I love self checkout. It allows me to scan avocados for my daily avocado toast as russet potatoes. Only 50 more years of that and I’ll be able to afford a house!
My local Kroger now will say the name of the item you just keyed in very loudly. “Put your bananas in the bagging area!”
“PUT YOUR HEMORRHOID CREAM IN THE BAGGING AREA!”
I imagine it’s just the items you select from a menu not the scannable ones
That’s not where it goes!
Going “beep” (optional) and just pocketing every other item does the trick too. At least at Aldi. They skimp on security.
If you move to SF you’ll have to learn credit card fraud
(not all SF^, and in SF it’s only certain neighborhoods that do this)
Especially if they play this hand
sidebar
hmm I guess nobody reading here today would ever steal for fun, just out of necessity (b/c otherwise this security escalation is annoying: lots of waiting, maybe fine by me but not overworked/mobility impaired folks etc)
Anyway, learned that liquor stores in India might operate exclusively with this method!
PS: UBI when!!
I live in Germany. No locks here except for expensive stuff like laptops. Everything else is protected solely by the honor system. I’ve even pinched some of their e paper price tags for tech projects. They really can’t be bothered.
I work in a secure area that requires every person entering to have and show id to security, whether you’re recognized or not. They have these scanners that tell them if you’re allowed or not. sometimes the scanner doesn’t work, so they’ll have printed sheets of paper that I’m sure is the equivalent, just takes longer.
One day I came in, gave my ID, heard a “beep”, got it back and continued on. About 10 seconds later my brain caught up to the very obvious vocal “beep” that came from the security guy. I have no idea if they just decided to say fuck it that day and let all the fun people in, or if just the speaker wasn’t working and they were just having some fun.
If I worked for a self-checkout manufacturing company I’d record myself saying “beep” as the beep. And “Ruh-roh” if it didn’t scan.
Your aldi has self checkout? None of the ones around me do.
When talking about Aldi you should know which one you’re talking about. It’s either Aldi Nord or Aldi Süd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi
It’s 2 different stores both using the Aldi name.
In the US, it is Aldi and Trader Joe’s
Neither of the messages in the comment chain implies the US.
But aren’t you terribly glad to be informed of this fact about the US now?
I literally posted the Wikipedia page for it.
I pictured the people overseeing self checkout calling you the potato guy amongst themselves
We 100% know and 95% of us don’t care lol.
Also, if any readers want to try this, the people most likely to care are older workers, but they’re also the least likely to notice.
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Having somebody bag your items is such a USA thing.
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You can always bag yourself, they will absolutely let you do it.
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Hahaha. Humans are so silly! My preference is the exact opposite of yours, but the reasoning behind my preference is the same. I strongly prefer a cashier over self checkout because I prefer to bag my own stuff, and find it easier to do that while someone else scans.
Very few of the places I shop lately even have a bagger, so I don’t usually have to ask anyone not to help. I find most self checkouts frustrating because there’s no space for scanned items to sit before bagging them.
I also usually plop my card down on the card reader once the cashier starts scanning, so I don’t have to bounce back and forth between bagging & paying.
We are waiting for you at self check out as well Unless there is no line at all.
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Same problem and I’d prefer we pay a cashier and a bagger. Not a computer and a slow bagger.
Cashiers everywhere around here stopped to put things in the bags for at least 10 years now. I still remember the good times when the bags were carefully and properly put by them with all the items magically fitting. Good old times. Nowadays there’s barely a difference between self checkout and using a human operated one. The main difference is that on self checkout I’m not rushed and can take my time to put the items how I want in the bags.
The self-checkout at Aldi is a godsend. Way too many times I’ve been on my lunch break trying to buy a sandwich and snack, only for some old git to be using the time at the till to have a chinwag with the cashier!
By all means, have a chat with the cashier, but not when there’s a massive queue of people waiting behind you! Also, you know those shelves near the window with the sign saying “Pack here”? That’s not a suggestion. Pack your shopping away from the tills so people can keep buying stuff.
