I’m surprised at all the people who are reporting “no waiting” in the self-checkout lines. Typically where I use them, there are 3 or 4 people waiting for each machine. One of which is often out of order. The good news is the average order is only a few items, and I sure won’t get in line behind somebody whose order is huge, who looks incompetent / out of it, or whose order is obviously lacking barcodes on many items.
ISTM that I can often use the human powered express line or a conventional cashier line quicker than I can wait for a self-service to open up. I’m not suggesting this is typical for everyone everywhere, but it happens a lot for me here.
I don’t often have trouble with the latest machines. But it appears many of my fellow shoppers do. Sucks to be in line behind those shoppers.
The two main supermarkets I use do not have them. I still like interacting with a human, and they are much faster than me when it comes to large purchases. If I’m buying just a handful of things (like under ten), I’m fine with self-checkout. Anything larger than that, and I try to find an acceptable line. Unfortunately, in stores with self-checkout, this will often mean there’s only two cashiers or so open. And, still, about a quarter of the time, I have some problem with the machine waiting for me to put an item in the bag, when I already have, or telling me to “take out an unexpected item” when I just put the damned thing I scanned in the bagging area. Or I’ve bought something that requires an ID, because apparently half the store is full of stuff used to make meth, or something.
That’s a major failure on the part of the store. At the very least, there should be a single line that feeds 4 or so self-checkout machines, so that no one person is stuck behind one person who gets stuck. But really, there’s no excuse for not having enough machines to virtually eliminate the wait. I wouldn’t want to use the machines at your store either.
Well, I’ve used self checkout at three places. Once at Home Depot, where getting the attention of an attendant was a major hassle. Once at my regular supermarket, where an attendant noticed i was slightly confused and fixed my problem before i even tried to fix it myself, and once at the unattended 24/7 farmer’s market. So I’d say it varies a great deal by location.
I’ve both underpaid and overpaid at the farmer’s market, and only realized it when i got home. (And I’ve twice left my card there by mistake.) I’ve overpaid them more in total than I’ve underpaid them, if you care. But the real issue is that I’m only willing to spend a certain amount of effort making certain I’ve done everything right.
Right. That’s the big advantage of them - you never get stuck behind a slow poke who also writes a check.
That’s what I do at Costco now. For the supermarket, when there is a bagger it is a person who really needs that kind of job. And the baggers are all super nice people. I’d prefer to bag myself but I’m happy that they have a job so I’m fine with them doing it when available.
In any case I wrote a paper that referenced the bin packing problem when I was in grad school, so I’m an expert.
Not only is the transaction recorded at my store, but the system also utilizes “artificial intelligence” to look for potential problems. That part of the system isn’t great at the moment, but it is improving.
Likely they have.
And if you’re doing it honestly and correctly that’s fine. If not, you’re mug is on camera stealing.
And yet… not only are the attendants keeping an eye out, our LP staff are randomly looking at various places in the store including, yes, the self-serve stations. The system incorporates facial recognition AI that will alert the humans if a possible match to a known thief shows up, as well as alerting for suspicious behavior.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the perpetrator will be escorted out in handcuffs right then. Apparently the store has had some success with going through legal channels that result in the police visiting the person at home, court dates, and copious video evidence in court.
Moisten your fingers. DO NOT do this by licking your fingers as that is disgusting and unsanitary. Either wipe your fingers against something frozen like a boxed dinner or use a dab of hand sanitizer. Doesn’t always make it easy but it does make it easier.
Yeah, at Meijer you really want to avoid back-and-forth motion or front-to-back motion over the scanners, it confuses the machine. I find a left-to-right or right-to-left motion across the scanner to be most successful with those.
For darn sure you don’t want to “flutter” in front of the thing. It will have a fit.
Yeah, that’s great unless you’re there early enough for the daily maintenance on the self-serve - you can NOT use the shop-n-scan app on the register lanes with a human being, your items will have to be re-scanned by the cashier. Which is really shitty on the part of the company if you ask me, which no one did.
At the place of my employment the units no longer scold you for putting things back into your cart. No more “item removed from bagging area” or “unexpected item in bagging area”. They turned off the scales, much to everyone’s relief.
Because that’s what our corporate overlords want us to do, and failure to comply can cause us problems.
UNLESS the customer says “put the receipt in the bag”, THEN we can do that without unfortunate (to us) consequences.
Remember, we’re on tape the whole work day. Failure to follow the rules WILL be caught sooner or later.
