To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.
The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.
However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.
Not having to put the items on the scale is a huge step up.
Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don’t use self-checkout. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.
Super fun fact, the people who aren’t idiots at the self checkout, are not notable and therefore are not noted. It’s the morons who stand out.
Just like with driving. The guy in front is always too slow, and the guy behind is always going too fast. Because you don’t notice when the inverse is true.
For me it’s mostly privacy concerns. Now the fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.
fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.
What?
What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!
If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.
If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity.
App/account - yes. Card - no.
That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.
I realise USA is quickly descending into totalitarianism but what you are presenting is a tinfoil hat level of madness.
In what reality do you live in lol? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of “data collection companies”. European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.
If you don’t think all this data isn’t being collated and used then you don’t understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they’ve already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.
Why? At least here the self checkout gets exactly the same info from me as the regular one
You mean you can pay with cash? The one I’ve seen is with making an account with email and online payment, or worse, an app that can extract all sorts of info.
Havent seen one where you can pay with cash, but I have never seen one where you need to make an account to use.
I just tap my card
Well then they know your name at the very least and can use and sell your shopping data.
But that’s not at all specific to self checkouts
Yeah, but all you need to do is wear a small tinfoil hat, that protects you from this.
HOW THE FUCK IS BEING CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT BEING TRACKED CONTROVERSIAL NOW??!?
where are you at that you can’t use cash and have to use an app??? everywhere I’ve worked and shopped, at least some of the self checkouts take cash
I avoid self checkout for different reasons.
-
I’m not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.
-
I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.
- It’s often very time saving to go through checkout. It is really that much hassle to scan your own items? If you’re using a card you typically handle that yourself anyway and many places already have you bag your own goods.
- you’re not going to get in any real trouble if you forget one item. If they happen to check and you did, simply go pay for it, or say “oops, missed that, here take it back I’ll get it next time” if it’s not needed.
I got a question, how much are you being paid for this?
No. seriously. What business is it of yours if someone chooses to not use a self check out?
What? I’m not OP, but I’m pretty sure they’re just stating why they don’t use it.
Why are you assigning their logic to what they think of others?
So to your question, I say: they never said it was their business.
Enjoy your down votes. I’ll give you and upvote just to try to equal the scales slightly. Good luck.
they’re defending the use of self-check out lanes, which were introduced as a cost saving feature for the benefit of retail stores- not their consumers.
They are more than welcome to use the checkout lanes for the reasons they gave, but others- myself included- chose not to. I don’t think any one cares about whether or not a retailer has to hire more employees. at least nobody reasonable.
You do whatever. I like them when I have just a few items because it saves time and social interaction.
I’m with you. Too many opinions all up in here.
number 2 works less well if you are off white
🎶 the land of the freeeeeeeee 🎶
🙄
About the second point, this is copy pasted from a Dutch magazine that looked it up (auto translated)
Forgot to pay for something? That can have serious consequences.
Forgetting to pay for something doesn’t automatically constitute theft. The shopkeeper will have to prove that you intentionally left something unpaid. However, if the shopkeeper believes it was a case of theft, they can call the police. Is this your first time? Then you’ll receive a reprimand, a kind of warning. However, you will have to admit to the theft. This won’t result in a criminal record, but it will be registered in the police system.
Another possibility is that theft will be reported to the police. In that case, you may even have to appear in court. The police will then have to prove that it was intentional – and therefore theft. The shopkeeper can also handle the matter themselves. In these cases, offenders must pay €181 in damages. In some cases, a ban from the shop will also follow. Last year, tens of thousands of shoplifting cases were handled this way.
My number one reason for avoiding self checkout is that I want people to have jobs.
If fewer and fewer people use the manned cashier lines, there will be fewer manned cashier lines.
If it’s busy, and I’m just grabbing a few things, sure, I’ll divert to the self checkout, but if there’s nobody in line, or just a few people in line, I’ll avoid self checkout. I’m not going to be the reason someone lost shifts.
Further:
- Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you’re packaging a week worth of purchases.
- You still need an employee to come over and certify that you’re over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there’s usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
- I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it’s just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
- They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
- They’re non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
- They often don’t take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it’s just a number on a screen).
whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout
The store I go to most often has those rotating plastic bag holders at the end of the belts which makes it effectively impossible to put stuff into your own bags. And they have the fucking gall to put up signs asking you to bring your own bags! I do self-checkout there no matter how much shit I have in the cart.