Man I always hear such good things about Aldi. They started building one near us and I got excited. I was gonna see what the job situation was like because I heard they were kinda based.
Nah. It’s reportedly a Taylorist hamster wheel. Unrealistic productivity metrics that, if you really bust your butt, are rewarded with tighter metrics. Sucks, man.
Self-check out makes it easier to steal from the mega corporation. 🤷🏻♂️
honestly no, you’d hypothetically probably be better off putting something in your bag than risk being one of those times the machine asks a worker over to scan shit
Lol, the cashier dgaf. They come over, input the code to canal the alert and go back to their chat, 90% of the time without even looking. The times they do look, they tell you what’s wrong and you fix it.
They’re the most surveilled places in the store and now stores are looking into face recognition tech to effectively ban thieves from stores
They might not care about small stuff, but repeatedly doing it will definitely put you on their radar
It’s not stealing, it’s getting paid to do the cashiers job. Honestly I underpay myself every day i go to work at the self checkout
Why waste time in a queue? It’s quicker to self checkout and get back to my own thing.
Self checkout hate is plain stupid, it’s for the customers who wanna get in an out quick.
They are running lean enough many places that you actually wait in line to check yourself out. I have no problem checking myself out. Waiting in line to use a machine because they don’t have enough of them on the other hand… Literally some places run like one minder for 12 machines but they will have another 12 machines disabled because they don’t want to come off another minder.
No, you are wrong. Places like Walmart will only have self checkout open, forcing you to ring up your own cart of items while their employees stare blankly at you … either that or you just make eye contact with them and walk away from the cart and leave the store (usually what I do).
I don’t work for them.
Sorry to hear that you live in flyover country. Too bad your state “voted” for this.
Turn in your commie card, tiny tyrant.
I didn’t punish them. They punished themselves.
That’s not how informed consent works, droogi.
Voted for what? Self checkout lanes?
The cashier at the self checkout is to
A) Do things that require intervention like verify your ID to sell alcohol
B) Help people having trouble
C) Keep people from literally paying for a banana and taking home TVs
They aren’t there to check you out. If you spend usually spend 15 minutes driving to the store, 15 minutes gathering a cart, and then walk away and spend 15 minutes driving home empty handed I believe the joke is on you. The employees get paid at this point $20 an hour to put away your shit while you wasted your own time and gas.
That’s wasted effort for both the seller and buyer. Hope it’s fixed.
Why do you think that is wasted effort? You can have one person monitor 12 machines where 12 people are checking out
If I look at this topic the American skewedness is so obvious.
In Belgium the only thing you get by going the old fashioned way is they scan your shit and push it off at the end or you need to rush to put it in your cart. Same in The Netherlands. There are no baggers.
So yeah, let me just scan my items, put them in my bags like I want them, scan the thing at the self checkout, put scanner in tray, pay, walk out.
Every so often you get a bag check and if less people cheated on their scanning there would be less of that (is what they hope you think)
American here. Love going to Aldi. Cheap as hell and I can bag as I like it. (My first job was grocery bag boy, I know how I want it.)
I think Amazon tried that here and shut it down
This only works in a respectful society that isn’t exploited
So one in which Amazon doesn’t exist!
I don’t know how the self-checkout is constructed in Belgium, but in the US (at least, the stores I go to), the self-checkout is a small kiosk with a small weight-sensitive platform where you bag your groceries. You’re supposed to scan each item and then place it in the bag so the scale can register it, and then scan and bag the next item, and so on. The problems are that:
- The technology is buggy and doesn’t always recognize that you’ve bagged an item, so it locks up and won’t let you scan your next item until an attendant comes to assist.
- Certain items like cooking wine or cough syrup or matches require proof that you’re old enough to purchase it (again, an attendant has to get involved)
- If god forbid you take a second to rearrange items in one of your bags to make more room for your next item, the stupid machine nags you and then - yep you guessed it - locks up until an attendant comes.
