Wait, you scan your groceries at the actual checkout? 
:eek:
In all the stores I’ve seen around here(Sweden) that got self checkout, you get a handheld scanner when you enter the store and just scan the items when you add them to your cart.
We here in the States don’t have public hand scanners yet, generally. I think everyone just assumes that they’ll be stolen left and right.
Here’s a typical US self-checkout
Another of the US types
It gets kind of silly in some applications
We do it like this:
In the video she needs to wait for an associate to approve the liquor sale, but you can see the concept from the video. It’s an automated talking computer screen as opposed to a hand scanner you carry around.
I didn’t say they’d completely replace cashiers, just mostly replace them- Where there were, say, 10 checkout staff previously, there’d instead be three and one or two guys on the floor who can work the registers in an emergency.
The Australian banks have done an excellent job of trying to eliminate the job of bank teller and subsequently it wasn’t uncommon for me to get stuck in the queue at the bank for 30 minutes when I was doing the banking at my previous job.
Because the cashier lives in Australia, whilst the person manufacturing the checkout equipment lives somewhere like China or India?
Besides, automobiles created insane numbers of jobs (manufacturing them, servicing them, making tyres and parts for them, obtaining and refining petrol for them, selling petrol, etc). Self-serve checkouts don’t create jobs, they remove them. And there are still a few blacksmiths about, you know.
My time is valuable, but not so valuable that I want put lots of people out of work so I can save five minutes from my day. And, just as importantly, why am I doing someone else’s job for free? If I’m not getting a discount on my groceries for doing my own scanning and packing, then I’m getting ripped off. And supermarkets rip us off quite enough as it is without firing their checkout staff, getting us to do their jobs, and then pocketing the wage budget savings from all the people they no longer have to employ.
I confess to not really understand this mentality - and it’s been mentioned a few times already.
Surely, you don’t eschew your broccoli because of how many field-hands the harvesting machine put out of business, right? Nor boycott your favorite bottle of beer/juice/whatever, your injection molded blender, or particle board desk merely because they employ extensive (sometimes exclusively) automated labor?
They have that system in the grocery store I shop at. (Stop & Shop, in Massachusetts.) I purely love it.
Consider the ‘normal’ way of shopping:
- Pick the item up, put in it your grocery cart.
- After you’ve collected everything you want, go to the cashier station, pick each item back up out of the cart and set it on the convey belt.
- Someone (cashier, bagger, or likely you) picks the items back up after it’s been scanned and packs it into a bag.
- Someone (again, likely you) picks the full bags from the bagging station and puts it back in the cart.
(I swear, it sounds as insane as the system that used to be used in Soviet stores.)
Anyway, with the scanner it goes:
- Pick item off shelf, scan it, put it into a (hopefully reusable cloth) bag in your cart.
- After you’ve collected everything you want, go to the selfcheck out station. Use your scanner to scan the ‘my order if finished’ barcode posted at the station. Put you scanner in the rack, scan your id card and presto! The cashregister retreives your order from the data base, displays it, and asks how you want to pay. Swipe a debit/credit card or insert cash, and you’re on your way.
You only have to pick up each item once instead of four times. Much faster and less tiring!
Other advantages: you are in control of the bagging. Do you want the bags heavy or light? Do you want to have all the frozen items in one bag? Do you want your produce separate from everything else so you can handle that bag with care? Do you want a handful of things bagged separately to drop off at your sister’s? Whatever your preference, you get it exactly that way. 
Another advantage is that the scanner thing shows you the price you are being charged the instant you scan something. Very handy if you want to save money and don’t have a perfect memory. There was a great sale of potato chips, but was it Lays? Wise? Utz? What size? Just scan and descan until you find the sale item.
How does any of that justify not wanting a cashier to lose their job? “Hey, I just ate some ice cream so now it would be sensless for me to worry about the effects of eating this pie and these cookies and this eclair.” The cashier employment thing isn’t my reason for not using the scanners but arguing that “You’ve already put these people out of work so you’re silly for worrying about those people” seems like a strange point.
Anyway, I’m among those who hate the self-scanners because I can never accomplish the task successfully. Invariably, I eventually have some experience like:
Scan Soup
– Beep! Put soup in bag!
Put soup in bag
– Beep! Put soup in bag!
