Meh, self-checkout is blessing. I don’t have to stand in a irritated line of idiots, don’t have to deal with overworked and really doing their best impression of not suffering clerk at the checkout and all that taking like what, three times as long as self-checkout?
Ya all really are masochists just so some tortured soul would smile at ya and pretend shit’s fine.
A good cashier/bagger is much faster than self-checkout. If I only have like 10 items or something, I use self-checkout, otherwise I go to the cashier. Granted, I rarely get a fast cashier/bagger anymore; makes think the company does that on purpose.
I haven’t had a good bagger since they started using the cheap plastic bags. The worst was before they started outlawing them and I had checkers put 2 or 3 items in one bag and then start a new one so you end up with 12 bags for 30 items.
Good baggers would plan out your heavy items for the bottom and bread and eggs on top and fill those paper bags well. They got rid of those employees first.
My local supermarkets have a portable barcode scanner that you use to scan products as you take them from the shelf. When you’re done you just use self-checkout to pay and you can leave immediately.
Self checkout is a blessing when you have, like, six items in your cart. Any more than that, and it’s a punishment. Have you ever tried to be fast with those torture kiosks? They’ve added cameras and shitty AI so that they complain if you’re holding the next item in hand while putting the first item in your bag. It forces you to pick something up, scan it, put it in the bag, wait for the scale to register it, and only then pick up the next item - and heaven help you if you have a second person helping you. Having worked at grocery stores in the distant past, it’s agony.
The actual checkers can scan an item with one hand while picking up the next item, passing each item to the bagger behind them in a steady stream without having to wait for anything. It’s not quite an order of magnitude faster, but it’s close. The only reason self-checkout is ‘faster’ is because one cashier can watch six kiosks at a time, and payment takes the same amount of time no matter how many items you have.
I’ve used self-checkouts in Canada and in The Netherlands. The ones here in Canada are just like the miserable experience you describe. Especially the weight sensor and the machine complaining. In The Netherlands I never had that issue (even with a second person helping me). I’m convinced companies have just turned the anti-theft settings up to aggravating false-positive levels over here.
Yep, that’s exactly it and why no-one understands each other on these threads.
North America is three months away from Boston Dynamic Replicants gruesomly executing and dismembering single mothers in public because a little bit of flour fell out of the bag at the counter and Peter Thiel’s AI decided it was Space Fentanyl.
I like self-checkout in general. I have already been a cashier and I don’t mind. I can keep my headphones on and just go about my day without a social interaction for a few items.
However there’s one thing that I started to not like about some of these, and it’s the giant camera pointed in your face. Sometimes with the image on the screen so that you can see yourself. It makes me wonder how many layers of software are analyzing that data. I’m under no illusions that they are also compiling data from the checkouts with employees, but it’s never so literally in your face.
I don’t have to stand in a irritated line of idiots,
You’re literally describing the self checkout line here.
I refuse to believe you’ve never been in line, absolutely seething while the poor grandma in front of you is trying lookup, scan and bag her groceries while multiple store employees stand by and watch… And then they needed to help anyway because she has a purse full of expired coupons!
I have but the beauty of self checkout is that there are six kiosks for one line, so when granny is taking forever there are five other stations that can finish up before her.
Yeah well, one is offline for no reason, another is broken, two people are buying alcohol and waiting for the attendant to notice the flashing lights, one has a person with an over packed shopping cart and the last one has someone yapping into their cell on speaker while one-handing the entire process.
All those people would go much faster in a full service line, leaving you free to self-check if you wanted to.
I sort of feel like this is the sort of challenge people should be faced with. Like the idea of exercising your feet to walk to the store.
I’m an introvert. I’ve left many parties early. But it’d never get so bad I’d hate interfacing briefly with a cashier for pleasantries. Having those skills, while certainly a challenge for some, is a worthwhile challenge to overcome. I’ve also had some great interactions with cashiers that cheered me up.
Introvert here too and I don’t believe it one bit. It’s wastr of both my and cashiers time. The cashier is there because they are getting paid to do it, not because they want to.
If I wanted to exercise small talk, maybe park? Dunno. Or some place tied to my hobby, where I know I have topics I can rely on.
To me it’s a little bit like the convention of praising things that are handmade. Yes, a perfectly efficient world would factory-produce every item with clear-cut lines, but that gives people fewer meaningful jobs, and exposes us to fewer interesting flaws.
One other very tangible negative related to having mostly self-checkouts is petty theft. Many of us heard about the large rings of criminals that would steal massive numbers of low-value items from stores, no one would stopping them because there’s hardly anyone staffing those stores, and those that are there are overworked.