- The machine-monitored security camera sometimes misinterprets what it sees you doing. For example, one time I was done scanning my items and realized I was still holding onto my shopping list, so I tucked it into my pocketbook as I was getting my credit card out. The camera must’ve thought I was stealing something, so it locked up until an attendant came to review the video footage.
- The bagging platform is too small for a full week’s worth of groceries, so it’s really only useful if you’re picking up a handful of items, meaning you still need to go through an attended line if you’re doing your weekly shop.
Honestly I prefer bagging my own groceries, and if the problems with self-checkout were fixed, I’d be happy to only do self-checkout. But the way it is now, it’s annoying to use.
American here. Haven’t had most, or any, of the hassle in a long time. #2 is a fucking pain though. Yes, I’m 54 and am allowed to buy spray paint. OTOH, the attendant usually clears it before I even notice.
Your self checkouts oversee bagging and lock up constantly? No wonder you hate it.
Around here there are a variety of supermarket solutions. Morrisson’s for example near me has about a dozen cashier lines, usually 3 or so open unless there’s a rush. They have a self-checkout section like people are describing, with the small bagging area (about big enough to cage a toddler), maybe 10 of these. They also have a trolley self-checkout area, which is the same but has a bagging area big enough to cage a lioness.
M&S have cashiers, basket self-checkout, and a third scan-as-you-shop section, where you put things in your basket and scan them, and on your way out you put the scanner back and tap your phone and bag stuff, or if you’re using a trolley, just push it out to your car, whatever.
Polosh self checkout:
- One cashier per 6-8 machines, on watch to take care of age verification or occasional lockuo
- Machines do lock up when weight doesn’t match…and unlock when scale decides that it’s okay after all. Happens sometimes with lighter things, or when someone fucks up values in software (once met error where buns were 900g per piece xD Cashier gal was busyyyy that day, had their fixed code, but until it got into menu, they had to punch it themselves)
- Age verification, of course, is there
- There’s only scale. Sometimes you need to also scan your receipt to leave. That’s all.
Sometimes that cashier taking care of self checkouts even gets their own command center - console that can allow to give age verification without physically moving or to bypass weight alerts (useful when cashier sees from far away you carry, for example, hair bands. )
We had that weight platform system like early days of self checkout. It sucked hard and thankfully they just gave up on it.
Do still have age checks when buying alcohol and doing self checkout
Yeah most self checkout at grocery stores is hot garbage for all the reasons you mentioned and more.
My favorite self check out experience is at Uniqlo. You walk up to what is effectively a plastic bucket with an iPad attached. Toss your shit in the bucket it shows you what it thinks you put in there and you click ok and tap you CC. It takes like 30s.
Grocery stores are just cheap and won’t put the 5 cent RFID tag on things.
Haha, I want to believe the thing just guesses what you buy 😂
In my supermarket they don’t have the scale under your bag and no camera, and the plagform is just big enough for a weeks groceries, so it works a lot better
The store nearest my house, where I shop a lot, is a bit more upscale. They’ve installed fancy self-checkout kiosks that tell you to continue scanning items while waiting for the attendant to come deal with an issue. The giant, discount grocery store with locations on the edge of town have enough room that they’ve installed self-checkout lanes that have about a 2-meter conveyor belt to a large bagging area. It’s enormous.
The only time it’s ever useful for me is when I have to come in and grab 2-3 things fast.
I hate that it basically kills cashier jobs and I hate having to do a weekly grocery on them because of how shitty the systems are… It’s to the point where I’ll avoid places where there’s no cashier the day I do my grocery or do it online and pick it up or get it delivered.
I hate that it basically kills cashier jobs
It was kind of a dying job anyway, checkout operators have a higher turnover rate than other departments in retail, because enough people still like to treat checkout workers as some sort of indentured slave, people don’t want to be treated like crap at work by customers and checkout workers seem to catch the brunt of that because they can’t walk away from the situation.
