Hate them and won’t use them if there is any option. It never fails that I have some sort of “problem” item every time I’ve tried to use the damned things and I end up waiting for a clerk to come by anyway. In general I don’t like dealing with machines when a human is an option. I don’t like to feeling of that I am pressing a button for a food pellet from some machine and I don’t like getting stuck with a non-standard item and no way of dealing with it.
I also avoid stores that restict me to interacting only with a machine.
Then that bottle is less than half full: you should take it back to the shelves, and get one weighing at least 2.2 pounds (or one kilo).
Hell Yea.
I’ve never been stuck behind the old man who has to remove his glasses from his front shirt pocket and clean them with a handkerchief so that he can see the check he’s writing out for $15 worth of peas and ginger ale at the self checkout. I think I may have heard the “Place item in the bag” spiel once at Home Depot, but I told the machine to shut the fuck up, and it did.
I love them in theory, in practice I hate them.
Perfect them, make them actually save me time and I will start to support them. Even though they have been around awhile now, they still seem in the infancy stage of development.
There is a grocery store that I stopped going to because of the self-checkouts. And they are the worst self checkouts ever.
They are the belt type, not the bag type, which should make it easier. And there is a kiosk full of store employees who allegedly are there to help with the self-checkout.
And none of them ever do a damn thing. The screen starts flashing “see cashier” and the big light to notify the store help starts flashing and they all ignore it. If you try to get their attention they pretend to ignore you. You ask them to come over and they don’t,meanwhile the line is growing and growing behind you.
My only solution at that point is to
A. put the item back in the cart and do without, just leave it in the store
B. Throw it on the belt even though it didn’t scan and steal it.
And they don’t have baggers at self check. I don’t mind bagging my own at full service because the cashier is working while I am but at this particular self-check no one else can use the register until all your stuff is bagged and removed and if I manage to get a couple of weeks worth of groceries to scan it takes some time to bag them, all while being watched by everyone else in line that can’t use the scanner until you finish bagging.
So now I just shop elsewhere, since this store got the self-checks they only have one manned register open and the line on that one is usually over an hour,
I’ve never had trouble with produce the few times I’ve had it when I use the self-checkout. If the produce was pre-bagged it had a barcode label so it scanned just like regular groceries. The “identify what you’re buying” process was never that complicated to me. Saturday I bought two bulbs of garlic that were priced at 2/$1; I had to touch the screen a few times to tell it that I was buying garlic and how many bulbs, then I had to put the bag on the scale; I presume that was so it could verify that I didn’t have 20 bulbs in it.
The only reason to have a self checkout system is to have fewer employees. Why would the store go through the expense of installing the system other than to minimize the number of employees?
The systems suck right now because of barcodes but that is a temporary measure. The future is RFID tags. These are small radio tags, the grandchildren of those tags that they have on expensive items in department stores, the differences is that each tag has a number associated with it, not just for the product and manufacturer, but each individual item. Every single Snickers Bar will have a unique number. So you place all your items in your cart or bag and visit the checkout system and it will read the entire contents of your cart or bag. No need to take anything out and scan it manually.
The RFID Revolution is going somewhat slower than was thought a few years back, but the US military and Wal-Mart have both made clear their plans to require RFID tags on every item they purchase. Those two entities are the biggest purchasers in America. Wal-Mart is the reason UPC barcodes are ubiquitous. They said they wanted them, and all the manufacturers complied.
All businesses want to employ as few people as possible. Someone mentioned gas stations? There is gas station here in Kansas City that has absolutely no employees during its regular hours of operation. Obviously someone comes by to fill the tanks and repair stuff, but there is no one that you can pay any cash to is strictly a credit card operation. There are a handful of full service gas stations, but they are the most high-priced ones. The others offer lower prices because they eliminated their greatest expense - employees.
ATMs eliminate teller jobs. Websites eliminate retail sales jobs. And buggy whips should be used to beat those who constantly bring that old chestnut up. While they are wearing whalebone corsets.