Meh, self-checkout is blessing. I don’t have to stand in a irritated line of idiots, don’t have to deal with overworked and really doing their best impression of not suffering clerk at the checkout and all that taking like what, three times as long as self-checkout?
Ya all really are masochists just so some tortured soul would smile at ya and pretend shit’s fine.
A good cashier/bagger is much faster than self-checkout. If I only have like 10 items or something, I use self-checkout, otherwise I go to the cashier. Granted, I rarely get a fast cashier/bagger anymore; makes think the company does that on purpose.
I haven’t had a good bagger since they started using the cheap plastic bags. The worst was before they started outlawing them and I had checkers put 2 or 3 items in one bag and then start a new one so you end up with 12 bags for 30 items.
Good baggers would plan out your heavy items for the bottom and bread and eggs on top and fill those paper bags well. They got rid of those employees first.
My local supermarkets have a portable barcode scanner that you use to scan products as you take them from the shelf. When you’re done you just use self-checkout to pay and you can leave immediately.
Self checkout is a blessing when you have, like, six items in your cart. Any more than that, and it’s a punishment. Have you ever tried to be fast with those torture kiosks? They’ve added cameras and shitty AI so that they complain if you’re holding the next item in hand while putting the first item in your bag. It forces you to pick something up, scan it, put it in the bag, wait for the scale to register it, and only then pick up the next item - and heaven help you if you have a second person helping you. Having worked at grocery stores in the distant past, it’s agony.
The actual checkers can scan an item with one hand while picking up the next item, passing each item to the bagger behind them in a steady stream without having to wait for anything. It’s not quite an order of magnitude faster, but it’s close. The only reason self-checkout is ‘faster’ is because one cashier can watch six kiosks at a time, and payment takes the same amount of time no matter how many items you have.
I’ve used self-checkouts in Canada and in The Netherlands. The ones here in Canada are just like the miserable experience you describe. Especially the weight sensor and the machine complaining. In The Netherlands I never had that issue (even with a second person helping me). I’m convinced companies have just turned the anti-theft settings up to aggravating false-positive levels over here.
Yep, that’s exactly it and why no-one understands each other on these threads.
North America is three months away from Boston Dynamic Replicants gruesomly executing and dismembering single mothers in public because a little bit of flour fell out of the bag at the counter and Peter Thiel’s AI decided it was Space Fentanyl.
I like self-checkout in general. I have already been a cashier and I don’t mind. I can keep my headphones on and just go about my day without a social interaction for a few items.
However there’s one thing that I started to not like about some of these, and it’s the giant camera pointed in your face. Sometimes with the image on the screen so that you can see yourself. It makes me wonder how many layers of software are analyzing that data. I’m under no illusions that they are also compiling data from the checkouts with employees, but it’s never so literally in your face.
You’re literally describing the self checkout line here.
I refuse to believe you’ve never been in line, absolutely seething while the poor grandma in front of you is trying lookup, scan and bag her groceries while multiple store employees stand by and watch… And then they needed to help anyway because she has a purse full of expired coupons!
I have but the beauty of self checkout is that there are six kiosks for one line, so when granny is taking forever there are five other stations that can finish up before her.
Yeah well, one is offline for no reason, another is broken, two people are buying alcohol and waiting for the attendant to notice the flashing lights, one has a person with an over packed shopping cart and the last one has someone yapping into their cell on speaker while one-handing the entire process.
All those people would go much faster in a full service line, leaving you free to self-check if you wanted to.
Sounds like you’re just lucky enough to have self-checkouts that aren’t shit
You seem to be on point. And to think when I was a child USA was seen as a place of high technology…
I’m in Canada myself, but we have issues with self-checkouts too, and it very much depends on the store. Some suck, some don’t.
I sort of feel like this is the sort of challenge people should be faced with. Like the idea of exercising your feet to walk to the store.
I’m an introvert. I’ve left many parties early. But it’d never get so bad I’d hate interfacing briefly with a cashier for pleasantries. Having those skills, while certainly a challenge for some, is a worthwhile challenge to overcome. I’ve also had some great interactions with cashiers that cheered me up.
Introvert here too and I don’t believe it one bit. It’s wastr of both my and cashiers time. The cashier is there because they are getting paid to do it, not because they want to.
If I wanted to exercise small talk, maybe park? Dunno. Or some place tied to my hobby, where I know I have topics I can rely on.
To me it’s a little bit like the convention of praising things that are handmade. Yes, a perfectly efficient world would factory-produce every item with clear-cut lines, but that gives people fewer meaningful jobs, and exposes us to fewer interesting flaws.
One other very tangible negative related to having mostly self-checkouts is petty theft. Many of us heard about the large rings of criminals that would steal massive numbers of low-value items from stores, no one would stopping them because there’s hardly anyone staffing those stores, and those that are there are overworked.