@AAKL@BBC I actually prefer self-checkout but I'm a very pedantic grocery bagger. I do wish the self-checkout stations at my grocery store were not so finicky about their weight sensors on the bagging area but it's a minor quibble.
I'll add that I really began to appreciate them during the pandemic. Not having someone with indeterminate hygiene handle my groceries after handling other people's items/cards/cash just seems a bit more sanitary, though that might be an illusion.
@AAKL@BBC Honestly I don't really think there was ever any illusion it would revolutionize or improve anything. Stores just want to reduce human employees as much as possible and will try anything to do so. Having worked retail before I can tell you firsthand that it seems to positively GALL those in charge that human employees require breaks, food, even need to use the restroom. They may not even realize it, but their ultimate goal is to be rid of all the humans.
@AAKL@BBC If customers hate self checkouts then the store isn't doing them right. As a customer I love self checkouts because then I know that an underpaid clerk is not scanning my itmes twice, and I have time to look at the prices being charged to see if the price at the scanner matches the price in the ad or on the shelf tag. In fact that is the biggest failure I have seen, where the scanner isn't pricing the item correctly, but that would also happen at a human-run register because the prices all come from the same database. And where I live, if there is a scanning error and you are overcharged and you have already completed the transaction and paid, then the store has to pay you a bonus of ten times the difference in the price (between what you were charged and what the price should have been) plus $5. So it it potentially saves the store a LOT of money if customers can see what they are being charged before they complete the transaction, and can get assistance to correct the error.
And sure, in theory you can call an error to the attention of a human cashier, and that's a possibility if you only have a couple of items, but if you have a shopping cart (or trolley as they say in the U.K.) full, an experienced cashier often scans the items so fast you just can't follow along (plus you are often still trying to unload the cart when the clerk begins scanning your order). So all you can do is check your receipt for errors, but now you have to make a trip to the service desk and wait in line there to get an adjustment, and meanwhile all your frozen and refrigerated items are getting warm.
But if I am doing the scanning, I can see the price for each item and if I want to scan my items in a particular order I can do that too. If I don't want my bread or eggs or bananas smashed I can make sure that doesn't happen. If I have to weigh something, I can make sure that a part of the previous customer's order isn't sitting on the scale (that actually happened to me in a human-run checkout line once, and the clerk was totally unapologetic).
And I don't have to try and make small talk, which I hate. Some people may want that, but I don't. I just want to pay for my purchases and get out.
Most of the time the self-scanners at the stores I shop at work great and I really wish all the stores had them. The one store that pisses me off is #Aldi (#aldius); they recently installed a bunch of self-scanners but their scanners neither take cash nor the store's gift cards. So if you want to pay cash for your purchases, you need to use a human-run register and usually there are only one or two of those open, and their cashiers scan items REALLY fast, which is great for people in a hurry but not for people who want to see how each item is being rung up. A store that does self-checkouts right is #Meijer; theirs accept cash and give change and hardly ever make mistakes, and they have so many that even if one or two are out of service it usually doesn't cause a backup - I can't even think of a time I had to wait more than a minute or two since those were installed, except for one day in the middle of the holiday rush where I think I had to wait three or four minutes.
@AAKL@BBC I feel really validated by this article. I resent the ubiquity of self-check; I didn't mind when it was like two little self-check kiosks and the rest of the lanes were fully staffed—if you only need to purchase one or two things, self-check is fine—but as soon as our local grocers stopped staffing normal check-out and started pushing every shopper to self-check, well, I emerged from my chrysalis a beautiful curmudgeon.
@AAKL@BBC I was under the impression that it was a cost saving measure for the store. Employees cost money. As a cost savings measure, one employee helping 6 frustrated customers is much cheaper than having to staff 6 registers.
I can't be the only one to understand that they are successful by the real metric and not the made up excuses.
@AAKL@BBC I don't use self-checkout because it isn't really automated. I replace a clerk and a bagger.
If I could put my groceries on a conveyor belt, push my cart a few feet forward, watch as each purchase was scanned and placed correctly into a bag, watch the bags go into my cart, pay with my card, and then push my cart away, I'd use it.
Not surprisingly, there's a huge gap between theory and practice for the tech folks
People almost always prefer dealing with other humans--not some capitalist tech bro's vision of heaven (esp. for customer service)
It's amazing to me how horrifically the tech/corporate industries missed these key considerations when making such a large bet on something doomed to fail.
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