I did. It’s in the bag now.
– Beep! Put soup in bag!
How about I take it out and put it back?
– Beep! Item removed from bag!
Oh sure, THAT the scale notices…
– Beep! Return item to the bag!
Fine. Have the soup back.
– Beep! Put soup in bag!
:smack:
– Beep! Calling cashier for assistance!
I went to the self-service thing for this?..
I still use 35mm film and get it developed at K-Mart as well as using Digital Photos. There’s only one or two people in the K-mart photo lab and they handle digital camera sales etc as well. Even if they stopped doing 35mm film developing tomorrow, those staff would get to keep their jobs- they’d just be selling digital cameras and accesories instead of selling digital cameras & accessories AND developing 35mm film.
You can’t E-mail a lot of important documents, and- most importantly- you can’t e-mail physical objects to people. The postal system isn’t going anywhere and, if anything, E-mail and on-line shopping has actually boosted the use of the postal service.
And no, I don’t pay at the pump with my EFTPOS or Credit card when I buy petrol- I always go into the petrol station and pay the attendant.
Besides ensuring someone’s job isn’t replaced by a computer, it also means there’s a 100% guarantee that fuel is paid for, as opposed to paying at the pump where any one of a number of technical issues could prevent the transaction completing properly or the purchaser being charged the incorrect amount.
I sell a few books on Amazon and eBay and am able to print off my own postage stamps at home. This avoids all that endless waiting in Post Office queues where there never seems to be more than two windows open out of the available six.
All I needed to do for for this self-service facility was to register my debit-card with the Royal Mail and have access to an accurate digital scale (we have one in our kitchen). It’s so easy because you not only print off the stamp but the address label as well. Even that is easy because all you have to do is enter the person’s name, their house number and post-code and the rest of the address is created automatically.
I guess I just am unclear why a cashier’s job is more important than any of the other jobs lost by new convenience methods. For some that seems to be the main reason so I wasn’t sure if it was a boycott on saving jobs or just saving cashier jobs. Who knew cashiers were such beloved folks?
I’ve honestly only had trouble scanning one item at a self-checkout so I can’t speak of the difficulty you have encountered.
The point is that many people have lost their jobs due to these “new” and more “convenient” items.
There aren’t nearly as many people staffed in film developing as there was 15 years ago. Just because there are still two at your Kmart doesn’t mean that many didn’t lose their jobs.
Of course (duh!) you can’t email items to people so the post office is still needed. I really didn’t think that needed to be pointed out, but I guess it did. When they’ve raised postal rates here in the US they’ve mentioned that the post office handles less mail now due to people not sending correspondence as often due to electronic means of communicating including receiving bills and paying bills by email.
The postmaster general gave information to a congressional panel last month that the postal service here in the states was 2.8 million in the red last year and listed a decline in volume due to the internet as one of the reasons. They are considering cutting mail service back to five days a week because of it.
Also, you trust a human being to be more accurate ringing up your gas purchase than a computer? Of course computers can have an electronic issue that causes it to make a mistake but you don’t think those same issues can happen to the computer inside the station? Or human error? Come on.
If people don’t like using these new technologies, that’s cool. Saying it is to save a cashier’s job seems kind of an odd reason when I’m sure people are taking advantage of other things that have caused job decline.
In this part of the world, getting your photos developed has traditionally been handled by either your local chemist or somewhere like K-mart, or a conventional photo store which sold cameras and film. Chemists just stopped doing it (but still sell medicine), K-mart and photo stores still develop film, and the camera store now sells digital cameras and accessories as well as printing out people’s digital photos (K-mart does the same thing). So, the number of people who’ve lost their jobs around here as a result of the switchover from 35mm film to digital is “almost none”, at least as far as I can tell.
I haven’t got the numbers handy but I recall Australia Post saying business is UP because of people sending & receiving parcels etc as a result of online purchases. Bills here are still- generally- sent via mail and paid at the post office, so they’re doing quite well for themselves at the moment as far as I’m aware.
If the computer inside the station has an issue, you’re not potentially liable for theft (filling your car with petrol and driving off without paying for it being considered stealing). If the pump EFTPOS system has an issue, and the customer doesn’t notice, then that’s a lot of potential trouble for someone to find themselves in.
