I was checking out some groceries today, and the person next to me was clearly doing something the machine didn’t like.
“Please scan the item before putting it in the bagging area”.
Over and over again. I started thinking about what an entirely bogus thing “self-checkout” is. It seems to have exactly zero benefits to the consumer. No bagger, no help if you’re missing a price sticker, not even ample room to put your groceries while you scan. You’re left with exactly one square foot of space to do this job.
Is it making groceries cheaper? After all now they don’t have to staff as many cashiers now. Nope! Groceries are higher than they’ve ever been! All that delicious margin gets sent straight to our benefactors at the Kroger corporation. Where would we be without them!
Not to mention the thing is calling you a thief every five seconds. The ones by me even film you and if they feel you’re swiping something, it will show a slow motion video of you in the act and it tells you to correct your mistake.
So it’s work that I have to do. That nobody is getting paid for. And that is taking videos of your face and your behaviors. And it’s constantly announcing that you’re a bread thief to everyone in the store.
And for what? To increase unemployment of course! It’s one of those things I can’t believe collective society has taken sitting down. It’s one of the most egregious examples of pure corporate greed at the expense of the consumer experience, all the while cutting swaths of entry level jobs.
I only use self-checkout if it isn’t annoying. Albert Heijn in the Netherlands has self-checkouts which are mostly quiet. You can scan your groceries there, or get a scanning ‘pistol’ at the entrance to do it beforehand. You are checked at random by underpaid 16-year-olds, the only real downside. This is really annoying when you’ve already packed your groceries, as they have to scan them all to see if it matches what you’ve scanned yourself. And those 16-year-olds as a result have to deal with annoyance and even aggressivenes by customers.
On the other hand, self-checkouts at the Lidl here (used to) show you on film and be overly loud, every step being explained at volume level 10. If self-checkout sucks this much, I’ll just wait in line at the normal cash register. I’m pretty sure it has improved there as well in the meantime, but I now go to the cash register at Lidl anyway.
This is really annoying when you’ve already packed your groceries, as they have to scan them all to see if it matches what you’ve scanned yourself. And those 16-year-olds as a result have to deal with annoyance and even aggressivenes by customers.
If they are paranoid people arent being honest, maybe they shouldn’t have self checkouts. Personally i would just ignorem and walk out. Once i paid for it, its mine.
Interesting thought, but the ‘you’ve been selected for a check’ (or however it’s phrased) message comes up before you pay.
Which case you just walk away.
One of my pet peeves has been stores blocking off half the self checkout except when there’s high volume of customers. I didn’t need to be waiting in line. You have perfectly fine self checkouts there, but no, I have to wait, and possibly walk to the other side of the store for no good reason.
Yes, also these are the times when the people self checking in front of you are all the people in town who haveliterally never seen a barcode before in their life, so they spend 5 mimutes puzzling over each item.
Like shit man, shoce all your shit across at once, the checkout will get it. Moce move move.
Dude makes my blood boil, there’s a store I go to very often near my house that ALWAYS has 4 of the 8 self checkout lames closed, and the one or two cashiers they have staffed also use the self-checkout stations, so it’s completely fucked and idiotic. Sometimes there will be a huge line and still they never open the other 4
I’ve waited in register lines while people hurry through the self-checkout like lightening. I refuse to self-checkout unless there is an automatic 10% discount. My labour means something.
And my time is just as valuabke, probably moreso. I don’t need to wait for some fumbling cashier to ask how my day was.
Thé best self checkout is decathlon.
No scanning. Just throw everything in and you’re done.
My local grocer is part of a small chain (3 locations, all in the same county). I know the owner by name, he’s a regular at my restaurant. They don’t have any self checkouts, just an express checkout and then 5 normal ones. It works out great. They’ve also got a State Store inside (where I live, only the State government is allowed to sell bottled spirits), which is a huge bonus. I went there yesterday since my vodka stash was running dry, and I needed to stock up on trash stickers for Spring cleaning. I picked up some cheese and buns while I was there. Had a chat with the butcher, small talk with the cashier, helped an old lady load her groceries into her car. It was a genuinely enjoyable, and very human, experience.
Contrast with the Walmart supercenter. They have 50 self checkouts, and just one manned register, which is only really used to buy age restricted products like cigarettes. I don’t physically go there anymore because the checkout experience is damn near torture. It feels sterile, more like a warehouse than a grocery store. If I need something from Wally World, I get it delivered to my door, usually in an hour or less.
I get what I can from a grocery store chain in my area. They have three stores in the same county as well but they’re part of an overall larger family of different named chains of a conglomerate if I remember right. They have no self checkout, and though the findings there are less than say Wal-Mart I’m not shopping at a big box store where the profits all leave the local area into some rich family’s pocket.