I’m happy to see someone who dislikes them as much as me.
I recently went to the self checkout because I was in a hurry and only had 5 items (one of them ice cream).
One item (croissant) didn’t have a bar code, I accidentally selected chocolate croissant. When I wanted to correct this, I had to click 3 menus just to delete an item. After I deleted it, the counter locked. It told me to wait for assistance. After a while I just picked up my 5 items and went to a different self checkout counter. Still nobody came to unlock the other machine.
There’s a good argument to be made from the point of view of customer convenience and expediency for using self-checkouts to pay for a small number of items, but even then most existing implementations of that concept are so fucking bad that there are all sorts of stupid problems, like my case of the thing not working unless I had a bag (it literally had no button to just skip it) and yours were a normal human mistake is complex to correct even though the users are amateurs and hence naturally more likely to make mistakes hence the thing should have been designed differently.
I’ve actually worked with UX/UI designer at several points in my career, and one thing that pisses me off about most self-checkouts is just how bad their UX/UI design is.
That so many self-checkout implementations are like that is probably explained by, having moved the costs of wasting time to the side of client, those businesses are not financially incentivized to make the self-checkouts efficient to use, which probably also explains all manner of weird choices in everything from their shape to even the order of their menus - in a manned checkout it’s their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it’s bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it’s not their problem so they don’t care.
This is also another reason for me to be against self-checkouts: the financial dynamics are different with self-checkouts than with manned checkouts since the costs of inefficiency on the former are on the customer, whilst with the latter the costs are on the store (which has to pay a salary for somebody who is less productive than they could be), so stores have less (and more indirect, hence harder to measure, hence often ignored by MBAs) financial pressure to make self-checkouts efficient to use than they do with manned checkouts.
What I also don’t understand, how in this day and age when we have AI that are better at image recognition than most humans do we even need to scan items? A couple of years ago I was in a supermarket that had a conveyor belt, where you place your items. Basically identical to a normal check counter. But instead of a human the items go through a small tunnel with a lot of camera’s (possibly a scale) on the inside. All items scanned automatically, no extra responsibility of forgetting to scan an item, etc. Not sure why I never saw that concept again, it worked great.
I suspect that outside a well controlled environment (like that small tunnel with a lot of cameras), image recognition still yields too many false positives and false negatives to be acceptable compared to scanning a bar code (then again, maybe scanning barcodes is what that tunnel does rather than image recognition).
That said, there was this whole idea of using RFID tags on products so that checking-out was merely passing by a scanner with your filled trolley - which would scan all of its contents at once - and paying (or even have your card directly charged).
However I believe this failed to take off because neither product manufacturers nor the stores wanted to spend the few cents per box that would take to add the RFID tags.
So in order to save the few cents per-box that would enable pretty much instant checkout, we have these crap self-checkout implementations were clients get to do all the work of cashiers in a teller which is worse than that of cashiers, and without even getting a discount for it (actually prices just kept going up) - the whole thing is fucking insulting.
Ha I remember reading some article in the early 2000s about the future of grocery shopping, and it said just that. We could all load up a cart and walk into a pay booth and pay. It would have been really great if that actually was a thing. Everything was going to have an rfid tag.
Even if you’re not using a card, or discount/member program, you’re still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.
If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.
You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you’re not being tracked b/c you used cash.
They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.
Your “argument” is akin to a claim that people shouldn’t worry about having a good lock on their door because it’s always possible to break the door down with explosives.
“Don’t be the low hanging fruit” is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.
But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.
Clearly you’re not in tech, shadow profiles are a thing and the ROI on tracking “people like you” is pretty high.
Clearly you never actually done Tech projects in large corporate environments if you think complex shit is implemented across all sites just because it can be done, rather than because the expected profits exceed the cost and the hassle.
Also you seem to be under the impression that the social media guys would just give searchable access to their store of pictures (or provide a search service) to those big companies for free, which is a hilariously naive take on how Tech businesses work.
Automated following customers in a store with overhead cameras for the purposes of studying how they move around and purchase things is only done for some stores and has entirely different requirements for camera positions, external dependencies (no cross-referencing with external data to ID anybody is needed) and acceptable error rates (the data is not for selling to others so the error rates can be higher), because they don’t need to actually ID anybody to extract “human movement patterns” out of that data and it’s fine if the system confuses two people once in a while because there is no external customer of that data getting pissed off when the same person is reported as making purchases in two places at the same time or other stupidly obvious false positives.
