I totally get the convenience at a fast food (“FF”) place.
And around here substantially 100% of the FF workers have Standard US English as their third language at best, even if they speak only English. Interacting with an ordering kiosk can eliminate a lot of aural / verbal miscommunication which is a benefit to me. At the expense of me dealing with a frustrating UI that is illogical, badly designed, and differs wildly for each brand of FF restaurant. And seems mostly to be designed to trigger upsales, not help me enter what I want, not what they want me to want. If I ate at e.g. BurgerMonster every day I’d learn their system’s idiosyncrasies. But when it’s months between visits odds are they since upgraded their software to be even worse.
When I go to a restaurant I’m generally looking for a service experience and a chance to interact with people. Even if this is a casual lunch that’ll only take 30 minutes. If I wanted the moral equivalent of microwaving a frozen dinner, I’d do that at home.
Time for a nostalgic anecdote. When I was in the US Army long ago, I was in a position with a lot of free time and there was a commissary across the street. A (military) roommate of mine was quite a hustler, and he said we could make some money by volunteering at the commissary as long as our commanding officer didn’t mind (he didn’t). So we would show up very early in the morning, and if we were chosen for the day by the retired sergeant who run the bag boy department, we worked nonstop until the commissary closed at 3PM.
Bagboys worked for tips only, and we put a can at the end of the checkout lane with a small sign about this. We found that the average shopper tipped about a quarter for each full cart, more if we helped them out to their car. Doesn’t sound like much, but since our salary from the army was (I kid you not) $1.50 per day before taxes, those quarters can add up.
Several things made this store different from a typical civilian supermarket. It was small, and carried a very limited product line, but due to the extreme traffic, most shelves were completely restocked at least once per day. The meat counter sold out at least twice.
Many retired military would drive from their homes in the mountains down to the city once a month and stock up, so Saturday was the busiest. They also would carry a shopping list from their neighbors, so it was not unusual for one couple to have 3 or 4 full carts to check out.
This was before barcodes, but since the prices rarely changed, the stock was so limited, and the 4 cashiers had the same job for years, they had all prices memorized. They could punch in the price and push along the groceries so fast that it took two very quick bag boys to keep up with them (and they had no patience for slowness). We learned to prepare a pile of folded double bags before the store opened, because the time it took to make a double bag on the fly was not acceptable.
So ever since, I have never balked at bagging my own groceries. Everybody else looks so slow!
“Manned” in this sense comes from the same root as “maintain” or, in French, the word for hand. LIke “niggardly,” it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means. /pedant
Our Thai place is not FF and not the gastronomical equivalent of microwaving a frozen dinner. It’s the best Thai in our area and we have a lot of choices. Their staff all speak perfect English.
Their tablet ordering system is simple and logical and does not attempt to upsell. So I guess that explains my differing experience.
Here’s why you don’t understand. You’re looking at the wrong metric.
They do NOT care how long you wait in line to pay. Not at all. It costs them exactly zero for you to stand there for 15 minutes (or 45 minutes at Costco on the weekends). The moment they start caring is when you, and lots of other customers, simply abandon your carts and walk out without buying at all.
We all get the service we demand. Never more. And often less.
The solution to inadequate checkers is to abandon your cart unpaid, tell the manager why you’re leaving, and that you don’t intend to come back anytime soon. And certainly not until you hear via the grapevine (AKA TwitFace) that their store really has no-waiting checkouts.
THAT is the very first thing that might, just might, be able to attract some attention to how their penny pinching is hurting them, not just you and me. Because you walking out without buying IS the first moment their penny pinching on staff has ANY adverse effect on them.
Most of us won’t do that. I do. I may be tilting at windmills, but it feels damn good. There are stores that care more about adequate staffing than they do about penny-pinching. Shop there or expect the worst. Which will only get worse over time.
I started to use the self-checkouts at the beginning of the pandemic. When it started, the stores limited the number of customers, so we’d queue up outside, and wait our turn. They also didn’t allow us to bring our own bags so we had to use the ones for which the store charged ten cents each. I thought that was unfair, so I resorted to using the self-checkout and claiming not to have used any store-provided bags. Later, we were allowed to bring in our own reusable bags but I continue to use self-checkout.
For produce, I scan the little sticker when possible but when not, I try to memorize the PLU code (for example, 4628 for the bundle of three kohlrabi).
I worked for Safeway for a long time so I have always been comfortable with self-checkout. I don’t even have to use the produce lookup menu, I still remember all the PLU codes (most produce now has a sticker on it with the PLU). Sometimes I politely call them out to the person in front of me if I see them searching through the menu and have a lot of produce. Gets us both out of there faster.
This “technique” is basically theft, and a discussion of it violates the SDMB Registration Agreement’s rule against encouraging illegal acts. Since you didn’t technically encourage it, this is just a mod note. But try to avoid things like this in the future.
IIRC the reaction of the regulars when that drive-by occurred was either utter WTF?? incredulity or vehement accusations of thievery. IOW, we collectively did the right thing then. And you’re doing it now.
I recommend saying ‘staffed’ instead of ‘manned’ and save yourself the time it takes to explain a term that is almost universally misunderstood. Easy peasy.
I’ve loved them from day one. I hate waiting in line and am more than capable of checking my own purchases. Plus, I tend to be strategic in my shopping…get it, get what I want and get out. I rarely have large amounts of stuff even when shopping for groceries. So self checkout saves me time and supports my shopping style.
How much power do you think the manager has over corporate policy?
I’ll give you a hint - none.
I work in a grocery store that didn’t have self-checkouts when it opened and does now. I love them. The talking point that they take away jobs from human cashiers is false - we don’t have any fewer cashiers now than we did before we got them, and they’re a godsend during early/late hours when we might only have one or two checkers on duty. Before we had self-checkouts, I’d often have to stay an hour or two late to finish my stocking because I had to jump into a checkstand for a couple hours every day when things backed up. These days I almost never have to jump in and I can get my work done early enough to do some extra stuff that tends to get neglected.
Honestly, a lot of the problems people seem to encounter with the SCOs are of their own making - I routinely see people trying to put items in their cart mid-transaction and ignoring the prompt to put it back, or trying to scan multiple items without putting them down, or pressing “skip bagging” for every single item which makes the process take much longer for them, or waving their product in front of the screen instead of the barcode scanner, and so on. For every one machine error I have to fix, there’s about ten customer errors that could be resolved by simply following the instructions on the screen and doing what the robot voice says.
Now that they finally work well, I like them a lot. Even the ones at Costco, on busy weekends. The cashier overseeing the self-checkouts often ends up scanning my items for me, anyway, esp if I have something large.
As often as not, now, I shop at Amazon Fresh. No checkout at all. The store knows what I’ve put in my cart, and I just breeze out the door. Sweet!
I will always chose them over a human cashier. It is much easier for me to quickly scan and bag my own stuff than having to hand everything over, and wait for them to do it. The self checkout lines are often shorter as well.
From what I have seen of other people using them, most of the errors people get are their own fault. And the whiny “I don’t work there!!! I’m not bagging my own items!!” just reeks of boomer entitlement.
Mainly because when I don’t I wind up behind people who apparently don’t understand how money works, and turn a 10-minute shopping excursion into the 7th Level of Hell.