Like most of the other posters, I only use them when I have a small number of items. And that’s usually in one of these situations:
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I’ve checked out with my weekly groceries, then realize I’ve forgotten something.
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I want an item they have a limit on, but I want more than the limit. I first get only the limit of that item and go through self-checkout, take them to my car, then get another set of the item with the rest of my groceries.
Here in Chicago, at those lines you can get up to $50 over your purchases with your Discover credit card, the same as the attended lines. I’ve never done it myself, but I assume the machine itself dispenses the cash like it gives change for a cash purchase.
I prefer the regular checkout. I don’t like using a card to pay for groceries, bill scanners are notoriously finicky, and besides, I like having the modicum of human interaction from going through a regular checkout line.
Oddly enough, my otherwise-technophobic mother loves the self-checkout lanes at every store that has them.
IME, there is no issue if you go over the maximum as long as there is no one behind you. It’s like hanging out at a restaurant. If there isn’t a line waiting to get in, you’re not hurting anyone.
For short trips (20 items or less kind of thing), I usually check myself out at stores that offer it. I also check myself out if I’ve got stuff I want bagged in a particular way. (Say, if I’m buying cleaning chemicals, make up, ground beef, fresh veggies and a new shirt… I’d put the chemicals and make-up in one bag, ground beef in it’s own bag, and veggies and a shirt in the other. They don’t seem to understand that I don’t like chemicals with my food, or bloody meat with my clothes… hmm.)
If I have a lot of stuff, I won’t hog a self check line. So maybe, half the time I use the self checker and half the time I wait in line.
Yep, that’d be me you’re stuck behind.
I dunno, before self scanners, I always thought the stores were under-staffed. There were never 100% of the lanes open. I don’t know if the stores were too cheap to hire more people or if they just couldn’t get enough people to work.
Now, with the self scanners, there’s always at least 4 lanes open plus whatever lanes they can staff.
Don’t forget that people usually work in shifts of 8 hours. There are also call-offs and breaks. If you have people on shift from 9-5, and your busy hour is 5PM but from 9-4 you’re absolutely dead, you either have to pay enough people to cover 5PM properly and dick around from 9-4, or staff a happy medium so that you’re not wasting too much money from 9-4 and deal with the long wait times at 5.
If you have 4 lanes as self checkout, then it eases the wait times at 5PM and eases the payroll during the dead hours.
People are going to bitch no matter what you do, really.
Drum roll… To increase sales. You can increase your checkout bandwidth without employing additional people. You maintain the same staffing levels and open up additional checkout lanes that used to stay closed before.
I am friends with a manager of a local Shoppers Food Warehouse. He confirms that the number of cashiers has not changed since installing six self-checkout lanes. Adding self-checkouts has allowed him to move the cashiers that used to stand in those spots down to other stations that used to stay closed. In my last few visits to his store, this seems to be true. I notice that almost every single checkout lane is staffed, whereas in other stores, you’ll be lucky to see more than 50% of the checkout lanes open.
The great thing about self-checkout is that there is an element of natural selection at work. Incompetent boobs who can’t comprehend the simple processes involved in scanning groceries (in spite of having seen a human do it hundreds of times in their lifetime) will be intimidated and select the human checkout instead, leaving the automated checkout to us capable folks.
They still exist here at the local Jewel-Osco (a Midwest grocery chain.) Love them.
As for self-checkout, I’ll use it most of the time, since the teller lines are usually two or three people deep (since only like three or four out of twelve registers are opened these days, since the dawn of the self checkout), but I hate 'em, especially since I’m buying some adult beverage most of the time with my groceries and require human intervention, anyway. They’re also slower than tellers, annoying as fuck with the stupid “Item removed from bagging area” errors (no, really, I’ve placed my damn groceries in the bag), and just generally a pain in the ass to deal with.
Luckily, the grocery store I shop at most is well-staffed with cashiers and I get out of there a hell of a lot faster than if I were to scan a cart full of groceries myself.