And yes, I know several people- honest people- who have had problems with the EFTPOS at pump system malfunctioning and not charging them for petrol, and them driving away, and having to do a lot of explaining afterwards. Yes, technically it’s the petrol station’s problem and not theirs, but really, it’s easier to avoid any potential headaches by walking 20 feet to the service station building and paying the guy (or gal) inside and getting a receipt at the same time.
Most of those other things that have caused Job Decline happened before we were born so there’s not a lot we can do about it. I can, however, refuse to contribute to its continuation by choosing the “staffed” option over the “Self-service” option wherever possible.
What are you people doing that’s so vitally important that you can’t invest an extra minute or two to gasp interact with another human being and make sure everything is done properly?
To put it another way: Think about what your first job was, or one of the many “McJobs” you’ve taken at one time or another to put food on the table or pay some of those bills that just couldn’t be left unpaid. Now imagine that those don’t exist anymore because people decided they’d rather save a minute or two than interact with another person. That might sound good to you, but it certainly doesn’t appeal to me.
In all the tanks of gas I’ve pumped, i’ve never had an issue with being charged the correct amount. Nor have I ever heard of it happening to anyone I know. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I have yet to have issue with it.
Things may be different where you are, but in the US, I don’t think this situation occurs with any appreciable frequency. The system works as designed, save for rare exceptions that I’ve yet to come across or hear about. It’s much easier for me to walk two feet to the pump, use it as intended, and get a receipt from the pump at the same time.
You can call me whatever names you like, but personal convenience is more of a priority to me. I think you’ll find that many agree, given the prevalence of self-service options across a variety of industries, and their rate of use. The only time I see people paying for gas inside, for example, is when they’re using cash.
No one ever said that I was doing anything vitally important. But I don’t like waiting in line, and quite often, the “full service” line is the longest. I know how to scan my own groceries, and do so every time I shop. I know that everything’s done properly because it’ll either scan and appear on the screen or it won’t. Really, it’s not a complicated process.
Why do I want to interact with the cashier anyway? Again, maybe there’s a regional difference, but the cashiers at WalMart here tend to be more interested in having side conversations with each other than with me. If I go to a cashier, I’m lucky to have him or her speak to me before announcing my total. With rare exception, they don’t want to talk to me, and I really don’t care to talk to them. I’m in the store to purchase items, not have a conversation. A machine can do that for me, faster and easier, than a cashier can.
And as technology improves, jobs will be had elsewhere. There will never be an all-machine supermarket – if for no other reason than some people simply don’t like using machines.
Presumably you don’t use vacuum cleaners, washing machines, e-mail, Amazon.com or drive a car. :eek: (Since you have destroyed the living of servants, maids, butlers, postmen, shop staff and coachmen. 
)
That Industrial Revolution really messed up the economy, huh? We all had secure jobs under the Feudal System! :smack:
That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’ve already explained how e-mail isn’t hurting the postal service (at least in Australia), and vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and cars were all introduced and part of life decades- over a century, in some cases- before I was born. It is, in short, a bit late to do anything about it now.
However, I can do something about check-out staff being replaced by self-service lanes. I can refuse to use the self-service lanes and instead wait an extra minute or two and get served by an actual human. It’s not like it’s costing me anything, after all.
So we can never automate anything? This just does not make sense to me.
Ultimately, technology is going to keep advancing. If they can use RFID to scan my entire cart for groceries and I can swipe my credit card and walk away without waiting, why should I wait for an employee just to make sure I have a job? Companies shouldn’t be forced to be inefficient and maintain more stuff just to create make-work jobs.
If dealing with a cashier is faster and more pleasant - which it is, now, in many cases - people will use that option. If it’s not, people will use the self-checkout. I appreciate having a choice and if a company decided to get rid of all cashiers, I’d stop shopping there except for small purchases appropriate for a self-checkout. Consumers have the power to choose what they want, and I’d prefer a company to reduce their overhead and costs so as to either drop or not increase my prices.
I’ll echo the folks who dislike grocery store scanners. For me, they just don’t work well. Sometime I can have a sucessfull hassle-free transaction, but about 75% of the time I’m fighting with it and end up with the cashier person having to reset something.
Maybe I’m buying flowers and there isn’t a place to set them that’s on the anti-theft scale. Maybe a UPC doesn’t scan. Maybe I’m buying booze so somebody needs to verify my age.
