now somebody posts it and everybody knows it.
The “honeymoon” of self-checkout may have lasted a number of years from when they were introduced. But now it’s definitely over. All the bad folks know how to steal, and marginally bad folks pressed by economic circumstances are becoming persuaded a little stealing is justified.
The cashiers at Aldi are so fast compared to what I can do that I prefer to wait in line rather than do self-checkout…
We have ways. Video, logic, time and amount of transactions… we can usually figure it out.
They’re being paid to NOT be confrontational. Being confrontational can get a retail employee fired.
One of the reasons the cashiers at Aldi’s are so fast is that anyone doing business with them has to put bar codes on all sides of the packaging, so the cashiers don’t have to fumble with turning boxes and bags around looking for it.
I have stolen produced from Aldi. There was no cashier, so we used the self-checkout. Had to weigh some bananas and something else I don’t recall. We scrolled through the produce list twice looking for what we had, and couldn’t find it. There were no employees available to help, so I made the executive decision that my hourly rate was equal to the cost of 6 bananas and whatever the other thing was.
A couple of days ago, my wife nearly absconded with 4 sweet potatoes, but an Aldi employee saw her confusion and told her that they were mislabeled and selected some completely non-obvious choice.
Well, apparently it can be done. . .
Thank you for sharing this!
Publixes around here have dedicated baggers, but only one for every 2 lanes. So when calculating the fastest lane, you have to guess whether the bagger will be helping someone else by the time you get to the front (plus, whether the cashier is quick or not. And, sometimes, whether the bagger is quick or not, but the slow baggers are no longer working at the Publix I usually go to.)
Was there no search bar to find bananas? Seems very odd that you couldn’t find bananas of all thing. Now star fruit might be tough to find on a scroll but bananas?
Around here, the self-checkouts invariably and automatically throw up a list of the most commonly-bought 10-12 produce items when you choose “Look Up Item”. Bananas are always high up on the list.
That’s what we thought - but with two of us looking, it seems unlikely we passed over it (but we’re old). It was not a user-friendly interface - just figuring out how to scroll was non-intuitive.
“Help is on the way”…and I’m on my way to another self-checkout. You deal with whatever has you in a dither, Machine Miranda.
4011 IME.
Yes correct! ( I had to look it up) 
I buy organic so 94011😁
A better solution to the “why don’t they put barcodes on all sides?” question is to have scanners that read all sides of the object. The scanners I encounter seem to be able to get the bc from at least the bottom or front of an object, even if it is not squarely planted on the glass. Also, at least one packager of frozen fruit (notoriously difficult to scan due to frost) prints the bc about 10 inches wide, difficult for either a human or a computer to miss.
The Safeway I go to hires mentally challenged people as baggers, and they all are wonderful. I prefer to bag myself (I’m with my wife who handles the money) but I’m happy for them to do it and be needed by the store.
In grad school I published a paper on a problem equivalent to the bin packing problem, so I figure I’m a bagging expert.
The only way to read all sides is to have some sort of portal or tunnel the products pass through. Which places a limit on the size of items that can be scanned.
Last week I was shopping at clothing store Uniqlo, and the way the self-checkout worked was you put all your items in the bin and it immediately displays the total on the screen. You don’t scan or do anything. Apparently there is an RFID chip in the tag and it can read it no matter how it’s placed or how many items. Even had the correct discount and clearance prices. Mind blowing!
Tres cool. They have some good stuff.
Sounds like how the library has us stack all the books to check out on the scanner thing and it reads them all in one go.
Someone may have pointed this out but at Target you can add a tip when using self-checkout. Since I haven’t done that it’s unclear if I would be tipping myself or the store!