Meanwhile matching the list of items bought with payment information, both of which already get sent from the tellers to the backend systems (for purposes of inventory tracking and accounting), is easy peasy and has a very low error rate.
You’re ridding a massive Dunning-Krugger there in thinking you’re the expert.
I never said they’d be tracked around the store. Matching items bought with who bought them using data taken at POS, including pictures of the face is what I said. AI and website scraping make putting a name to a face a low bar to get over. Or a company could use any of the plethora of OSINT tools to find who a customer is.
-
Fortunately, I’m the sort who goes, “Who the FUCK are you looking at?”, when I catch people staring.
I don’t need them to be speedy Gonzalez but to just not be actually illiterate buffoons
Well then don’t be a fucking moron. Sorry for being a dick towards those kind of people, but the voice prompts walk you through the entire process. All you gotta do is listen to them. I didn’t have any issues when I first tried one 20 years ago. They’re self-explanatory.
I mean at this point they’ve been around long enough that everyone should know how to use them by now, unless you recently moved from a country that doesn’t have them. But again, the machines walk you through the process every time.
Mate, not the previous poster but I’m a senior software engineer with an EE degree and broad enough experience that I could design and implement myself a self-checkout from the ground up, both hardware and software, including UI and backend integration, and I still tend to avoid self-checkouts for those reasons and a lot more (many which I listed in another post here).
There are two very opposite ends of the curve for people who don’t like self-checkouts: those who can’t deal with the tech (who you deem “fucking morons”) and those who have evaluated self-checkouts as a process and found it to overall be inferior to the existing process for their own usual use conditions or who look at it in a broader context and find it to have indirect social damage.
That you can only spot the “being a moron” as a reason to avoid self-checkouts is a pretty good indicator of your own intellectual limitations.
I’m also really lazy and don’t want to do it.
If you’re there for a bag of brown sugar or a carton of half and half self checkout makes sense.
I’ve used scanners outside of this retail environment and I know how to pack both a vehicle and a box well. But the awkward height, shape, configuration of self checkout and its bags or lack thereof turns me into a fingerless, blind man trying to use a calculator.
Never had this issue, and always think it’s incredibly convenient when a supermarket has a self check-out.
But then, I also live in Denmark, so maybe self check-outs are different here?
I personally really like self checkout. Even with a full cart im in and out significantly faster than most everyone else. I dont get how people get tripped up at them but my god Is it so many. I would like to have the option to remove something I accidentally scanned without needing someone though. We finally got passed the bag scale issues this is the next hurdle!
As a side note I only do self check with a full cart because im a late night shopper I would never in a million years do it during busy hours.
If every self checkout was similar to others, but each of them want to make things different.
Different and worse. How do designers keep seeing other checkout system and think: “You know, I think I see a way that we could make this process slower and more complicated…”
I don’t understand why the card reader and the screen are separate units, just combine them like those Square kiosk things that counter order places have.
Security is a big reason to never combine payment processing and user (the store) defined ui.
Could you clarify? Because I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing.
stripe recommends it for card reader to smartphone at least, and it looks like home depot is an example of why it should be done between the card reader and the pos.
https://stripe.com/ie/resources/more/how-do-card-readers-work
Because at the scale these stores work at. It’s cheaper to have different units you can replace, repair and upgrade at different intervals as needed.
Well for starters because their job title is designer.
If they just copy and pasted it would be “What are we paying you for”
See every single UI/UX change on a modern operating system, or website in the past 30 years.
Trust me it’s not the designers choosing to do it this way. There’s management above them saying “hey this other company makes them put in their phone numbers, it must be for SOMETHING, we should too”
This is doubly true for the card payment terminals. The on screen options are all in different places, orders, and with random questions thrown in. What’s your phone number? Do you want to round up to donate a car to starving kittens? What’s your zip code? Debit or credit?
Also, because this system is apparently developed by a maniac: where I live (might be national and not state level, not sure) EBT cards have to be used on some terminals by swiping, not the chip that comes on the card. But to swipe, first you have to use the chip and let that fail. So if you see someone using an EBT card that looks like they have no fucking clue how to use a card, it’s probably that they’re actually using it the only way they can.
