My local Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market has scores of self check-out aisles. I always use them, thinking that this time, things will go smoothly. But they never do.
What I want to know is this: How does the machine know if I’ve bagged an item or not after scanning it? There’s a spot just past the scanner that says something like “touch bar codes here after scanning.” I try to follow this direction, but the machine keeps telling me to bag items I’ve already bagged. Then, when I do, I get some message about “unauthorized items in bag” and I’m stuck waiting for an attendant.
Sigh.
Here’s the question: How does this system work, specifically? What does it want me to do, and why? When I know, I expect to be able to do it “right.”
My experience with these things has, invariably, been frustrating. They never seem to work smoothly. Last time, with help, it took over 10 minutes. (I had lots of small parts that the machine refused to read.)
They’re particularly stupid at Home Depot. How the hell am I supposed to put 5 40 lb. bags of compost and 5 10’ long PVC plumbing pipes on the scale?
If I’m missing something obvious, please fill me in.
On what can only be described as a slow news day, a newspaper reporter here took the same 10 items and went through the regular checkout lane, the express lane and the scan-it-yourself lane. His finding: the express lane was 10 seconds faster than the self-scan lane. The regular checkout lane was only a few seconds slower.
What you are missing is that there are some things at home depot that cannot be easily dealt with in the auto checkout lanes. I recommend using the regular checkout.
If I don’t have anything big or bulky, I use the self-checkout lines at Home Depot, just for a chance to play with the gadget. Seldom have any problems with 'em, either.
Regarding sacks of concrete, sheets of plywood and whatever else won’t fit into the bagging area - there’s normally a “skip bagging” or “item removed” / “item not bagged” button on the screen for just this scenario. And hopefully, someone that’s buying an entire house piece by piece won’t try to use a self-check. You can’t just tell the machine “100 2x4s” - you’d have to scan each one separately, whereas a human cashier can key “100 @” and scan one.
These things are bad enough at handling produce that has to be weighed*, that I can’t even imagine how bad they’d be with a handful of loose bolts or something with a “cut tag” such as a sheet of glass, which may not have had a bar code on it to begin with, and requiring a manual entry of a SKU. The cashiers at regular lanes have enough trouble looking up the bolts, washers and whatever in a binder - holding the item up to outline drawings in the binder, finding a match, then using the gun scanner on the binder page. Do the Home Depot self-checks put up pictures of bolts on the screen?
At the grocery store, when you put an item on the scale, a “keyboard” pops up and you’re prompted to poke the first three letters of the item’s name. So, you put your tomatos on it, poke out T-O-M, and up pops pictures and names - just press the picture of what you’ve got - hothouse tomatos, roma tomatos, green tomatos, cherry tomatos, etc. I shouldn’t say they’re “bad” at produce - they actually are fairly clever in the implementation. The alternate would be the flip-charts the cashiers use to find the appropriate SKU for your tomatos. And they don’t always know either. Who hasn’t been in the checkout and heard a cashier call out “What is this?” and hold up some mysterious veggies as even the customer doesn’t know what they’re buying?
What really remains to be seen is the durability of the things. A now-gone Kmart near here had four self-checks. Within about three months, they were all wrecked by the customers. Someone smashed the screen on one, another had its card terminal / PIN pad ripped off and the others were suffering other problems. So far, the ones at my Albertsons are surviving undamaged.
Believe me, I do now. But there’s a disturbing trend. Fewer and fewer regular lines are open. When I was at a Chicago HD on Friday, there were no regular lines open. Also, at HD, I would estimate that over 50% of the shoppers have at least one problematical purchase, either because it’s too heavy, too bulky or unusually shaped. Think garden supplies, power tools, construction materials, appliances and furniture. Anything over 20 lbs or with one dimension over about 24 inches seems to screw things up.
I’m hardly Bob Vila, but I’ve been there 3 times in the last 10 days, and I had at least one big item every time. From looking around me, I’m hardly unusual. On the day that no regular lines were open, there was absolute chaos.
One of the keys to a happy check out is knowing when to avoid the self check-out line. Big, heavy, awkward or odd-ball items don’t work too well at the self check. Extremely light weight items like a single plastic washer don’t work well either because they often don’t weigh enough for the scale to measure. That’s when you get that “missing item in bagging area” message. There’s a trick to this, though. Just toss down a penny or nickle and it will register that.
I’ve never seen an occasion where there were no regular lines open.
That spot is to disable theft-deterrent tags that are usually placed in small but expensive items (like many over-the-counter drug items), so you don’t set the alarm off when you walk through those white gates when you’re leaving the store.
[slight hijack] I know those tiny plastic-encased metal strips stuck on the inside of items like I described above are the theft-deterrent tags, and the magnetic field of the spot that you’re supposed to stick the items on before bagging demagnetizes the strip before it goes out the door, but that’s not the same thing as RFID, is it?
[we now return you to your normal thread…]
My personal experience with self-checkout: If there’s no one in line, I’m using a debit card and I can go right up to it, I’ll use it. If not, I’ll find the shortest regular line, since no matter how many people are in front of me, at least half have no idea how to use the checkouts, a quarter have to go to customer service for new bills that the bill receptor will take, and the other quarter have about 20 or so items more than the limit of the line.
If I only have cash, even if no one is in line ahead of me, I’ll never use them since it is far quicker to count the cash out to a human all at once rather than feed one bill every twenty seconds or so.
Well, the only point in using the self-check terminals is to save money anyway – instead of deployng four cashiers with four lines, you just have one cashier supervising four or five self-check stations, to handle those “difficult” cases.
Sounds like your K-Mart just decided to toss the self-check stations, but didn’t bother to restore the extra cashiers.
Yes, it is weight-based, and that’s something the employees of the store should be taught. When I started with something I was checking out once, there was a basket in the bagging area. In the middle of the order, an employee removed the basket, and the system told me to put the last item “back in the bag”. So I took another nearby basket in the bagging area (correcting the weight problem, and now able to proceed), and the employee snatched that one too, and it once again gave me that same message. So I had to wait for the cashier, who was out for a minute or two, to correct it.
What was I going to do? Say to the teenage burnout employee, “Don’t remove the basket. The system, I believe, has a tare-value that it figures at the beginning of each order. If you remove the basket, the system sees it as negative weight, and thinks you’ve removed an item, and the only way to straighten out that confusion is to have the cashier get involved.”? I don’t think so.
Seldom have any problems with 'em, either.