I actually prefer self checkout. Idk. I get it though.
Recently had a support call with a woman who was complaining about our 2 factor authentication system because she could only access one web page at a time. When I asked her if she couldn’t just open a new tab, she said she was too old to learn how computers work and couldn’t do that. She went on to claim that there’s a lot of people at her level of ineptitude, and that we shouldn’t have implemented 2fa because “most people don’t have multiple monitors.”
It was so, so hard not to throw out an OK Boomer as they proudly lectured me on the depths of their ignorance.
There is a time when every person realizes that things have changed so much around them that they no longer understand how it works. It creeps up on you slowly, but in the Information age, that is accelerated. Every person here will experience some form of that at some point in their lives.
That’s entirely your choice, it’s not a requirement of life. You can continue learning new information, there’s nothing that forces you to give into ignorance. I’d also say there’s a pretty big difference between “I’m not a very tech savvy person” and “I am completely helpless and choose to make it other people’s problem.”
It’s a balance in many ways. There’s some aspect of refusing to do things due to not wanting to learn things. But sometimes people don’t want to adopt technologies simply because they’re unwilling to accept some very glaring downsides. For example, if you demand 2FA, you are demanding that your customers essentially consent to have an ankle monitor and remote audio monitor on their person at all times. Smart phones track your location 24/7, and they seem to track what is spoken around them as well. They are absolutely a huge invasion of privacy, and it’s remarkable we ever let them become as indispensable as we have. They’re basically just ankle monitors we all voluntarily put on each morning. I can absolutely see people just refusing to have a smartphone for the privacy implications alone.
I also have some red lines on technology. I refuse to use tiktok because of its privacy and psychological manipulation issues. And I’ve moved away from most social media, even if that cuts me off from some very useful communications and conversations in my family and community. I also refuse to buy any appliance with a wifi connection. I try to avoid any device that requires an app to use. If your widget requires an app but your competitor’s doesn’t, I’m buying from your competitor. If your widget requires an app and your widget is just something that would be nice to have, but not life-changing, I’m not going to buy your widget at all.
It’s a very dangerous thing to simply decry anyone who rejects a technology as ignorant or not tech-savvy. Often people reject particular technologies for damn good reasons. If we just accept the newest thing with zero thought simply for the fact that it is new, we are actually the ignorant ones. Something being newer does not automatically make it better. And often newer things are inferior to old things, like the case of a lot of privacy-violating appliances and companies filling everything with DRM and trying to turn it into a subscription. I don’t want basic household items to require an app to use, as it is guaranteed that the security on that system will be crap, and that the product will stop working after a few years after the company stops supporting the app.
If I’m buying a physical thing, I want it to be completely stand-alone and require zero continued feedback from its manufacturer in order to continue to function. You can tell me til you’re blue in the face about how spying on me helps improve the customer experience, but I’m still going to tell you to take your privacy-violating, app-dependent widget and shove it up your app-loving ass.
My father was 75 when his finances had deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to afford a personal secretary.
He had me explain the things he had to do, and he wrote them down on paper, step by step. He was pretty quickly able to do all the things he needed to do on his desktop.
Never got fast typing down, so I got him dictation software. Anyway, I’m pretty convinced as long as your determined, you can stay hip to new technology in a way that at least allows you to work with it.
The difference is you. You enabled him and helped accommodate his needs. Without you, how’s he going to cope? Also you’re a good child.
Can be funny for trivial stuff, but in the medical field this type of stuff is pretty messed up in my opinion. Some medical places implement stuff like that just because they refuse to pay people to staff the phones in scheduling.
Also, if the old lady doesnt want MFA thats her choice.
Mandatory MFA isn’t a bad thing though.
If an old lady doesn’t want to remember a password, should she be able to enter just her email/identifier without any verification?
MFA doesn’t really help much in the case of a tech illiterate person though, since TOTP codes can be phished just like username and password can. A scammer that calls them will just ask for the code in addition to the username and password.
My employer uses Yubikeys with FIDO2/WebAuthn for two factor auth, but that’s probably too complex for a non technical person to figure out (even if it’s basically just “press the button when it tells you to”).
Well, TOTP prevents at least these attack vectors, even for tech-illiterate people:
- Unnoticed data base leaks being used to gain full access to people’s accounts
- Credential stuffing (using another service’s leaked credentials to gain access)
With TOTP there must be at least some contact between the “hacker” and the victim.
I just think they should be able to opt out. Its up to the patient what their security posture is. If they don’t want it, they shouldnt be forced to have it. Just have them sign away their rights to sue the hospital or something along those lines.
I’m open to hearing an argument why it should be forced to use MFA even if the patient doesnt want it. I know at least one hospital my company works with that has it optional for patients who want it.
