The ones at Sheetz do.
dammit!
I hate you.
So, does she never use self-serve gas stations, but only with attendants? She never uses ATMs, she always goes to the cashier? She never bags her stuff, she lets a bag boy do it? I have trouble with this kind of thinking, because here in Europe, it’s clear that extra service by people costs extra money to pay their wage, either directly (gas stations with attendants have an extra fee) or indirectly (the prices in that store are higher evenly).
We don’t have bag boys in this country, the checkout operators bag the shopping.
There are no full service PETROL stations in this country, so there’s no choice there either.
Up until the last 5 years, there was no such things as self-checkouts in this country either. They’re being put in more and more places, but the cost of goods is not more expensive in locations that don’t have them. So in that regard, she does have a (kind of lame to me) point - to use the self-checkout there’s no saving to her, but a saving to the company that’s not being paid on. There’s no benefit to her and in return she has to do her own scanning and bagging. So she choses to go through the staffed checkouts.
If they actually worked reasonably well, the point to using the self-checkouts would be a quicker checkout, without having to wait in line.
There was one chain (can’t remember which - KMart maybe) that installed self-checkouts 5-6 years ago. After a few bumpy trips through them, I was getting a sense of what things would be a problem in the self-checkout, and which things would sail right through.
So a few weeks later I went into one of their stores, picked up a number of things that I knew would be safe in the self-check aisle, headed to the front of the store to waltz through the self-check lane…and they’d pulled it. It was gone. So I had to wait in line while a slow-as-molasses cashier rang up three customers in front of me. :mad:
Yes we do, and yes there are. Publix stores all have baggers. New Jersey and at least one other state require that gas stations be full service.
Which is great for us, but Sierra lives in Australia.
Damn those with ambiguous location fields!
See - it’s still in the process of introduction, and so the store still employs cashiers, too. I don’t remember the introduction of ATMs, but in the last two decades, banks started charging a fee when you withdrew money from a teller inside instead of using the ATM (they got slapped down by the courts, though, who ruled that an alternative method must exist to get your own money, and esp. to pay money into your own account). They also started charging fees with accepting paper transfer notices, because it requires a clerk to scan in/ check it *, as opposed you doing it at the self-service station/ over the internet/ telephone.
- they are supposed to compare your signature on file with the one on the paper. Actually, they do a lousy job, several people have badly forged these transfer papers and the banks didn’t catch them at all.
I used a touchscreen at Mel’s Drive-In in Universal Studios Orlando, it was a godsend.
I was ordering for 14 people so I could tailor each order without problems and didn’t feel like I was holding anyone up.
There were a couple of guys ready to help you if you needed it, the interface was very good and simple. In five years, when everyone has a touchscreen phone and PC, they’ll be a walk in the park. We customers are not that stupid, some smug motherfuckers are.
I’m pretty sure it can’t clean my turd out of the urinal either, but who knows. The future may be even more magical than we think.
I have seen kiosks in movie theatres, where the transaction cannot be simpler.
If the theatre has tellers AND kisosks, its great. Most people use the tellers and I go to the kiosk and breeze right through.
When the theatre uses ONLY the kisoks…I want to kill.
Dont know what country you live in but I can name [or find, however you care to look at it] at least 3 full service stations in eastern Connecticut … one is in my tiny little 2500 person town.
WE do not
The thing is, the UServe scanners can be defeated by a wily 9-year-old. Just . . . um . . . consider that the bagging area scale does not know the difference between a liter of wine and a liter of sparkling apple juice. All it knows is you scanned in an item anyone can drink, and an object of the appropriate weight was placed there.
Not an issue in MN.
That’s my main concern; it’s a problem in general at the moment. We’re lacking jobs that require few skills. Makes it hard for people to find work while training for the more highly-skilled jobs, and pushes people with certain learning disabilities out of the workplace.
But having said that, what I’ve noticed with the self-service checkouts in the UK is not that there are fewer staff, but that the queues are shorter. At some times of the day it’s quicker to go to a manned checkout far from the door than queue up for the self-service checkouts that are always near the door, at peak time the self-sevrice checkouts are always quicker. They’ve also gone through some teething problems, mostly due to the customer getting, er, accustomed to them, but are pretty much fine now.
They do require staff too - my local medium-sized Tesco’s usually has one member of staff for each four self-service checkouts, to punch in the ‘this is OK’ code for alcohol and DVDs and the like and to OK things when you get ‘unexpected item in baggage area’ messages.
So I reckon self-service machines alongside normal manned tills would work in the UK at McDonald’s.
This discussion kinda reminds me of people in the US saying that grocery home deliveries are too difficult to be realistic when, in the UK, they’re a part of life. It’s odd how… behind you seem to be on some things, while being ahead on others. Guess the same thing could be said from the US’s perspective.
Hopefully the attendant is paying a bit more attention than to miss a bait and switch.