Then just wait in line.
I love it when a cashier checkout is available because everyone is doing the self-checkout and I can get my stuff bagged properly (I’m terrible at bagging up). I’ll even chat with them as they’re in the middle of the most boring shift imaginable.
as a former cashier, fuck talking to people, the mind’s enough
Cashiers no longer pack bags in my area, unless you’re paying for the bag.
Shrinkflation you say?
Weird that the money supply can grow so fast, raising home values to ungodly levels, while we keep getting worse service; you cant even put an overhead bag or choose a seat on an airplane anymore, but nothing to see here inflation is only 2%.
Will they bag groceries into reusable bags, or are you using plastic bags?
At every store near me they’ll use your reusable bags if you have them.
Workers bagging your stuff at a store is so incredibly weird to me. In Sweden you have to bag your own stuff and afaik it has always been like that.
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.
“I don’t work here, and I refuse to be a class traitor.” Fuck corporate greed that kills jobs for more profit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Of course they are. What of it?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
A local grocery store had self check out lanes and removed them and replaced them with 5 express check outs. I feel conflicted about it.
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.
Not only do I not work here, I wish to spend as little time here as possible.
So I’ll hand the scanning and bagging task to someone who has been doing it every day for years and can get that done quickly, in the lane where they provide enough table space to actually work, two people to do the two jobs of scanning and bagging… and all that without the extra steps of weighing every individual item, stopping for assistance if you look at it funny, and stopping to upsell you on the fucking loyalty program.
Grocery pickup > normal checkout > self checkout.
They aren’t nearly as motivated to go as fast as I am, and they can only bag one person at a time and have lines, while usually there are 4-6 machines wide open for me to jump onto immediately.
I fucking hate going to the grocery store though.
EDIT: also lonely old people will stop and chit chat sometimes slowing shit even more.
Ugh, yeah, i hate customers that take their damn time. if there’s no line, i may go to a traditional register, but i highly prefer waitig for self check out rather than waiting for a cashier
I didn’t realize this was such a contentious subject.
When this first became a big thing like 15 years ago, I feel like most people hated them. Then it becomes normalized, society shifts.
I’m introverted, I liked them immediately.
Probably just different grocery stores with different patterns and workflows.
My experience is a normal checkout line is usually a reasonable wait so unless someone bought three carts of groceries they’ll get through before too long.
In contrast the self checkout is a clusterfuck of idiots who don’t know how to use it, people not sure where to stand while they wait because there aren’t really lines, and 1 frazzled attendant trying to cover 6-8 people simultaneously screwing up their self-checkout.
I fucking hate going to the grocery store though.
On this we agree!
Nope, I gotta price match. I will wait for the cashier.
I use the self-checkout so I don’t have to talk to anyone.
Same
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Honestly with my social anxiety, self checkout works perfectly for me. I feel a hard to describe tension when being rung up by most folks that I don’t feel when ringing myself up, and if I’m just popping in for a few things I’d rather not stress myself out more than I need to.
Honestly, even without social anxiety, not having to spend the effort to do basic small talk and engage with someone makes it pretty convenient sometimes. The only time I really use the cashier line is when I have a lot of stuff or my kids with me.
It’s reasonable to have a store provide a service where an employee processes the customer’s items to check for damage, verify prices, and bag them intelligently.
But it’s not worth the risk of getting the wrong chatty cashier.
No, I’ll roll the dice and scan them myself. If I hit an “unexpected item in bagging area” error that requires someone to come over and help me, I can always burn down the store and run away and try again somewhere else.
To each their own, for sure, but I love a chatty cashier.
Nobody at the self checkout is holding me up because they are having a chat with the cashier. No one in the self checkout is holding me up because they want to talk about every item I purchased like it’s some rare lost artifact. No one in self checkout is causing me to be “in the slow line” because one line feeds to multiple kiosks. No self checkout ever struck up an unwanted conversation with me, or caused me to roll my eyes in irritation with their inability to figure out how to pay wirh some obscure format, or wait for 10 mins for some stupid price check or price compare with a website or another store or whatever.
I get my shit, and I leave unbothered. I’m not working for the company any more than I am by picking my own food off the shelf. I am, however, unburdening myself of other people. I actively avoid places with no self checkout.
I absolutely agree with all those points and I’m glad self-check oot exists, however… When you stand in line for 10 minutes at the hardware store to get up to one of four kiosks, and something scans as an invalid UPC. Now you’re waiting for one cashier that servicing four registers. Or you’re at Target and there’s only four self checkouts open. Zero regular lanes and you’ve got a cart full of groceries You’ve just spend an hour curating. Each one of those checkouts is able to handle about two bags.
Each one of those checkouts is able to handle about two bags.
Fuck Walmart. With that said: the local one has huge flat spots (bigger than a normal checkout actually) with no scale for their self checkout, it’s perfect
Walmart is the only self checkout that constantly accuses me of stealing.
I’m not advocating for there to not be normal lanes. Both have their use cases and yeah if I have an assload of shit that I can’t be fucked to scan, I’ll go to a normal lane and deal. But an overwhelming amount of the time, I just want to enter, get my shit, and leave without being hassled.
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