I think most people are just unaware of the risk that is involved. Healthcare information is some of the most sensitive data on a person and should be protected at all cost.
Some older people in particular have as much of a self-preservation instinct on the internet as toddlers in real life. If protecting them takes away a tiny bit of agency from them then so be it because they cannot be trusted with such decisions. I believe any reasonable person would use MFA because trading off a tiny bit of convenience for a significant amount of security is always worth it.
Most of these patients have already received emails from multiple healthcare organizations that their data was breached though.
The way medical data is stolen isnt through individual accounts usually unless you are famous or a politician.
I get being mean to walmart because corporations are bad but being needlessly rude to random employees rubs me the wrong way. Most of us can’t get a job anywhere better despite having a degree. We have to deal with the mental abuse of people constantly treating us like dog shit just because we exist. The job situation is so fucked right now. I should not be having to compete with people that have masters degrees and decades of experience for tech support jobs that pay $15 an hour. Fuck this broken society.
The last time I was not underemployed was 2018.
Maybe your decades of failure is just obvious to everyone but you
I was once mistaken for an employee somewhere and my sleep deprivated response was to say “I am wearing pants so clearly I dont work here.” I have no fucken clue what that means but I think it was a threat.
We’re you at a strip club?
Pretty sure I was at an Ace hardware or some shit. Like I said I was severely sleep deprived and was looking for something, pretty sure it was duck tape for reinforcing an air conditioner.
Frankly speaking once I got to my car and realized what I said I started laughing my ass off since it was such a non sequitur.
I refuse to use them as a union worker, when I’m told to use the self checkout as I’m in line for the only cashier I just refuse. I’m doing it for you kids
This is broken window fallacy, akin to throwing garbage on the floor so some custodian keeps his job. These workers still have other shit to do. I get to waste less time waiting. So it’s win-win-win situation.
Saying this is win-win-win is rather short-sighted. Unless we talk about something nationalized.
I see it as every employee walmart has to hire and pay to solve this problem is a local and the money will be saved and spent locally, not automatically going to be another drop in some CEO’s bucket.
The best choice is to shop local in the first place but some places don’t have that luxury.
I’d rather “work” than wait behind people with 100+ items. I can be out the door in 2 minutes.
even faster if u skip some items from being scanned
Shoppin’ with Hoffman
Why bother going through the checkout at all, the fastest way out is straight through the door. Unrelated, the weather is changing so I’m thinking of buying a really big coat, and I’ll want pockets for my keys and other essentials.
I don’t know where you live but here this would be a crime and very antisocial and despicable.
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re being facetious.
I thought you were fully serious, but then I hit the line
Even if prices in reality do not need to compensate, because margin is already big enough, it gives retail a free card to jack prices,
And assumed you were just poking fun and the poor widdle corporations and their giant profit margins, but then you continued with your paragrap, and now I’m not sure again…
No, I’m serious in all statements. Corpos will jack prices on any occassion that offers itself, so keep the number of those low.
Don’t worry, even if we don’t give them the theft excuse they’ll just lie about it anyway and do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of our input or reality. If a retail corporation wants to raise prices, they will raise prices. There is nothing you or me or anyone else can do about it.
The only winning move is not to play the game.
But maybe you can explain where all the downvotes come from, because I don’t understand.
Is thievery good? Only when thieving from companies? Is is socially acceptable to take what is not yours from others? Only from companies? Or from a stranger who has more than you? From a friend? What’s this all about?
appeal to ignorance.
Fuck the corpos, choom.
Whoosh that’s were the DV came from.
Yeah, it’s completely ethical to steal from big corporations. They steal from you every single day. Their entire existence is based on the amoral exploitation of other humans. Other people, small businesses, a very very very few medium-large corporations, it’s not ethical to steal from, they’re not a disgusting blight rotting away the foundations of society. Nor a friend, or stranger, or small business, etc. for the same reason.
I feel like this isn’t a particularly hard concept.
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I don’t know where YOU live but Walmart is one of the biggest thieves in the USA. People working there still have to collect government assistance because they pay too little to live on.
Bro relax. It was a joke
it gives retail a free card to jack prices
so blame the corpos for that. not your neighbour stealing some chicken.
Based
I mean, walmart could easily fix that by having fucking cashiers.
At the walmart I go to they put in like 60 self checkouts and have, maybe, one cashier running at a time.
I don’t mind self checkout as a concept. Its fine if you are just buying a couple things, or something you might be personally embarassing for you… but they are not a replacement for cashiers.
Cashiers and belts are needed to handle bigger purchases like monthly groceries and shit.
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
You don’t get to be 3 of the richest people on the planet by paying for labor
Walmarts keep the same number of cashiers before and after self checkouts are installed.
That number is between 0-2 depending on how many cashier lanes there are.
not in any walmart where i’ve witnessed the changeover.