Absolutely insane design choice, especially for people who may already be facing delays like separating items into two separate transactions for non-covered items, having to remove items that seem like they should be covered but aren’t, etc.
why would a store need a zip code?
Sales metrics, I guess. Ikea always asks for it when you check out, and I remember having to ask people when I worked at a retail clothes store untold ages ago.
wow, I guess it has been about a decade since I was at an IKEA l
I like self check because it’s less interaction with people, mostly. Also, you can rip 30 packs of PBR near the handle and just scan the can instead on the box.
A 30-pack for a six-pack price is a good deal.
But yes, they are shifting labor to customers.
I’m surprised that:
- You don’t get flagged for a human to check your ID
- The weight doesn’t flag you
Mos def.
They check ID but I’ve never had them scrutinize the price. I think they are just focused on the ID.
I hold the 30 pack and scan near the handle (which I have ripped a little) to scan the can (which I have rotated). Place case on ground to save room for other groceries.
Yaknow that tracks. No one at self checkout will give a shit. Underpaid.
Burn down the self chechouts
Yeah, I won’t help companies to save money they should give to their staff.
They are saving money so ya we should get some of it off the cost
They make millions. Fuck them.
Hell no. They’re a godsend. Don’t have to interact with people and I get out of the store in way less time. And you don’t have a person standing behind you waiting for you to pack your shit.
If they made some system where you could buy booze with some sort of pre-authentication tied to whatever that approved you then that’d be perfect
Honestly self checkout is the bare minimum for me these days. One of the two duopoly supermarkets in Australia rolled out “scan and go” where you can scan it with an app on your phone and pay on your phone and just walk out (with the occasional random inspection to deter theft) and it was such a huge improvement over even regular self checkout. I was gutted when they announced that option was being deprecated due to low uptake.
S-chain in Finland has that but with a device of their own. Rimi in Baltics has the scan and go through app, it was really nice to use.
Before ; someone with a salary did some work.
After ; you the customer do the work, are not paid for it, forced to see ads, and naturally more and more steps will be added. (do you want to give to charity? do you want our premium card? what is your city? and other bullshit).
Sorry but I refuse to self checkout. Pretty often if there is only self checkout I left everything in place for the staff to put again in the store.
If I am forced to use them, I am already in such bad mood that I make my best to make the experience as terrible as possible. I lie systematically to any question, I tend to make mistakes, wait for someone to come. Mainly, I try to make it worse economically.
How in one generation people have accepted to work for free. Not for me.
And you don’t have a person standing behind you waiting for you to pack your shit.
Can’t confirm.
Here stores usually have a single line to multiple machines so it doesn’t feel as much that someone is waiting for you to pack, even though there’s people in the line ofc
There’s rarely someone waiting where I live in the burbs, there’s usually about half the machines available unless I go on the the day before a major holiday or something.
You must not buy a lot of produce, gift cards or otc medicine; the self checkout is slower every time I have to buy any of these things and it’s given some companies (cvs, Walgreens) a reason to make their employees who would otherwise be working the register do other things and leave the front of the store almost completely unstaffed every time I go in there. Now I have to use a self checkout to buy something I know they need a person there for and then stand around like an idiot waiting for the cashier to come and assist.
If it’s a grocery store and I have even a moderate amount of produce, I don’t have the codes memorized and there’s no bar codes on it, so I have to find everything I’m buying on their checkout machine. Something else inevitably doesn’t scan or the bagging area detector freaks out about something and then I have to completely stop what I’m doing and wait for an employee to come and scan their card.
It has made it a lot easier to steal things though and with the terrible experience that comes with these things, I’m not far from doing.
Produce I buy a lot and it’s pretty quick to do them, put on the scale, find the item, press the button, done. Not much different to how you would weight them, press the button, put on the sticker and then get it scanned/scan it. Sometimes I have a brainfreeze trying to find where the produce is on the menu but I also have brainfreezes about the scale number so evens out.
Gift cards and medicine, no I don’t think I’ve ever bought either from a store. Gift card maybe but it was before the machines.
Oh, I guess our produce checkout system is different; that definitely seems like more of a 1:1. For the grocery stores in my area, we just bag up what we want and the cashier puts in the code and weighs it up at checkout time. It’s much faster for them to do it since they usually have the codes memorized or at least know where it is on their cheat sheet.