I work in retail and quite often get pulled out of my department to jump on checkout and even when I’ve stopped my job to put these customers through, they still want to have a go at me for the fact that self service exists.
If we could all be chill with checkout operators we would have more checkouts open.
Also I know most people are chill, but the ones that aren’t chill, make it not worth coming in.
I tend to buy so much booze that self check out is a hassle.
It’s always a hassle for me. Items not scanning. The machine screaming about the item not weighing correctly. The machine screaming at you because you moved your item.
It’s great for quick purchases. But I’m going to a cashier if I have more than 10 items.
This isn’t problem too. If I have a couple things, fine self checkout might be better, but every store has replaced most of the regular lanes with self lanes and more often than not I have an order of sufficient size that the hassle of self checkout isn’t worth it for exactly the reasons you state. Code doesn’t scan, items being moved or bagged too soon or too late. Also the speed at which the scanners work is awful. I’ve worked as a cashier, and the scanning didn’t have any delay between items, but the self checkout is rate limited to an asinine level that, going back to my opening point, is frustrating for anything other than a few items.
Then just wait in line.
I like the scan and go in the Sam’s club app. Scan the items with your phone, and if the QR code receipt is visible when you walk through the gate thing they usually wave you on without a person checking.
My local grocery store self checkout after every single item:
Unexpected item in bagging area.
If they’re going to treat me like I’m stealing the groceries I’m paying for, making the process slow and inefficient, then I’m just going to go to the regular checkout and not deal with it.
I find it fascinating around here that all the self checkouts do that except Walmart which is actually pretty good. I usually go to the cashiers at other places because the self checkouts suck, and the cashiers bag stuff better than me.
Walmart’s self checkout probably doesn’t accuse you of stealing out loud. They want to wait until they can “prove” you’ve stolen over $1000 worth of goods over time so they can charge you with - I forget - either grand larceny or grand theft, which are felonies.
Haven’t heard that in forever. It was hell for some time, but it seems a solved problem everywhere I’ve gone, for many years.
There’s a sensitivity setting that can be adjusted. At first most stores were set to +/- 1oz, so even legitimate items that have varying packing weights could set it off. My local stores have adjusted it so that you really have to put something heavy on there to trigger that alert. They also don’t seem to care if you take stuff off the scale anymore, which is nice because it’s never large enough even if you have an item limit.
Can we talk about how ridiculously tiny the shelf is. On both sides, but especially the first side when you begin to check out. It’s roomFor like a gallon of milk that’s it.
Maybe I should give the ones near me another try then - thanks for the heads up.
Yeah and if you have alcohol you wait eleven minutes for the one employee who is supposed to be helping, to actually notice there are people waiting. Then she realizes five people need help. Gets the cigarettes for the one guy but it takes three trips to the cage and back to get the right ones. Helps the lady with the coupons they grabbed the wrong items for. Helps the really old person who can’t even stand scan and bag all of their groceries (why were they in self checkout anyway?).
Finally comes over to my white-bearded ass after 20 minutes and they could just hit the “customer is over 40” button, but they want to see my id. Yeah I’ll just wait in line for the one cashier.
This problem is caused by shopping at busy times, not self-checkouts.
ah yes lets make things harder on service workers just because they exist. As someone who has 2 degrees and is underemployed because our society is corrupt and broken: fuck this type of behavior. I suppose next there will be a meme about bullying fast food workers for being worthless members of society. ha. ha. where funny.
I go at my own pace since I’m doing their job essentially. It’s their fault they didn’t put enough self-checkout lanes. It gives me time to bag and organize everything logically before returning to my vehicle. If they wanted speed they should either hire more cashiers or build more self-checkout.
Fuck that I’m there to get my shit and go, the less interaction the better. For me, personally, it’s ideal.
Sucks about the low paying jobs tho =/
To me, this has always been more of a boomer complaint.