Right now is the transitional period. The systems don’t work particularly well. The old and technophobic are using the staffed lanes. But eventually, the automated systems will work as well as an ATM. Before ATMs, all bank transactions required a teller. Now, nearly every contact the average consumer has with her bank is via ATM, web or automated voice response phone system.
Yeah, a friend of a friend was a vice-President of a bank. He swore up and down that they employed as many tellers as ever. I challenged him to check, and he did so. It turned out that they had only one tenth the number of tellers as they did 30 years ago, despite the massive increase in assets under management. They obviously had a lot more loan officers, and I’m sure some of those folks had risen from teller positions. But as a job category, it’s been literally decimated.
The next step is that all lanes will become self-check-out lanes, and the remaining people who used to work as cashiers will now be “customer service reps”, and will assist the customers who can’t figure out how to check out (shaming them in the process to encourage them to “figure it out already”). But as I said, once RFID tags are on each product, the shopper won’t even have to take stuff out of the cart. They will be presented with a list of everything in the cart, and all they will have to do is pay and pack.
We are all now bank tellers, typists, gas jockeys, soda jerks and perform any number of jobs ourselves that used to be performed for us by others. Supermarket Cashier is just one more job that consumers will be doing.
Love them. They also seem to have improved massively over the last few years. I remember when Tesco first installed them years back, and the note scanner would never scan a note properly, and the thing would keep repeating “Place item in bagging area”, until somebody came by to shut it up. There’s none of that now. If I only have a few items to scan, I’m out the door in less than a minute.
The local Tesco Express here has just removed two of their manual checkout lanes and replaced them with a bank of 12 self checkout counters. Whereas last year buying anything from the store in an evening was a nightmare, shopping there now, at any time, is actually convenient.
I think we’re quite a way away from having zero live cashiers. If nothing else, the slowness of bagging a large order at a self-checkout, even a belt-style one, makes that an unfeasible option if you’ve got a large order. They’d still need people to help with that. Admittedly, maybe a bagger is cheaper than a cashier. RFID tags are not yet cheap enough (I suspect) to make it worth putting them on everything. I doubt they’ll start tagging small things like greeting cards for example, and produce is tough also.
I tried the scan-as-you-go again the other day, with a somewhat larger order, and still dislike it. It took me 2-3 times as long to do the shopping. Checkout was again a problem - you’re supposed to scan a barcode on a sign by the self-checkout and the damn thing refused to scan. As with the day before, a store staff member had to try (and even she had trouble with it). This was after it took 10 minutes to even get a handheld - one rack said “none of mine are fully charged, go to the other door” and the one at the other door was simply not working. The produce area has 2 scales where you weigh your stuff, select it from a picture menu, and get a printed sticker. One of those machines was jammed. I had to constantly remind myself to scan items as opposed to simply tossing them into a bag (I don’t think I inadvertently stole anything :eek:).
Anyone know if there are studies showing what increase in theft has been seen in stores with self-checkout? Of the two Giant branches near me, one has it and the other (slightly smaller) does not; a cashier said their store manager decided not to install them because of concerns over theft. Any patterns regarding decreased prevalence of these units in neighborhoods considered higher crime?
You say that like it’s a bad thing. If the consumer gets a benefit out of the deal, what’s the problem?
Because, if this trend continues, we’ll have fewer consumers. It doesn’t matter how low the retail markup on a product is if the pool of potential consumers has shrunk because automation has rendered them unemployed.
Yes, but as I said earlier in this thread, RFID will enable you to bag as you shop. Your groceries will be bagged before you get to the checkout line. Or, at some point in the future - much less time than you might think - we’ll have robotic systems that can bag the groceries. It’s not a physical issue -dexterous robot hand development is moving quickly. Between RFID tags that will allow the system to know the exact size, weight, location and orientation of each item you’re wanting to purchase.
Actually, when I was working for Hallmark Cards back in 1997, they were planning to use RFID. They have a huge number of SKUs, constant product churn and a very difficult inventory problem. But they also have (as my boss said to me) “a product that costs six cents to make and sells for two ninety-five.” As soon as RFID tags break the five cent threshold, they’ll probably move on it.