Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021
Ah yes, the 'Nightmare' that a clear majority of people prefer.
This is yet more 'wahhhh shoplifting' bullshit from companies whose interests are directly opposed to the interests of their customers.
People want self checkout to be less shit, which it easily could be. In Australia I didn't even have to put things in the bagging area, just scan them. It made the whole process so much smoother.
The BBC article that this article is a bizarre summary of is far better (the Gizmodo article even links directly to the BBC article). It give a far better overview of the issues; the main crux is they cost most than anticipated through both theft and cost of the machines themselves. The consumer's disliking it is a less point and more naunced essentially "customer's want the technology to work but it isn't" which is also what you've said.
Personally I preferred the self checkouts because I don't want to interact with someone, but th they fail so much (because of the weighing which is to stop me being a supposed thieving scumbag, not to benefit me) and you end up standing around waving at a random stranger to come and fix the machine awkwardly while a massive queue waits impatiently for a machine. I've recently switched back to the manned checkouts for bigger shopping trips.
Same when I was living in Spain. It was so quick and easy, I almost never needed assistance. There was a noticeable difference when ingot back to the States.
See, that sort of thing is why I hate supermarket self-checkout. Other places it can be fine, but unless I’m doing the old ‘ten items or less’ thing and it’s an off-peak time, there’s a big line at the self-checkout. It’s a toss-up whether self-checkout or going to one of the two checkout lanes they have open with people on them is faster at this point, which basically means I’m subsidizing the company by doing what an employee could do more efficiently and everything would be a lot faster if they just opened up more human lanes.
If you want to talk about shitty robots, grocery stores have shitty robots. The thing can only wander around and look for spills and stuff, and then it just beeps and an employee has to come clean it up.
Basically they automated the assistant manager position.
You think they're going to spend more money on the biggest money sink in a business, humans? They'll do away with self checkout and not increase their cashier count, maybe even decrease it, because if they get rid it of it, it's a cost saving move, not a customer satisfaction one.
The mistake here is in assuming that it’s either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.
The reality is that they’re great for some applications, but suck ass for others.
Here’s the deal; if it’s just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it’s me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it’s way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won’t be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.
What part about this do people not understand?
I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don’t actually have to shop for families of their own.
Self checkout should have those mobile scanners that you can use to check items out while you’re still shopping. We have them here and it is a godsend for larger purchases. You scan the items, put them in your bags and at the self checkout, you can just register your card and pay.
I think the problem is that there aren’t enough checkout lanes for either to be practical anymore in a supermarket with a cart full of items. But I agree, it’s not an either/or thing.
For me there are two things that makes me reject all self checkout. Most importantly, it is taking people’s jobs and making me do the labour for no discount, companies only offer them because it pads their profits. Second, the user experience is almost universally terrible. I don’t want to take the risk just to get pissed off.
I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can’t even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There’s no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we’re putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs…
Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they’re more fun to drive than a shopping cart.
I'm just going to copy/paste my comments from the last article 2 days ago that was saying this same thing:
This is the second third article in the last month I've found here on the Fediverse pronouncing the death of self checkout and honestly I just don't see it. Most of the stores around me have only just recently expanded their self-checkout areas and I vastly prefer using it unless I've got more than 25 items.
I'd honestly probably stop going to a store that decided to not allow me to check out on my own. Small talk and having to make a minimum wage worker suffer through it is just not something I want when I'm running to the store for a gallon of milk. I vastly prefer being able to throw in some earbuds, get my shopping, check out, and get out to having to interact with anyone while I'm just trying get my shit.
I read the last article like this while waiting in line at a grocery store that had replaced literally every human-staffed checkout (which were never open anyway) with a massive complex of self-checkouts the previous week. It made me laugh.