Gift cards are a scam.
Do your grocery store’s checkout have a search by name? Mine can search by name and have a picture of every produce.
For OTC, i dont see how its a problem unless you buy age restricted stuff?
They may have a search by name, but by the time I hit the produce button, then the search by name button and start keying in the name, a cashier could have rung up two things.
For OTC it happened the other day, just to buy NyQuil at cvs.
They may have a search by name, but by the time I hit the produce button, then the search by name button and start keying in the name, a cashier could have rung up two things.
I mean… thats because the cashier memorizes the codes because they do it hundreds of times in a single day. You could do it equally as fast too if you knew the codes too.
Ah yes, stuff like nyquil is ussually age restricted…
Yeah, that’s my point; I’m never going to memorize those, so I’ll never be as fast as a cashier.
Eh. Thats only a minor issue imo. The real issue is they provide no room to take items from the cart, scan and bag it and keep it in the bagging area. After 2 bags, the area is full. Why dont they have carts stationed there so you just transfer from one cart to the other?
Another issue I have is the machine scans a barcode that is not a ‘product’ barcode and you cant clear it yourself. You need an attendant to clear it. Thats very annoying.
We buy most of our produce at Costco or something, where we avoid the self-checkout. At the grocery store, we’ll usually only get a couple produce items and the rest will be stuff we can’t reasonably get at Costco, like snacks, drinks, etc, and most of those have bar codes. If we have a bunch of produce or a full cart in general, I’ll get the cashier, but 9/10 times, we’ll take self checkout since it’s faster.
I hate how everyone with a billion items in a cart goes through the smaller, 1-3 items checkouts that have no belts, while people with 1-3 items are all at the belted lanes. Why are y’all so bass ackwards?
What kills me is when I’m behind an old person attempting to use a check like it’s 1989. I haven’t been to a grocery store that accepts checks in the past decade, I just don’t understand why they think it will suddenly change back to how it was, and they always act angry and confused when stores don’t accept their checks even though like I said I haven’t seen a store that accepts checks in the past decade
Holy shit, cheques (as we spell it in the UK). I’d not seen one in decades, my bank stopped issueing chequebooks more than 20 years ago but they’ll still print a one-off cheque for you if you ask. Then I spent some time in France and they still use the goddamn things and it is an absolute ordeal - I swear they spend two solid minutes passing the thing back and forth between the customer and cashier, taking turns to make little amendments. I understand that in France a cheque has a lot more legal clout than in the UK.
Have you seen the couple that both get out of the car at the gas station and have to collaborate way too much to work the pumps?
How do these people function in society? The machine is extremely simple to use. Insert card, type code, remove card, pick gas type.
Tourists from New Jersey or Oregon.
Luckily us Oregonians can legally pump our own gas now
Yeah, I only do that when my kid wants to “help,” and that usually means messing with the squeegee/sponge thing.
Not only the self checkout. I usually end up behind someone who’s new to the concept of exchanging goods for legal tender and needs an introduction to it.
This is of course after they have told the story about why they’re in the store, starting with the new testament and moving on from there…
I spend a lot of time thinking about how it’s not my place to judge these people, but I think very few of them would manage to sit the right way on the toilet without outside assistance.
People on their cell phone who act surprised and annoyed that the act of checking out requires a brief moment of their attention.
At every checkout you pay twice. Attention and money. If you’re doing it correctly.
“Can I go ahead of you in line? My kid is acting up. Great thanks. (To cashier) I’d like to buy this alcohol and cigarettes with these food stamps that I acquired totally legally. No? Let’s take several minutes to discuss if there’s any way around the law. Now that that’s over, I’ll pay with a check. Oh, also, can I get 20 scratch off tickets? I just want to scratch them off while you wait. Here, I have a giant roll of cash that I will use, but don’t worry, I wasn’t doing this to make things go faster. Now is my chance to try to do a cash-changing scam on you.”
that’s why one line for multiple checkouts is better
Is it not the standard? Every store with self-checkout I’ve been to has a single line for all machines. I’ve even seen some stores with a single line for regular checkout.
Some places it’s unclear, like Lowe’s home improvement stores. Most people there sort of gravitate to a one-line-for-all-kiosks arrangement but there’s often one douchebag who think everybody else is standing there for no reason and cuts in.