I’ve written about this before but it seems self checkout is very different in the US (and probably some other countries) from here in Sweden (and, again, other countries). A lot of people prefer it here and it’s easy so to use and you rarely need to call for help. The descriptions in several of these comments about it requiring babysitting and cashier assistance was only a thing for a while when it was new about 20 years ago until the tech got better. Now it’s rare to see more than one person, even in big stores, needed to help and they often do other things around the self checkout area because they are so rarely needed. I’m sure part of it is cultural, people in the US are definitely more prone to try to cheat it or do other things that forces the stores to have that babysitting.
it was until, chains started realizing people were just shoplifting, stores around me phased them out already.
Those kiosks are there to extract capital from customers, like 99% of bullshit that exists
I like the ones where you scan the item while putting it into your cart much more. I can sort everything into my reusable bags right away. No needless shifting from the shelf to the cart to the cashier to the bag to the cart into the better bags in my car.
Only easier thing is when we order online and they put everything into sturdy baskets you can borrow instead of bags.
Someone clearly isn’t bothered by inane small talk. Check your privilege.
You have smalltalk at the cash register? All I say there is: ‘Hi!’ or ‘Good [part of the day]!’, cashier essentially repeats the same thing; the cashier scans groceries, I put them back into my cart, then when they’ve been scanned the cashier reads out the price, I pay, cashier gets ready to ask if I want a receipt, but I cut them off saying ‘I don’t need the receipt! Thanks, bye!’
I’m autistic so I really like self checkout but they’ve definitely gotten shittier over time. Many of the problems with them are really just the store itself being shitty and not self checkout.
I’m autistic and I hate most self checkouts. The video of me doing things and the bright blinking “we’re recording” light push me into sensory overload, especially after I’ve spent spoons on a big shopping trip.
Some are fine. I like them a decade ago before they had so many screens and blinking lights.
shop at aldi. the prices are better, a lot of the food is better, and you don’t give your money to kroger.
we switched to aldi and our grocery bill went down by 1/3 immediately. kroger sucks.
My Aldi has self checkouts.
One of the main reasons why I refuse to use self-checkout.
A few more reasons:
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In some stores, gift cards, discounts, coupons, etc can’t be used in self-checkout.
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It’s essentially making me do the job of the cashier for free. Fuck that noise. They want me to do it, they can pay me.
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The line for real registers is sometimes a bit longer, but it tends to move much faster, because it’s not full of a bunch of grandmas having their first experience with a robot accusing them of theft.
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Gross germs all over the self-checkout machines, which I’m sure are never cleaned at all.
To you point 1: all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them (2) products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers (3) the grandmas tend to pay with cash, taking ages to search their wallets for red coins (4) you don’t want to know where those red coins have been.
all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them
Nah, fam. I’m getting that 10% veteran’s discount.
products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers
All stores have at least some cashiers. At least, all the ones I ever go to.
And I’m going to need a source about those self-checkout stores being cheaper, because I sure haven’t seen that.
We haven’t seen a drop in prices, as inflation is way up, thanks to the Orange Chimpanzee. Yet, a store with 100% employees and 0% automation will always be more expensive than a store with 30% employees and 70% automation- that’s the reason humans invent machines…in the end machines and robots are always cheaper than humans. Those profits will not be passed on 100% to consumers, but parts will be, to draw more people into the store.
Those profits will not be passed on 100% to consumers, but parts will be, to draw more people into the store.
Really, though, got any data on that? Because what’s to stop a store from passing 0% of that onto consumers and thus increasing their profits?
That is completely false. Safeway is 25-40% more expensive for basic items like limes, onions and tomatoes compared to the Mexican market right across the street.
The Mexican market always has 2 butchers, 1-2 cashiers and 1-2 people stocking items. Safeway maybe has 50% more staff for a store that takes up like 10x the amount of space once you add in the parking lot.
Economies of scale would say Safeway should be able to obliterate the smaller store in price but that has never been the case in the 6 years I’ve lived here. They do have more items and longer hours (3 extra hours in the evening with a skeleton crew), but at the prices they demand, you are better off going to the Mexican, Asian and Indian markets while accounting for gas and wear and tear on a car and still have a better experience and overall cost.
Large corporations are just syphons of local money into offshore accounts at this point.
What has that to do with automated cash tellers?
(2) products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers
I have a hard time believing they would pass the savings on to the buyer. At least not any big chain.
I know the retail industry well, professionally. It is a low margin, high throughput industry, meaning that you want to tie in the customers as best as you can. The best tie in is price; Walmart, Kroger, Aldi, Target, Costco, they all fight for audience, in the end by lowering the price points. The most expensive “parts” in a store are the employees, and if you can reduce those numbers, you can lower your prices too. So the automation helps these retailers to keep the customers from wandering off to cheaper stores, while increasing the margins.
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I love them. Much shorter queue times because so many are set up in one zone. But they only work if people with carts still use stationed checkouts.
the Kroger corporation
There was your mistake. Kroger is a nightmare from dystopian hell.
It used to be a friendly place but no, that wasn’t enough money for them.