Those self checkout lanes are only there so they can cut jobs while charging more for groceries.
I’ll defer to @whotookkarl 's comment as they put it best. No one “wants” those jobs.
I don’t “want” my job either, but I do it to make a living. If local jobs disappear from the community so some rich guy can add another million dollars to his pile, that reduces the number of entry level jobs available locally to people getting into the job market with no safety net in place for them. Just so they can not pass the savings along to us.
The grocery store in which I used to work has been desperate to hire cashiers for years, really since the start of the pandemic. There were some days that we had only two lanes open because that’s all the staff that we had. During busy times, the store manager, the store owners, and sometimes the managers-on-duty would go up to the front to do check-out. The store installed more self-checkout lanes out of necessity.
Nowadays, I go shop there only in the evenings, and there are enough cashiers because they’re all high school students. But the help-wanted sign at the front of the store is still offering open cashier jobs. They’re certainly not eliminating jobs that people desperately need.
I’m asking this sincerely: where are those people working now? They gotta be working something, right?
Sorry, I’m not in a position to know. It would be very interesting if an investigative journalist looked into the state of employment from the perspective of workers these days to put together a bigger picture than one store.
The things boomers complain about aren’t always wrong. I ain’t their damn employee.
I mean, sure, I’m not there employee either, but I’m also not going to be snarky with a similar response.
I always wonder if people complained about stores when we started to get the merchandise out of the warehouse ourselves.
Something like, “why isn’t there a clerk getting the groceries on my list for me, I don’t work here, I shouldn’t have to go into the back and get my own shit.”
I prefer bagging my own shit anyways when I go shopping. I don’t break shit and at least in my area it looks like they disabled the weight shit or set the tolerances higher so I’m not constantly told to bag something I already did or getting told I bagged something without scanning .
Now it’s pretty good actually.
Like most things, the answer lies in the middle. You should be able to choose either.
I’m also not an employee of the vending machine company. I’m also not an employee of the gas station.
I don’t really see what added value a cashier checking out my items for me has.
Imo, they’re only there for the company to promote ad programs and discourage stealing by being there. Otherwise, they just make the store experience worse? Unless they give me a discount for using a cashier, I ain’t doing in.
That’s not an apples to apples comparison. I am buying a single thing at a pump: fuel. I boop my card. I stick nozzle in hole. I pull lever until it stops. Vending machines? Second verse same as the first. I boop card. I push button. I take chippies, I walk away. Vending machines specifically are purpose-built for self-service.
I spend maybe 30 seconds to 3 minutes at these things. The only work I do is tapping my payment and pressing a button or two. Groceries are a whole different animal. It’s scanning, weighing, coding, bagging, loading, and paying. It’s a fuckton more involvement by the customer. I don’t think you can in good faith compare self-checkout to a vending machine.
The business is incentivized to trick you into performing labor for them. Part of the cost of my groceries is for someone to have a job doing that. If I’m gonna do that labor for the store, I should get an employee discount, at least.
scan as you cart and self checkout is like the others.
I don’t think you can in good faith compare…
Ooh, that’s just one of my pet peeves. Such a stupid fucking phrase. The only way to know if you “can’t compare” two things is to do a comparison between them and come to the conclusion that the two things are very different. I can compare self checkout to a kumquat if I want to.
Now for some actually useful conversation, let’s compare number of steps for vending machine vs self checkout (since that’s the closer of my two examples).
Vending machine:
- insert payment
- push button to select items
- pick up item
- repeat all steps until you have the number of items desired
Self checkout:
- scan item or place item on scanner/scale and push buttons for item type. This only counts as one step, because you are never doing both to the same item
- repeat first step until you have all items desired
- insert payment
- pick up items
It’s the same steps in a different order.
There was also a time when people would get pay to press an elevator button for you. But we don’t do that anymore because those things are super easy and having someone doing it for you won’t make the process faster.
