i definitely don’t like it when I’ve got more than a few things. Among other reasons, the conveyor belts at the ones near us are a lot shorter (or nonexistent), so you can’t load all your stuff up then get to scanning / bagging . So every item is 1. grab from cart. 2. scan. 3. bag. And repeat. Overall much slower.
A human checker is just scanning / bagging while we load onto the belt, at least. Even better on the rare occasions when they have someone helping with bagging, but that is quite rare indeed.
I popped into the grocery store late-ish one evening for “a few things” and wound up getting much of what was on my main grocery list. I got to the front of the store, and saw to my dismay that there were NO manned checkout lanes, only self checkout. I was debating whether to just leave the cartful of groceries there and nope right out of there (dick move, especially with frozen foods and other perishables, but if the store makes that decision, they deserve it), when an attendant saw my look of horror and opened a lane.
Apparently that is their business model now at least for late-night shoppers. I can’t necessarily say it’s wrong; the store is never that crowded that time of day (which was why I was shopping then, as we were still under COVID exposure concerns).
I used to keep an eye on the lines as I waited in line, and if they seemed excessive to me – especially with many loaded carts – I would jog over to a clerk or the customer service desk and ask, politely, if they could open another checkout line due to the many waiting customers. They usually did.
What I didn’t say – for diplomatic reasons – was, “If you were doing your job, you would have noticed what I just pointed out, and opened another aisle without my prompting.”
I prefer the human interaction, and don’t think self-checkout more convenient or better. However, given the nature of business, this is the future (see Australia).
Canadian stores still vary a lot in how efficient it is. Walmart is heavily supervised and I have never had an item not scan or the machine randomly deciding I need help or the weight of the bag itself is suddenly an issue. Grocery stores are fairly good but may not list all sale prices or items. Dollarama has many good points but is a place where if you put the bag on the scale at any point, you will have to wait another three minutes for an overworked cashier to input some code.
No, but I have always pumped my own gas. I also chop my own trees, wash my own clothes, and clean my own house, all of which I could have someone else do. But I don’t.
I guess we can pick and choose what we want to do and don’t want to do. YMMV.
I think that was @fedman1’s point. It seems silly to protest self-checkout saying “I do NOT work there” when there are other examples we readily accept of doing things for ourselves in places where we do not work. Why don’t such people protest the very concept of a self-service grocery store?
My local Kroger seems to have gotten rid of the hand baskets. And while they have those smaller carts, finding one when I go there for just a few items is a rare event, so I’m almost always forced to use a full sized shopping cart and you feel stupid just placing a few items in one of those. While I hate to sound crazy, I can’t help but wonder if this was deliberate on their part to encourage me to buy more. (You know, not me personally, but shoppers in general. I’m not that crazy.)
This happened a while ago in my grocery store. When I asked the manager where the baskets were, he said they had to get rid of them because of shoplifting. People would fill them up and then walk out with them.
I prefer self checkout over attended ones now that they work OK and I’m practiced with them at least. They let me pack my groceries the way I want, un-squished. And they don’t feel like I’m being forced to engage in some ritual of humiliation and abuse for the attendant; machines don’t care about working conditions, and I know how poorly checkers are treated.
For all the anecdotes of people who seemingly need manual intervention every single time, I’ve worked in the retail business (either as an employee of a retailer or as a finance/operations consultant to retailers) for over 20 years. Any self checkout (SCO) configuration that triggered manual intervention more than 10% of the time would be a five alarm fire for the retailer.
The big retailers (anyone with hundreds of stores for sure) have lots and lots of data on this. Both from the systems themselves (number of times the employee card was used) as well as for either humans or intelligent systems reviewing video footage of the self checkout area.
There are people who have a high failure rate. They are usually people who will not follow the process either they think it is stupid or immoral, or because they don’t follow directions well in general. As we push more and more people to SCO, the percentage of transactions requiring intervention grows. Both because the “basket size” is higher and because the customers are more unwilling. You’re more likely to have an issue with twenty items than five, more likely to have an issue with items without bar codes or that have to be weighed (e.g. loose produce) and more likely to have an issue where you have to identify the item (produce, prepared food, bakery items).
SCO issues also indicate risk of shrink. Items not being scanned correctly, customers putting in the wrong codes (conventional zucchini vs organic ones). Retailers everywhere are constantly re-evaluating their SCO strategy and policy balancing customer service (speed of checkout, but also customer-staff interaction), labor cost and shrink.
I never did / don’t mind them, except CA appears to have a law prohibiting alcohol at the SCO. It’s a drag to have to wait in line just because I have a bottle of wine. I guess I found the one (and only) thing Floriduh does better than CA.
That happened some years ago at my local Wal-Mart. When I spoke to the manager (no, I’m not a Karen or Chad, but there are legitimate times to speak to a manager) she told me the same thing (that people were walking out with them). I pointed out that customers, like me, might not feel the absence of baskets was such a good thing, and maybe the losses are just a cost of doing business.
Dunno if my comment had any impact, but about a month later, a new, tall pile of baskets appeared and has been present ever since.
Pre-pandemic, my local supermarket had signs that they would open another register if there were more than three people in line. They don’t do that any longer and typically I only see three or four staffed registers, in addition to the eight or so self-checkouts. And the ten items or fewer staffed checkouts are almost never staffed.
I think we need to cut the customers a little slack; often the blame for confusion is due to the poor software design of the computerized machines, not the idiots operating the computers.
I am probably more computer-savvy than the average bear, having worked with technology at all levels from hardware low-level assembly code to hi-level database accounting software for a half-century. Yet I am often confronted at consumer levels with non-intuitive problems to solve.
I know that some functions in the self-checkout computers are restricted to authorized clerks; price changes, for example. I also know that some functions were only available to the clerks, not the customers. All of these can change. Example: I often buy multiple identical items, and don’t relish scanning each and every one when they are all the same, so I would call a clerk if there was a nearby one to enter the quantity and save time.
Then this option was removed from ANY operator’s options, including the supervising clerk.
I also wasn’t aware that any consumer could scroll thru the scanned item list to check on a scan or to delete a duplicate item. Then a helpful clerk told me about both of these, so now that I know, I need assistance much less. There is a learning curve for everything, no matter how knowledgeable you might think you are.
I’ll just point out that I’ve had times when I’m running a staffed register full time 40 hours a week, and I’m still rated one of the most fast and accurate checkers at my store.
I’ll now point out that I still sometimes struggle with the SCO’s. The systems are not always designed well, and that’s on the designer and purchaser, not the customer or attendant.
Today at self-checkout, I scanned one bunch of scallions, entered quantity=2, and set them on the bagging area. For some reason, the machine didn’t think I put down the correct amount and flagged a clerk. He came over, pressed a few buttons, and on the screen was a video replay of me doing whatever it was I did (correctly). Never saw that before. The clerk said he hated it because it really slowed him down, but he had to do it now whenever there was a machine conflict like that. Too many problems with theft.