Actually… we’ve recently been given an inventory robot that now does some of the inventory work…
We can’t hire 'em fast enough to replace those who either find out that yes, you do have to show up on time and actually do some work or who are caught stealing from the till. Plenty of demand, supply is a bit iffy.
Part of the issue is not just the job in and of itself, but the physical effort required. Walking all over a store and picking items is surprisingly physical. Standing at a register a bit less so, and being the self-serve attendant less so. We have people who simply can not physically do an 8 hour shift at “fulfilling an on-line order” who can do a full shift at a register.
Although MOST of the “on-line/app” shopping is not done by our store employee but by gig workers - sort of Uber for groceries. Which is another bundle of issues.
Again - those people may not be employed by the store - most of the on-line/app orders shopped at my store are via shopping app services. Is that better or worse? Depends on whether or not you need anything like health insurance - those third-party apps where you’re supposedly an “independent contractor” offer zero benefits.
At my store we don’t get a picture of it on our screen at the self-checkout, just a line item in words. Sometimes the words used are… interestingly chosen. Sometimes ambiguous. It’s all a bit annoying, which is why when things are extremely busy they’ll increase the number of self-serve attendants. Sometimes.
A good cashier who runs a register 40 hours a week is going to be faster than an amateur, even a fast amateur. It’s a matter of practice. Unfortunately, not all cashiers are good at the job.
There’s a wide difference between making a genuine mistake (you, above) and having a stated philosophical stance that justifies theft (not you).
But if you’re at the computer, it’s giving you issues, and you say “fuck it, I’m not putting up with this” instead of paying what you owe? That’s always stealing. It’s black and white.
It’s kind of like sitting at a long red light at a lonely intersection in the middle of the night. You get frustrated, run it, and the lurking cop tickets you.
I was at the local store with the new checkouts and as I was about to enter the code for tomatoes I looked up and saw that tomatoes were already chosen on the display screen. Happened to be the correct tomatoes on the vine too. Not Romas or beefsteaks. That was handy!
Some possibilities occur to me: (1) There was a barcode on the tomatoes that you didn’t see, but the scanner did; (2) A video camera recognized the product through AI, (3) You accidentally bumped a selection screen, and the correct item popped up coincidentally, or ?
The first explanation raised my spirits - Because I thought someone saying: “ARGH, YOUVE gotten a tomato that was sent out by mistake from a GMO lab. Where they’re working on having the barcodes grow as an invisible thing on the peel. And eating these vegetables will alter your DNA so you’ll have a bar code on your forehead…”
For 15+ years now conventional live cashiers have been fumbling around with my fruits and veggies trying to find the one example with the PLU sticker still stuck.
So for years I’ve joked “Some day they’ll grow them with the barcodes right on the skin”. I’ve gotten a lot of different reactions to that, but none have been eye-rolls.
Now here in 2022 it seems we’re teaching machines to recognize tomatoes by sight faster than we’re teaching tomatoes to grow barcodes on their skins.
I may have missed this in the thread (I haven’t read every single post and came into it late), but when I was at the airport a few months ago, they had this visual scanner (at least I think it was visual–I don’t remember seeing any weird tagging or instructions to put the UPC code a certain way) I had never seen before. You just place your items separated from each other on a defined area, and it just figures out what everything is and how much you owe. That was pretty neat.
I do exactly the same thing with multiple items of the same kind. I want to do it with, say, yogurt, which are all priced the same, but I buy multiple flavors and I don’t want to mess up the inventory system. (I’m making an assumption that these are used for inventory, too.) So those I’ll scan individually, or I’ll group the vanillas together, the cherries together, the strawberries together, etc., and scan those as smaller groups, even though the entire group may be 65 cents each, regardless of flavor.
You are correct the bar codes are used for inventory, which is mostly (but not completely) automated these days. By doing it as you do - the proper manner - you keep that system up to date an accurate. Therefore it won’t think you bought 48 cherry-and-vanilla yogurt and re-order based on that, it will know it was 4 cherry-and-vanilla and 2 blueberry and 42 lemon and will know to re-order the lemon flavor so there will be enough on the shelf next time you come instead of nothing but cherry.
Obviously, an over-simplified illustration of the situation but it gets the idea across. We human cashiers know to ring things up by flavors (although of course some are just flat-out lazy and don’t care) but the customers frequently don’t. Yet they’ll complain if next time their favorite flavor isn’t on the shelf but something else is overflowing the aisles.
(We do have people who try to make corrections so as to avoid such results but the entire system is far from perfect)