On the other hand, the thing that pisses me off the most about the self-checkout is that people take forever to scan their stuff. When I was working as a cashier I would have an average of 50 clients/hour. There ain’t no way those self checkout are more efficient considering the time people take.
The majority of these self checkouts also rate limit you intentionally or otherwise (likely due to weight checking on the bagging area). I know I can scan a lot faster than they let me given a proper setup
They are quite a bit more efficient when you consider that there’s only 1 staffed register open, but 8 self checkouts open.
And why is that? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the business benefits by making the customers the employees, too? Would a business be in any way incentivized to make paying customers also perform labor for them?
Of course they are. What of it?
So? I get through checkout faster because I don’t have to wait behind old people who take a fucking eternity to find their wallet. For me it’s a win/win. It sucks that some people will lose their job to it, sure. But that’s what happens literally every single time society progresses. I’m also not sad about the manual telephone exchange lady losing her job.
From what I’ve seen, the slower average time is made up for by having more of the stations. Depending on arrangement, you can fit three self checkouts in the same area as one traditional checkout. In my experience, the self checkout line is always moving faster overall.
And this answers the question.
Someone who isn’t experienced with doing this scanning regularly takes longer. Especially if you have to put in codes for produce or something else with label or scanning problems.
People working those jobs aren’t from a passion for registers or retail commerce. They don’t have many options or can only work part time to accept a low paying job with few responsibilities other than keeping accurate count when making change. I’ll prefer cashiers until we have better social support for people that need those jobs.
I agree 100%.
I mean we can agree on some things, no? I literally want to stand there while someone checks out my stuff. I have to work to pay for stuff? Oh sweaty.
If I have to self checkout, I should get a discount since an employee was not needed.
Sure, I’m not saying it’s exclusively a boomer complaint, just that boomers tend to complain about it more from my perspective.
I’m all for getting out of there as fast as possible. If I’m in line at self checkout and a cashier says “I can get you here”, I’m over there.
But generally, I prefer self checkout.
That discount is negated by the higher theft rate.
If you are worried about theft, don’t bake in opportunity.
That’s why they removed the self scan stations. It was a short lived experiment.
Where? My region has only gotten more.
Western Europe. Pretty rural place. Self scan seems to work better in cities around here.
It really depends. I do it in one shop because its more convinient. I have to put the stuff only one time in my hands.
- get the scanner on entry of the shop.
- scan item at shelf and put it in your bags
- repeat 2
- scan exit
- pay
- put bags from shopping cart into car.
That sounds like a dream self-service option.
in my experience it is:
- Go put it all the things in the cart
- Unpack each thing from the cart.
- For each thing: scan it, weigh it, maybe you pack it in a bag. You get three bags, so no real option to organize, and hope you like plastic bags. Also zero table space to work with.
- As you go, put the things you scanned on the cart with the stuff you have yet to scan, don’t mix anything up though!
- if you scan too fast or encounter an item that is wrong in the system: get fucked wait a few min for an attendant to punch in their PIN so you can try again. If that doesn’t work, get fucked wait for a supervisor to come around and override whatever shit their system is doing wrong.
- If you scan too slow or look at a prompt too long get fucked an attendant will be on your ass instantly to demand to know what you’re doing wrong. Yes this is contrary to the above wait time, and I don’t know why both of those things are true.
So yeah you can probably see why I hate self checkout.
I would hate that too.
Look, saying “I don’t work here” to avoid using self-checkout completely misses the point. Technology has always evolved by shifting little tasks onto the user in exchange for speed and convenience. It’s not about “working for free,” it’s just self-service - like when grocery stores first let people grab stuff off shelves instead of asking a clerk behind a counter. At the time, some people probably whined about it too, but now nobody thinks twice because it’s way faster and gives you more control. Same thing with ATMs - you used to have to stand in line and talk to a bank teller just to get cash, now you punch a few buttons yourself. Are you ‘working for the bank’ when you use an ATM? No, you’re just getting your money faster without the hassle. Self-checkout is the same idea: a tiny bit of effort, way more convenience. Complaining about it like it’s some moral stand is honestly missing the bigger picture.