Self check at Sam’s Club at other club stores works in a one line per checkout way, where I am at least
Yes but it’s 100x faster to use the “Scan-n-go” on your phone anyways.
Scan shit with your phone camera as you put it in the cart. When done click checkout, pay on phone. Then just walk out. Occasionally someone will ask to check yer cart.
seems weird to use an app for a physical store
Yes it does but avoiding the madhouse seems worth it. Lines at my Sam’s are always 20+ minutes long
Costco started doing that except it’s them doing it while you’re in line. Like Chik-fil-A. Big brain.
Lines were already speedy, considering.
Not standard here, but it’s a mix. Same applies to other checkouts: so many people are doing the devil may know what, I’m terrible at picking the fastest queue.
well, not in Jordan’s hood
Where I live the grocery stores all have groups of 6+ self checkouts that are reliable enough that only one or two might be out at the same time but generally work, all of the ‘too many items’ issues have been sorted out, and they are in places where people just naturally form lines and take the next free one. It works great and is so much better than checkout lines ever were as one person going slow doesn’t hold up everyone else.
Went on a work trip to a larger city and holy hell I understand why people there would hate self checkout. Forced lines, machines that constantly required human assistance, etc. That would suck to interact with regularly.
Yeah, self-chekout in the 'burbs is fantastic, we have like 4-8 machines and most of the time, at least half are available.
I have the same experience as you and live in a big city, I guess it depends on what country and how up-to-date the hardware is, it used to be like you said but the past 5 years it’s been great and I always use it.
I think that’s just called stealing
There are an unusual number of people in this world who gawk at the self-checkout as if they found themselves at the controls of an alien spaceship.
Oh man! I’m a city bus driver, and the amount of people that struggle with getting fare in the box is too damn high! I don’t understand how you could make a bus full of people wait for you to dig through your pockets at a pace that would make glaciers impatient. You’re standing at the bus stop, you know you’re getting on the bus, know you’ll need fare, yet here we are.
I want to get a documentary crew to follow some of these people around for a while just to see what they do with their days. I genuinely wonder how some people function.
Yup, I rode the bus a lot for a few years, and the first time I went, I checked what the fare was and made sure I was ready, and even on the 100th time, I still kept my fare in hand before getting on. I honestly don’t understand why you wouldn’t, surely you want to get where you’re going instead of digging through your pockets in front of the driver…
some people just living life on hard mode.
Does your area still use cash for bus fares? In 2025? Where I am it feels like we’re behind because only this year did they start letting you tap on with your debit card or phone. We’ve had transit cards since like 2007.
We’ve got transit cards, but some people still insist on cash. To be fair the same people that struggle finding coins are the same people who struggle finding a fare card. Or will try to sit in the entryway of the bus, fire up the app, and buy a ticket, then activate said ticket, then struggle to scan said ticket.
if the bus doesn’t take cash how in the world would tourists be able to use it?
I got an Octopus card when I went to Hong Kong. I got an Oyster card in London. I got an Opal card in Sydney. It’s really not hard to get the appropriate public transport card for the place that you’re at.
Plus, as I mentioned, many places are now moving towards being able to just use your normal debit card, phone, or smartwatch to tap on and off.
if the bus doesn’t take cash how in the world would tourists be able to use it?
Why would tourists be more inclined to use cash?
Because sometimes the dam credit card companies freeze your account when you travel and having the affordable transit option rely on having a functional credit card screw you over when you want to go to the bank to fix the issue. Also minors don’t typically have cards nor asylum seekers. not to mention that cards rely on connection to cellular networks that fail an unreasonable amount
here buses haven’t taken cash for like 15 years. card or pre-bought tickets only.
Must be nice. We’ve got cards, but a sizable population still uses cash
I was stoked when they introduced fare cards in my area because:
- discount on fare
- easier than cash
- they supported credit card tap at the same time
- easy to reload and freeze online
I bought three, one for me, my SO, and my oldest kid (wasn’t free anymore), and if I misplaced one, I’d just freeze it and move the balance to a different one until it turned up. I’d lend one to family so they could take transit to the airport after visiting us and then return it when they came back (I’d be fine if they lost it).
Fare cards rock, I honestly don’t understand why they weren’t very popular.
They since removed the discount, so the value of the pass is a bit less, but we still use it occasionally since it’s less bad to lose the card than a credit card.