I’m just basing it off of being married to a Walmart manager for 10 years but hey, maybe outsiders’ anecdotal feelings on the topic are more accurate than observed first hand experience.
Walmart is ALWAYS hiring cashiers.
Yeah, and you know where they are? stocking shelves and picking for the online pickup orders. Not running checkout lines.
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
I also faced that scenario once and walked out of the store leaving my $400 worth of groceries sitting in front of the abandoned cashier lanes. The profit from just my purchase would have paid for a full cashier shift that day. Instead they got to pay for restocking and ruined frozen food and meat.
I’m 100% against self checkout.
They’ve put the burden of sale on you instead of themselves. If you fail to check something out accidentally, you are liable for theft.
If they don’t have a cashier, I go to customer service and tell them to ring me up even if it’s one item.
NAL, but i believe that they have to show intent in order to prosecute. As long as the legal system works properly, they would have to prove that you’re lying when you say “I forgot that was down there”
I can’t imagine a judge taking a case where someone unwittingly stole something
Don’t need to get to a judge. They can just tresspass you and then you have to drive 30 miles to another supermarket cause you cant ever set foot in that one again.
Thats enough to fuck shit up for a lot of people.
Do you live in the US? I do and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that happens here
I admire your faith in our legal system but despair at you lack of imagination.
They’ll prosecute a bag of money for potentially being involved in a crime.
Depends how white you are
Not even cause the checker should have seen it but also what store prosecutes someone over 1 item
Which is why I’m against making people do big orders through self checkout, cause thats when an accident can happen.
Not when you’re getting your genital itch cream.
A lot of the grocery stores near me have a limit of 15 or 20 items for self-checkout. Safeway says “about 15 items” which is strangely vague. Any more and you have to go through a regular checkout.
i would say even 10 items is to much for self checkout, but thats better than walmart expecting you to take a cartful of monthly groceries through self checkout.
Yeah and then I had a lady ask to check my receipt because there’s not enough room to put everything on the fucking thing all at once so I told her no and walked out.
What’s so bad with self checkout I run through it faster then a cashier does
If you have more stuff than will fit in the weighing platform it’s a logistical disaster. Hence why the belts and bagger system were invented in the first place.
Not really you leave it in the cart and bag it as you scan it
And then put the full bags back in the cart right on top of the stuff you still need to scan?
There’s usually a platform you can leave 5-6 bags on till your cart is empty enough to through them back in there as you scan the rest
Yea no shit. Not everyone has the luxury of shopping as often as you do and we have to actually fill our carts. Also it sure seems like you are still using disposable bags which is a shame.
You act as if it doesn’t work the same way with a full cart cause it does, so what if I am that wasn’t even the subject
I haven’t seen a Walmart with one of the weighing platforms in years, actually
They all use larger flat plastic coffee-table bits attacked to the machine now, there’s actually about as much room on it as is in a cart, and it’s really nice
You beep, beep, beep, and never have to worry about UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING ARE or anything like that
It’s cute that you think 25% of your sale is going towards labour, even before self-checkouts became so commonplace.
Just curious, I have no idea what the real number is, what do you think it is?
I have no clue. I guess you can look at the profit margin for a supermarket (Walmart is around 2%, I just checked), then figure out the average full food shop spend, and finally see what the average hourly wage is for a worker and how long it would take to ring up a full shop.
Although, this also highlights why they can’t give OP 25% off as their margin isn’t anywhere near this figure. I guess we should also factor in handouts that companies like Walmart get from the government to subsidise their staff etc.
From reading a few reports, after looking this up, it seems walmart spend about 7% of it’s revenue on hiring, and about 32% on payroll. The other costs towards labor seem to vary greatly from source to source, depending on exactly what they take into consideration as a labor expense. So it is somewhere between 39% and 60% of the revenue.
So that other person was probably being super condescending for no reason? That’s kind of the impression I got when they said they had no idea the actual number.
Apparently they spend about 7.67% of their operating budget on labor. Just in case anyone was wondering. Source.
Thanks for posting this.
I would wager that a significant piece of that is centered around the logistics and distribution element. Cashiers are probably rounding errors.
Its cute that you are trying to twist what I said into something that I didnt say.
No wait, not cute. the opposite of that.
I said I want a 25% discount for doing their job and saving them the labor. Not that their labor is 25% of my bill.
I’m sorry you’ve taken offence to my throw away comment, as no offence was meant.
Is it actually “cute” that this person allegedly overinflates the worth of checkout labor, or were you being condescending?
I didn’t know there were places that even asked that.
…because it’s a non-sequitur and makes no sense as a response.
I’ve only been mistaken as an employee in one store I used to frequent. I was very disappointed when all three of those other customers actually accepted I didn’t work there.