It’s great at small stores where you’re getting a bag or two. At large grocery stores or Walmart like stores it’s annoying. There’s never enough space to put everything, it’s easy to mix things up if you have to put things back on the cart, and it takes twice as long because you have to unload and load while scanning. A couple of the grocery stores near me have scan guns that you can use while shopping and checkout right from. Walmart has this via their app if you pay for Walmart+, but they still make you go to self checkout to finish and wait in that damn line, and they still block the exit wanting to check your receipt which can gather a line. I avoid going to Walmart for all but a couple items that are super cheap. Even then I’ve paid more elsewhere because of how terrible the checkout experience is.
I don’t think they can make you do the receipt check at the door if they aren’t a membership club… I could be mistaken on that, but I’ve never submitted to that outside of Sam’s and Costco since that’s part of the agreement for membership
Legally they can’t force you to show your receipt. But refusing to show it could constitute probable cause for employees to detain you while they sort things out(shopkeeper’s privilege). Detaining you could constitute false imprisonment, though Colorado courts recently ruled Walmart not liable in that regard. The store could also choose to ban you.
I prefer self checkout because I get to bag my groceries the way I want. It’s infuriating to line up my groceries in the correct order only for the cashier/bagger to mix them all up in my bags anyway. If I insist in bagging them myself, then I have to awkwardly do it while the cashier and the next person in line watch and wait for me to finish. At least for self-checkout, there are multiple counters and no single person waiting for me.
From your comment I assume you are American, since I heard that people pack your bags at your stores. In Germany and probably most of Europe a typical checkout process works differently and probably solves the problem.
You put your stuff on a large transport band, emptying your cart (probably have those as well)
When you’re up you move your cart at the large area after the cashier
The cashier registers everything and pushes it to you into that big area
You put everything in your bags while they are working
Cashier finishes, you make your payment
You pack the last 3 items that are remaining
Some stores also introduced a simple “switch” that makes the products of the person after you slide into a seperate area, to save time .
I actively choose to shop at stores that have self-checkout because they have self-checkout. I don’t know why the author is writing as if everybody hates them.
I'm a millennial, and I will abandon my basket 99% of the time when there's not a staffed cashier lane available, especially if I'm trying to buy more than 2 items.
I actually tried to use the self-checkout at the airport recently when I was buying a single bottle of water, and the cashier jumped in almost immediately to assist anyway. I forget exactly what happened, but it was definitely overly complicated compared to the staffed checkout that I used at the same shop the previous time I flew through that airport.
Why? I find them much easier and faster, especially if I’d be bagging things myself.
Sure, the cashier can scan things more quickly than me sometimes, but compared to the extra waiting (due to self-checkout having a single line for all registers), it ends up being slower with the cashier.
Depends on the store. Some of them are terrible. Tiny areas to checkout an entire grocery car sucks. Especially when it weighs as you go, then hits the weight limit and apparently just starts ignoring the requirement.
Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I’d share:
The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you’re gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.
A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don’t think they’ve implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.
Look into Amazon fresh stores. They have that concept. You just place the item in the cart and it shows you the list of items you have in the cart while at the store. After that I think you just go to the register and it chargers your Amazon account.
But how do you do it with produce? Say you want to buy three apples. I can get that it could figure out amount with a scale, but how does it know you’ve bought apples?
Just came back from a trip to Japan and that’s how they do clothes. Drop everything on a basket, pay and leave. The staff is super nice but you don’t have to talk to anyone at all if you don’t want to
I despise Fry’s Electronics but they got manned checkout correct. A single fucking queue sharing all the resources (cashiers). Like at a bank. Having to pick & guess which mini-queue would go faster always gave me anxiety. And the “less than 15 items” queue was not always quicker.
Self checkout, in lots of cases, brings grocery checkout to a single queue, and for that reason, I welcome it. Obviously, stores that forcing people to pick self-checkout mini queues should be burned to the ground
A few stores, in my area it’s particularly clothing discounters, seem to have moved to that model, and as long as you plan your checkout areas even sort of halfway well, it’s a million times better.