I prefer to go to the bank and withdraw cash, now that my bank is ATM only I want lower card fees or something. The bank saves money on this deal at my expense.
Same thing with self checkout at the groceries stores, they save a lot of money while I do the work. I could only accept it if I got like a 5-10% discount.
Why would you want to wait in line and only be able to access your money during 9-5 M-F
I don’t want to pay the same amount of money for less product or service. Also, I think it’s nice that a secondary effect is a sort of solidarity with those who lose their jobs to a machine.
Machines still cost money to purchase and operate lol. So fucking entitled.
If the bank can pay for a teller and not charge you extra, an unmanned machine which is at most a high upfront cost with low service fees should be even easier for the bank.
Except self checkout isn’t faster. The professionals that check you out do this every day, they’re way faster than me.
Not to mention 100% of the time I use self checkout, the machine doesn’t realize I’ve put something in the bagging area and I need a staff member to sort out the broken machine, but because there’s 1 staff member doing this for a dozen machines, they’re constantly busy sorting out these broken machines so you often have to wait minutes for them to fix it.
Not sure about your lower-than-ideal scanning success rate machines, possibly a location issue. The machines i use work pretty much flawlessly and even if the process itself might be a little longer, the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier.
Cashiers are at minimum twice as fast as customers mainly because after doing it for a while they start knowing were the bar codes are in most products and don’t have to look around for them, know which are the awkward things to scan and how to do it, and are so used to the layout and sequence of the screens that they just go through them naturally.
You simply can’t be as fast at doing something you do once in a while, as somebody who spends hours every day doing it.
Also were I live the cashier doesn’t do bagging, the customer does, so whilst in a self-service checkout you’re doing both scanning and bagging, with a cashier they’re doing the scanning and you’re doing the bagging which also makes the whole thing much faster even if you’re making sure things are bagged the way you want it (for example, having all cold things in the same bag) because you can focus on bagging.
As for the lines being non-existent in self-service, that’s not quite so simple a judgement as it seems:
- First, I noticed that in stores where they introduced self-service checkout they invariably reduced the number of people manning the other checkouts in order to “induce” customers to use the self-checkout (because “the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier”).
- Second, once a store has fully transited to only self-checkout, you get lines at the self-checkout, mainly because as I pointed out above, customers are way slower at doing the checkout themselves than cashiers so even though there are more self-checkout tills that there were tills with cashiers before, people take longer to go through them, especially when they have lots of things to checkout, so effectively each self-checkout till has less capacity than a cashier till.
That said, self-checkout is faster for customers in stores with mixed systems (both self-checkout and cashiers) if you have only a few things to checkout.
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Correct, which is why no matter how fast you are at the checkout part it’s still going to be slower, especially if you’re trying to bag things in any way other than “dump stuff into bag as fast as possible” - you can’t both be scanning an item and putting an item on the bag at the same time unless you’re just dropping it there without looking (which is a problem if anything you’re buying is in a glass bottle or jar).
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Read what I wrote:
unless you’re just dropping it there without looking
The only way you can just scan and put it in the bag in one movement is like cashiers do it - pass it in front of the scanner with the barcode facing it, them just let go of it, all as one movement.
If you’re actually placing it in a specific position in a specific bag you have look at it, pick it up, pass it in front of the scanner, look at where you’re going to place it and place it.
The last two steps are additional to what a cashier does around here (were they don’t do bagging) hence the process is slower if a single person is doing all those steps rather than just the first 3, and that won’t change no matter how elitez your unpaid cashier skillz are.
This is seriously basic stuff and the principle behind Industrial Assembly Lines.
But, hey, if you’re happy doing it that way, good for you.
