Self-, as described earlier.
Maybe it’s obvious to everyone else, but since I’ve never seen a self-checkout system, it isn’t obvious to me, but there appears to be a dual system for those lanes: a few-items line, where each item is accounted for individually by weight as it is scanned and bagged, and a conveyor-belt line for many items, where the bags are not weighed and things move faster. Is that the way it works?
If so, why is the few-items line so obsessively concerned with individual item accounting and the many-items line not? The bag weighing sounds extremely clumsy and slow compared to conventional clerk lines.
It’s really not; at least I don’t have a problem with it. It weighs about as fast as I put them in the bag.
The self-checkouts are limited to 15 items here. I usually use them for after work shopping.
Re the lack of impulse items: the King Soopers I shop at decided that was a serious lack, and put candy and stuff on half the staging area. So you had a place to put your handbasket, but nowhere to put the gallon of milk or 12-pack of soda that was in your other hand. Fortunately, that was short-lived; I must not have been the only complainer.
I’m the queen of that. It drives me nuts.
I think the Home Depot says “Unexpected item in the bagging area” over and over…or “An item has been removed from the bagging area”.
I love the self checkouts since there usually aren’t technologically illiterate people in those lines anymore. We’ve had self checkouts at Home Depot and Winn Dixie (grocery store) for a few years now and the people who are incapable of operating them just don’t try anymore, or maybe they’ve actually learned by now.
My first time, at Home Depot, I had 1 item and there were two regular registers open with lines running all the way back to the plumbing dept. So I opted for the self-checkout. 3 of the 4 stations had big orange traffic cones on them, so I guess they were broken.
There was an confused older man in front of me trying to buy lumber and concrete…okay, maybe I"m exaggerating…whatever it was, it had a bar code but was a really irregular shape…like maybe a 14 foot piece of shoe molding. The scale didn’t seem to want to weigh it because when it was leaned against something, the weight wasn’t right and then the man tried holding it perfectly upright and that didn’t work either. Then he proceeded to remove the other dozen items from the scale, which set off all kinds of alerts. Then he rearranged everything again and finally got a reading. It was his LAST ITEM. Then he started moving stuff around again.
This happened three or four times and I could taste blood in my mouth from biting my tongue and not screaming “STOP FUCKING WITH IT AND SWIPE YOUR CARD”. When everything on the scale came to rest, he seemed to be having trouble paying and I decided to help him out…the screen was in French.
Now I realize that there are a small handful of people 200 miles away in southwestern Louisiana that still speak Cajun French (and they probably wouldn’t be able to read or understand regular French anyway) but why the hell is French even an option? This is New Orleans…unlike the movies like to portray, there are no Cajuns in New Orleans and nobody has spoken French since my Grandmother was a teenager back in the 1920s…this idea reinforced by the fact that none of the 20 or 30 people who had piled up behind this mess could translate the screen and the icons didn’t even vaguely resemble cash, credit, debit or check. Anyway, I digress…
There was nobody monitoring the self checkout and finally someone came over and managed to get the language to come up in English. The employee disappeared and then the guy whips out the dreaded checkbook.
At this point, the 40 or 50 people in line behind me, who all happened to be wielding hammers, blow torches, 30 lb. bags of fertilizer, razor knives and other dangerous Home Depot type stuff were turning into a restless mob. I stepped back, defenseless with my 2-pack of yellow floodlight bulbs, hoping nobody thought I was with the guy.
I don’t remember much after that. I woke up on a stretcher near the Pro Checkout and they were carrying people out in body bags and there was a lot of blood…okay, maybe not…the guy eventually got himself and his stuff out of there and normalcy resumed.
At that point, I decided that I would never use a self-checkout again…until the next time I went to Home Depot and they had their usual 2 lines open with 300 customers waiting to check out. I used the self-checkout without incident and have done so every time since then without any problem whatsoever.
I like them. Not because they are quicker, even though they usually at least seem to be (as there is rarely a line). I just think they are fun – I like to mess with stuff. Anyway, the point is mostly moot anymore – most of the places around here that had them have given them up. Home Depot is the last holdout. I always use the self-checkout there; but since we usually go to Lowes instead, it doesn’t come up that frequently.
I just type in the product code. I means I have to be sure that out of five apples I grab at least one that has the sticker on it that says #4032. But a couple other produce items have the number on the price sign, but no sticker. I have asked a manager at one local store to provide those little mini pencils and paper tags like over at the bulk section. So far, fo luck. So I just grab a bunch from the bulk food section and tag the rest of my produce. I can now go through self checkout really quickly.
ETA: I always feel guilty though because I feel like I’m taking away someone’s job. It’s not always easy to find unskilled labor type work. I keep thinking I got a student or young single mom fired from her checkout clerk position by using that system. Why pay a salary when you can get customers all enthused about beeping their own stuff?)
In theory, it should help those people by keeping prices down for their groceries. Umm… just like self-service fuel didn’t.
My only real experience with self-checkout has been with Albertsons grocery stores here in San Diego.
When they initially became available, I found I liked using them at least partly because I’m a geek and this was a new techie tool. I’ll admit I also appreciated having full control of the checkout process.
But some time last year apparently a revision in the system’s software was installed and my experience with them went all to hell. The main problem was it became all too easy while processing my major weekly shopping through the system for it to go into a loop that the on-duty clerk would have to clear. This frequently happened more than once in a single visit.
