Lunatech, 4 months ago

@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.