I disagree with your assessment of lines unless the store is simply doing it wrong. I have 3 stores I use that are self checkout only, and the only times there are lines at all are “rush hours” such as when everyone is finishing work, and the lines used to be FAR worse at that time. It’s a line of like 5 people waiting at most, not per checkout, in total. Before self serve it was a minimum of 5 per checkout, so like 20+ people waiting total.
The fact is they’re able to fit 6 self checkouts in the space there used to be 2 manned checkouts, even if they’re being fairly inefficient with space. So they get rid of 4 manned and have 12 self serve (real example of 2 of them did), and people can be 3x as slow with no extra build up.
From what I’ve seen (in two different countries, so it’s probably not something specific about the way people are used to do something in a certain country), it mainly depends on the kind of store.
In supermarket type stores (were people, including families and old people, go buy a whole week worth of shopping) self-checkout makes things worse, especially if it’s in a country were there’s some kind of obligation to check somebody’s age when selling alcoholic drinks (because the person who is overseeing a whole lot of self-checkouts has to come around and pass their card to confirm your age has been checked, so you generally have to wait for them, especially if they’re helping somebody out).
Those tiny tills that replaced the big manned tills are hugely impractical for people buying lots of stuff and you loose the time saving in the long manned tills which comes from people moving their stuff from the shopping cart to the conveyor belt whilst the person in front of them is being served.
In IKEA stores, were most of what people buy are big packages, self-checkouts seem to slow things down a bit, or at best are neutral, possibly because the space per till is still the same so they’re not really adding any more tills by replacing tills with cashiers with self-checkouts hence the loss of speed from having an amateur (the customer) do the checkout is not made up for there being more open tills.
Were I’ve seen it improve service speed and reduce queues is in small stores were people are just buying a handful of things. This also includes mini-market type stores in inner cities were people tend to go often during the week and buy just a few things like bread and milk.
I’ve also seen it work in a big surface hardware store, possibly because they still had 1 long cashier till for people who were checking out big items and replaced the other 5 cashier tills with about 10 self-checkouts and most people just bought a handful of small things which are fast to checkout in the self-checkouts.
perhaps it’s because I’ve never been to a place with smaller than supermarket sized stores with normal food items (pork, beef, cheese, lettuce, bread), but self checkout seems to speed up the process because those buying only a few items use it.
That’d be a great point if self-checkout was anywhere near as convenient as an ATM. But it’s not, it’s literally the same machine a cashier uses, bolted onto a card reader. There’s no added convenience unless you’re buying literally only one item. It’s not innovation, it’s outsourcing labor to the customer so the company can cut jobs and boost profits. You’re doing 100% of the work they used to pay Someone for.
You are completely wrong about this. The cashier UI is less friendly and has lots of functions. Many are designed to be used with a keyboard or with small touch targets.
The user UI can basically do nothing but add items and pay. It is drastically simplified with few larger buttons and a greater degree of thought put into UI as you don’t get to train every user to use your UI.
and the self checkout ui is worse because of the lack of keyboard
Yes because people who are using your system with the entirely wrong height to type anything absolutely need to be able to hit F3 instead of clicking pay. The whole shtick is having almost no functions. Add item, lookup items, pay
Not to mention the constant paranoia and assumption that you’re stealing from them whilst saving them an immense amount of labour costs. Cameras watching your every move and “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”.
Makes for such an enjoyable shopping experience…
Sounds like a you problem.
People steal a LOT. It’s impossible to catch the folks who steal without watching everyone. You are being watched whilst you shop too.
Bad design, no effort for user ease. I wouldn’t use that.
Ah, but you’re forgetting the emotional labor of forcing your lips to say “hi” while awkwardly shifting your eyes away from the cashier because after 20 years of life in your lonely, desolate suburban wasteland with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no people to see, you’ve grown unimaginably socially anxious and you’ve completely forgotten how to talk to anyone.
Frankly, I think you’re just a luddite, or something. You… hate… barcode scanners, just admit it.
Cashier line: Empty
Me: “I don’t come here to talk to people”