Even when the transaction gets screwed up it *might *still be faster than going through the live checkout. But it feels like a lot more hassle.
The self-scan stations at our local grocery have the machine prompt you with “Please scan your item and place it in the bag.” The voice is a naggy, impatient female, and it says “please” with all the sarcasm of a classic DMV window clerk. And it says it about 1.5 seconds after the last item is scanned.
There is nobody, not even the pros who work there, who can walk up, touch the start button, and scan 5 items without that bitch calling them slow & incompetent.
I’m one of the fastest talking, hardest charging, in a hurry assholes you’ll ever meet in person. I manage a some pretty high end software development for a living. I don’t take crap from a computer.
I like the idea behind them, so I try it again every few months thinking that surely they’ve installed vNext of the software by now & the darn thing will be more usable. But no …
The only other places I shop which have scanners like that are Lowes & Home Depot. They’re better, but only a smidgen. In UI design the details matter a LOT.
But there I’m always buying odd-sized things, or 6 idenitcal items, of which only 2 still have their bar code stickers stuck. Trying to repeatedly scan one item while juggling another stickerless one into the bag is stupid. I’m not interested in proving to a machine’s mindless satisfaction that I’m not stealing their goods.
Oh, for smeg’s sake, that isn’t the point I’m making and I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to repeat that before it gets through to people.
I’m all in favour of choice as well. I don’t mind there being a few self-service checkouts for the people with three items and a kid to pick up from sports practice. What I mind is when it turns into 20 self-serve checkouts, two manned checkouts, and groceries that aren’t any cheaper despite the customers now doing all the work. Having worked in the industry, I can tell you that’s exactly what the supermarkets- here, at least- have in mind.
Cars, vacuum cleaners, e-mail, and all the other examples people have thrown out here aren’t the same thing at all as what I’m objecting to here.
I’m aware of the Luddite Fallacy (which basically says The Machines Won’t Take Everyone’s Jobs because business owners will use the machines in addition to their existing workforce to expand their operations). The problem is that supermarket sales figures are more or less static- roughly the same number of customers per week, in other words. Having more checkouts isn’t likely to increase that number- there’s still going to be the same number of people in the area, getting paid on the same day, and buying the same amount of stuff (more or less). So, the supermarkets can replace their existing staff with self-service checkouts and make more money, since they’re not paying as much in wages.
It’s all well and good to talk about choice, but there are two and a half major supermarket chains in Australia here (Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi) and most of the market- 85%+ in my estimation- is controlled by Coles and Woolworths. So, if Woolworths decide to convert most of their supermarkets to majority self-service checkout, you can bet Coles will be doing the same thing by the following Thursday and that leaves Aldi who are pretty hit-and-miss stock wise (They’re fine for bread, milk, meat, and eggs, but it’s a bit of a gamble as to what else they’ll actually have in stock otherwise) and usually only have four people working in the store anyway.
In short, consumers won’t have a choice in whether to patronise a store with manned checkouts or not- average people go to their closest supermarket, generally, not the one four suburbs away, no matter how principled they are. That’s just a fact of life, unfortunately, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at the weathervane and make an inference about what’s likely to happen to large numbers of jobs in the bulk retail sector in the next 10-20 years.
It’s all well and good to say “Technology will create new jobs for people”, but vast numbers of people are employed as cashiers, and regardless of whatever marvels Science & Technology bring us, I can’t see anything popping up in the next decade or two that will give the cashiers replaced by self-service terminals an alternative form of employment.
Can’t they get a cheery waving robot to do that?
Well, they had better find something they can do that is actually useful to humanity. Seriously. There is plenty that needs doing. We used to need practically the whole population of the earth to pick crops for a living. We don’t need that anymore, so people can do other things. Cashiers would be wise to look into things that they can do that humanity will actually need done, like care for the elderly, teach school, do lab tech work.
The other fallacy you have going on here is that the replacement of cashiers with less expensive technology is not saving the consumer money. Yes, grocery prices are on a general upward trend. Yes, the owners of the stores act to maximize their profits. But money is invested in the grocery business based on the returns it can earn there. If it can’t earn competitive returns, there will be fewer grocery stores and that will result in higher prices.