And god what a sad death Fry’s had. It went from the bona fide nerd store to a disaster. Eventually the ones in Dallas-Fort Worth were just zombie husks riding out the leases and selling leftovers on consignment from the few manufacturers who couldn’t be bothered to come repossess the inventory after the store failed to pay their invoices.
Meijer is the only one that has their self checkout figured out. 2 different sections in my store with 10-12 checkout stations. So a minimum of 20 self check out stations open and they’re always open and working. They never give me the errors like Walmart and Kroger.
Walmart might have 20 checkouts as well but half aren’t working or open plus there’s 3x the people at Walmart so there’s usually a 15 minute wait.
Kroger is the worst with the errors. They might have 20 checkout stations but 5 might be open.
Going to Walmart or Kroger is always a hassle. I avoid those 2 unless I need one or two items.
Wait…ok, so I haven’t really shopped anywhere but Meijer or (to a lesser extent) Kroger for about a decade. Is this why I haven’t seen the problems with things like “unexpected item” and such? That could make a lot of sense. It’s been driving me crazy seeing stories like this when the worst experience I have with self checkout is when the camera thinks I’m stealing something because I have, like, a Wendy’s cup.
lol maybe. Meijer is such a breeze at the self checkout compared to Kroger. The memes are mostly true. Unexpected item in the bagging area half a dozen times, then the cashier has to come over and put their passcode in and override whatever happened.
Our Meijer is quite a bit further away too. If we’re out in the area already we’ll stop by and do a bigger trip. I could put up with the nonsense at Kroger if their damn prices weren’t so ridiculous. Kroger is by far the closest but they’re by far the most expensive for me anyway
This must be location dependent (and time). I have multiple Walmart and grocery store chains nearby, and the worst I ever see is one Walmart may sometimes have a line at self checkout… But I usually know by how full the parking lot is.
One grocery store never has a line, one grocery store does occasionally at rush hour (both the same chain, about 5 miles apart).
Well if you really want me to buy even more shit online (let's be real, from Amazon) this is a good way to do it.
At best I don't like small talk or dealing with other people through meaningless interactions. At worst I might have minor social anxiety. I hugely prefer to just walk into a shop, grab what I need, check myself out, and leave.
At this point I'm also just as fast (if not faster) than the paid cashiers and baggers (who need and deserve chairs or stools by the way).
So yeah, if self checkout goes away, I'm buying as much stuff online as possible and generally making fewer trips to the store.
The idea that whoever is already driving around could handle the increased load is laughably naive. You cannot increase load without increasing capacity.
Also, I've used my local chain's version of this. It's okay for prepackaged stuff but absolutely awful for fresh produce. They also regularly botch orders, because, well, the pickers aren't paid a livable wage and their metrics are all about quantity not quality.
Obviously. It was just a suggestion. Thanks for the agreement 👍
Yeah. Not talking about the bullshit supermarket delivery service. That is awful. A new system built from ground up. Really cutting out supermarkets entirely. Work with local producer’s to consolidate in service hubs. Then move from out of those zones.
Fresh fruit and vegetables really needs a different system entirely.
I have heaps of veggies currently and most are going into compost or to the cows. I can consume the amount a single zucchini outputs, let alone 4.
Yet other than putting it in a food bank where it will likely rot. I have no other options.
There’s millions in a similar situation. It doesn’t benefit me to give it away not does it benefit me to produce tonnes of waste.
Supermarkets are in exactly the same situation. Summer rocks up and they start basically giving away produce or it will spoil.
I get it, I do. I've been a migrant in a place with a language barrier on top of sharing that general feeling, so... yeah, sure. In principle.
But the times I've used it it's twice the anxiety, in that I keep fearing I'll mess up and need help, which is orders of magnitude worse than having to go through the register. Just the potential of issues is enough to deter me, but the times I've had the scales mess up or the payment method not go through were excruciating.
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