The nature of the loop is that it firsts complain about “Unexpected item in bagging area. Remove item from bagging area.” So I remove the last item I had put in a bag. It then starts complaining about “Item removed from bagging area. Return item to bagging area.” So I put the item back. “Unexpected item…”
GAAH! A pox on that! So, for my major weekly visits to Albertsons I now only use the standard checkout. I do find if I have to make an additional visit during a week for just a very small number of items I can use their self-checkout without any problems, but I’ve given up on it when I have a large number of items.
But that’s a watermelon. 
Why would you not have to wait for the people in front of you? When I do self check-out at the grocery store, I often have to wait for one or two people in front of me.
-FrL-
Just an anecdote and hijack, but this thread reminds me of my experience in the Army years ago. When we had free time, we “soldiers” often worked in the base commissary as bag boys. There was no pay; we worked for tips only, but the shoppers were generous, at least compared to our $1.40 daily army wages (really!). The average tip was a quarter per bag, and since retired military personnel living far away often made a monthly trip to the base for family supplies, many shoppers had more than one bulging cart to check out at once.
No self-checkout here. Our small store had only four checkout lines, each manned by a bitchy woman who had worked there all of her long life and considered us bag boys expendable and beneath contempt. Keep in mind that an Army commissary does a volume business but carries only a fraction of the varieties of food of a typical supermarket. One brand and size of coffee (generic, giant), one size & brand of paper towels (generic, giant pack), and very limited and basic cuts of meat. The volume in our small store was so great on Saturdays that the meat counter was completely restocked 4 or 5 times between 8AM and 5PM, when the store closed.
No barcodes, either. Prices, which rarely changed over long periods of time, were on stickers, but the checkers knew them all by heart and ignored the stickers. Each worked so fast that it took TWO bag boys working ass-fast to handle just one line. We even came in early to prepare double bags in advance so we wouldn’t be slowed down during the rush.
So I’m not impressed by modern scanners. I’d pit one of our bitchy ladies against the fastest scanner/checker any day.
The belt weighs items - it you dare to place the item directly in the bag at the end, ‘please place scanned item on the belt’ is the nag. And the ‘unexpected item’ sometimes triggers the belt going in reverse, too, which is quite a surprise.
That’s not the case. Both systems have scales, it’s just the smaller version has obvious scales below the bagging area whereas the larger ones have scales built into the conveyor belt mechanism. You can’t take an item over the belt and straight in the bag or the machine registers an error, it must sit on the belt first.
OK. So it still seems like the process is slowed down by the necessity to register/scan/weigh each item individually (by spacing them apart sufficiently?) and that’s where I don’t see how it works fast. Ordinary checkers don’t have this additional step, and can shove most items thru the scanning section as fast as they can physically move them. Self-checkers seem limited in comparision.
I guess I’ll have to wait until the technology comes to my town to see it, try it and fully understand it.
I will never be able to do the checkout thing faster than a checker. They do it hundreds of times each week. I might do it once or twice a week. I leave the experts to their expertise.
Amen. If it’s more than a few items or the lines at the real checkouts are really long, then the real checkouts are faster.
Anyone live in a state with those god darn automatic can return machines? We have a stupid “deposit law” in Michigan whereby we’re charged 10¢ per beer/soda-pop can, and we’re refunded that 10¢ when we bring it back (which causes higher prices and serves as a tax for the state for unreturned cans, and only nominally maintains the highways a bit cleaner). It used to be that we could return two cases of Labatt, have a human look at those two cases, and get a ticket worth $4.80 that you could cash in at the checkout. Now instead of that system, you have a bank of machines (of which only 50% work at any given time) that you’ve got to individually inserts the cans into. Yup, one at a time. Old, nasty beer and soda pop gets on your hands and shirtsleeves. It stinks. The machines accept cans at about 1/4 the speed that I can feed them. It’s also embarrassing because I hate it so goddamn much that the cans accumulate for months at a time until I fill two carts and look like a major lush ;). Yeah, maybe this should be a pit thread, but I’m really just trying to describe yet another automated system that grocery stores use these days. Hell, the only reason I return them at all is because I know that if I don’t, it just stuffs the state’s coffers.
We used to have bottle return in Illinois, about a million years ago. I live near an aluminum recycler, and when we get a big garbage can full of empties, we haul it over to him for the cash. Since Mr. K quit drinking, it takes us a couple years to accumulate a canful. Which is fine by me, as the can man’s digs smell really, really bad.
I tried a neat self checkout version of this in a grocery store once. When you enterd the store you grabbed a hand held scanner from a rack, then you would scan each item you purchased as you put it in the trolley. (Either scan the bar code on the product or the bar code on the tag on the shelf) This way you could see exactly what the things you’d purchase would cost.
When you then got to the checkout machine you just plugged the handheld scanner into the unit, the total would show up and you’d pay with a VISA/Mastercard or similar. Done in about two seconds, and you could proceed to bag the groceries. There were occasional spot checks that owuld take some time, but those were rare as far as I understood.
This method really saved you time - I wish they could implement this in every store soon. (Havent seen it in the town I live currently)
I hate this, too, and I think the cutting down on shoplifting idea gets thrown all to hell at this point. In the stores that I go to, it seems that the managers are so used to this loop occurring and being about nothing at all, that they just come and punch in their magic codes and allow me to continue without really investigating what triggered it.
I also wonder why people don’t punch in the wrong codes on purpose to save a little money. If I’m buying a pound of red peppers, but I punch in the code for green peppers, I’ll save $2/pound, but it will weigh the same. The store I go to has a sign that indicates these checkouts are monitored by closed-circuit cameras, but I don’t know if that makes a difference in attempts to thwart the system.