I was in the camping section checking out the flashlights and the idiot that actually worked there wasn’t expected to learn what those lights will actually do. Told the customer it runs at the maximum output for the runtime of the lowest output because the employee only looked at the simplified status on the side of the box.
I had to show the customer the chart on the back of the box where the runtime and brightness of each mode is listed there and talked at length about all the different lights on display that I saw and was familiar with.
When I stepped away three different customers asked me about stuff in different departments of that store and I told them I didn’t work there. Some of them gave me a dirty look, others were more chill about it.
You can make anyone believe you’re supposed to be somewhere if you just act like you know what you’re doing. But in this case I actually did know more about those flashlights than the employees did.
Boomer uncle literally drives his electric bill payment to the local office to pay it when they have a perfectly fine online portal.
Same exact response ‘that’s someone’s job’ like the employee actually has a say.
What about the jobs of the people that maintain the online portal though??
Most of them are useless and horruble ti use. Don’t get me wrong I love the cinvinience, but they need to hire competant designers/dev.
Well…fuck em, I guess!
If they’re charging so much that the local govt needs to pass that on in the form of a $5 fee on a $9 payment, they’re either gouging, or have an unsustainable business model.
Either way, fuck 'em.
There’s no justification from a pure convenience standpoint, but I could respect the pettiness if the electric company ran their shit like one local government office in my hometown, where there was this small annual fee they charged like $9 for…but then to pay it, you could either mail in a check, hand deliver cash or check or card…or pay online…where they added a $5 “convenience fee” to a sub-$10 payment.
You bet your ass that I paid that shit in person every year, in loose change, and requested a receipt (which they had to write up manually because they didn’t have a system to process and print one).
My city’s water bill went from a free online portal to a shittier one with a fee. I pay it by check now out of pettiness.
Yeah I refuse to pay a “convenience fee.” I’ll mail a f*ing check if they try to charge me.
No fee for the portal. His only justification was it is some human interaction, which is fine. Just feels like a boomer mentality.
Hell, you can even pay through a check via the banks online portal. Dude doesn’t have a cell phone and never has.
I live by this philosophy
If you charge me more to make both our lives easier, I will make both our lives harder out of spite.
It will cost you more than the fee you tried to squeeze out of me, and I will have spent nothing.
Now do Ticketmaster
I would but arson is a crime
Well, the funny thing is… it IS somebody’s job, and they get paid for it. There more they push “self service” the less workers they’re hiring and paying wages to, and the more your ever-increasing grocery bill just goes to pad some executive’s bonus so they can buy a bigger boat or whatever.
Most corporate bill portals I’ve personally used were terrible and charged me a significant convenience fee for using them.
None of my utilities charge a fee. Seems foreign to me. Usually only the bmv charges one online.
You’re kidding, right? Are You trying to tell me, You physically walk somewhere to pay Your electricity bill? Are You also using cash to do it?
This says much about respect and social competence in this society when the first instinct is to mock and abuse someone with different priorities than yours.
When they are that rude and stupid they have it coming
You mean “rude” in asking for a cashier? Not sure I understand
asking for a cashier?
That would be normal
“I don’t work here”
Is a rude response to the question whether they would like to use the self-checkout.
I would rather someone be rude and fight for what’s right then someone nice that’s propagating a system of injustice because “my 15 mins are valuable”
Ehhhhh very mildly rude if at all. Like it’s not the most polite response but people are allowed to express themselves too
You mean demanding special attention rather than using the self-checkout like everyone else? Not sure I understand.
“service” is no “special attention” but I get to the conclusion our misunderstanding might be a socio-cultural thing
I expect that the management is responsible for adequate staffing. Self-checkout typically doesn’t even work. Not a boomer, not USian, YMMV.
Self checkouts don’t work where you are? Odd.
Typically they need attendant attention, to be reset to be usable. Which makes it rather pointless. My expectation that checkout lines are to be adequately staffed with cashiers. This is, however, increasingly not a safe assumption, in Germany. I expect the situation to further deteriorate. As does everything else.
Here there are like 10 self-checkouts per 1 employee and they’re just there if the machine gets confused about a weight. It’s much better, and faster than waiting in the queue for a manned checkout. I can’t imagine wanting to go backward, where’s the benefit?
They didn’t ask.
service is not something the client has to ask for but something the vendor provides. Just like you hold a door open for someone entering behind you, you provide that service, unasked. Having to ask for service is a failure in itself, it’s just “no service”.
Can’t you read or do you just want to be right?
Netherlands :)
Instead, try saying “well, then they don’t pay you enough to scan everything now do they?”
Y…yes? They don’t? That’s not a very good comeback you got there.
Okay and what if I, believe it or not, actually already knew that they dont pay customers to scan things and wasn’t on Walmart side?
Never understood that argument. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Self checkout makes that happen.
