Yes, the convenience of the machine having an error and forcing me to wait while a supervisor wanders over to fix what I, or the machine screwed up.
I fucking hate these things. If they want me to ring up my own groceries they can fucking pay me.
Edit: and to those that think these are the greatest, you’re all outstanding, grade A suckers.
Where I live they work just fine. Sounds like your problem is that your supermarket bought terribly made self checkout machines that keep failing.
Or it sounds like you shut-ins will do anything to not have to deal with people.
That’s true but it isn’t mutually exclusive.
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I just saved hundreds on my groceries by switching to self checkout and fucking stealing.
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What should they do instead, Mr. Astral Brain?
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Perfectly sane response from a perfectly sane man.
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So you have no suggestions. They just should die? They either work where you deem useful or have no income and perish?
The solution is a society without a “work or die” mentality, like you have right now.
We have passed the need where everyone must have a job. We can’t keep inventing new jobs like influencing just to give everyone one.
It is okay if there are some members of society that don’t contribute much. We aren’t cavemen anymore where every person needs to work so the group doesn’t die. Hell we already have business owners and landlords, who offload all their work onto others and do nothing for society except own stuff.
Here’s a tip: Get a better job.
You probably leave no tip when you eat out, right? I say that because this phrase is the one most associated with being put on the tip line on a check. Anyway, I’m not trying to attack you. It is just frustrating to hear people think some jobs are less important than others in terms of a livelihood. In my opinion it is more appropriate to point out that replacing that job with a robot allows the person replaced to do something different within their field.
That was just a rude comment to make.
I actually do tip, funny enough.
What bothers me the most is the fucking Walmart recipt checkers.
Don’t make me check out my own shit if you don’t trust me.
The correct response to them is a wave and a “no, I’m good” as you walk past.
I don’t even bother with the no thank you, I just ignore them. It’s nothing but security theatre anyway.
The ones at Costco seem pretty serious. They want to count the total items sold and how many you have. At Walmart all I’ve ever gotten is “uh… it’s fine” probably because it’s too much trouble.
One Napoleon Dynamite-looking cuntbag gave me trouble at Costco one time because he couldn’t fucking count… I had my items on my own dolly vs a cart, which seemed to make him think I was an indigent shoplifter (really I was walking to my house 2 blocks away). He counted … 11!! Receipt says 10!! Okay, so which item did the clerk miss? He counted again… 9!! Uh, okay, am I missing something? He counted again… 11!! Then he found an item he missed and said , oh, that explains it (? Isn’t that 12?) Just turned to someone else and went on like nothing happened.
I don’t so much mind it at the membership stores because it’s part of the membership.
But my local Walmart recently hired some new woman for it. Most others just glance at it an say “you’re good” to every 10th person but this one takes your recipt and checks every item in every bag, and does this to every person and then freaks out if people walk past the line. It’s bad enough there was a whole thing on the town facebook page with hundreds of people complaining about it.
The most recent time I tried to ignore her and keep walking but a traffic jam stopped me and this bitch walks up and grabs the cart and starts reaching for my recipt.
Lately Walmart self checkout gives you an option to just text you the receipt which I always choose because I don’t need an extra piece of paper that I’m just going to lose in 2 seconds. I think it makes me look extra sus to the receipt checkers though because now they try to stop me every time. I really don’t care though, Walmart’s problem with shrinkage is not my problem, and I’m not going to take the time to stop, take my phone out of my pocket, and pull up the receipt just to satisfy them. Like Walmart, you gave me the option not to print a receipt, and you’re confused that I don’t have one?
I don’t mind using a self checkout except that they’re all terrible. The rep has to come over so often, it’s just a regular checkout with extra steps.
As not just an introvert, but an introvert who had to deal with a language barrier for a long time, I don’t love going through the normal checkout, but I actively dread the idea of having the support person come over because the balance can’t read my tomatoes or whatever.
I’d say online ordering works around both, social anxiety-wise, but then you have to live in fear of when they inevitably call you to say that they don’t have this particular type of banana and maybe you’d like some identical type of banana but we definitely need to have a conversation about it first.
If it smells like shit everywhere you go, check your shoe.
I rarely have problems and I don’t have to bother taking out my headphones.
Not that that saying never had the last four letters of DARVO written all over it to begin with, mind, but I’m so used to seeing it in the context of discrediting trauma that I had to stare at it for several minutes to realize it meant, “If the machine constantly fucks up, maybe you’re just too stupid for touchscreens.”
Not gonna lie, my time in customer service has notably damaged my impression of people. But really, my dude? The contribution is a more insulting version of “works fine for me?”
I had that experience when they were new, but barely ever need assistance for almost a decade.
They HAVE gotten a lot better. I was thinking about adding a disclaimer for the present, looks like I should have.
I’m so good at them I’ll change the language to Spanish and check out just for funsies.
My wife likes to put it in random languages. Real good fun until there was some sort of error and we had no idea what was going on and it didn’t allow us to change the language. Even the cashier was puzzled. I had a nice “I told you so” moment there.
My introversion and social anxiety is so estreme, that self checkouts make me imagine what I would do if I mess up something, or take too long to finish, or imagine people observing me and the way I interact with the machine.
Damn, I got a bit of anxiety just by writing this. The feeling is similar to using a computer while there are people constantly looking at my screen.
Yeah, some of them are continually recording video, which is annoying. Probably a bunch of facial recognition and emotion/behavior analysis too.
Don’t forget the horrors of having to have someone’s grandma sort though all your stuff since you look nervous.
My laziness triumphs over my introversion. plus, fuck robots tikin er jerbs
They’re not even doing good jobs.
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Thankfully it seems both cashiers and baggers are better trained than they used to be at least at the larger chains. I don’t have either of these issues at supermarkets.
That doesn’t mean they won’t be lazy or lack hustle though.
Sometimes I catch incorrect prices or the cashier keying in the wrong vegetable at checkout, but you can also read your receipt later and ask for a refund. I’ve never had a grocery store quibble when I said I was mischarged or an item was bad.
Why does this kind of thing only happen in the US?
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Cashiers in Europe are well trained and probably love it. Because we don’t offload those jobs to students trying to make a quick buck. Here it can be seen as a proper career which you can do your whole life if you want.
But that is maybe because we don’t have as many arrogant fuckers who think service jobs are bottom tier and the people working them shouldn’t even be seen as human.
I’ve never seen cashiers loving their jobs, but I’ve never seen them mishandling stuff either.
OTOH, I’ve never seen them filling the bags, so that may have something to do with it.
wait employees bagging your items is a real thing in the US? why? what’s this american obsession with having shittily paid people do everything for them?
I’ve always been fine with it. It doesn’t feel like I’m forced to do someone else’s job to me because they can be convenient if you have a small order, and it reduces lines. That said, I’d much rather see people employed and sometimes I like the personal interaction.
Same, self checkout is just 9 times out of 10 the most convenient option for people who don’t buy a cart full of stuff.
It’s not like stores are hiring people just to man the registers either… They hire X amount of people and if they need to open another register that’s someone who has to stop doing something else in the store, so self-checkout just lets them always have a bunch of registers open with only one employee overseeing them all and helping people out.
At least this is how it works in sweden, maybe in the US stores do it differently since they seem to have great difficulty making something as basic as scanning a barcode work.
From what I’ve seen in stores and job applications, the checkout clerks do have a separate job position, but if needed other people will stop what they’re doing and help.
Most IT systems work as expected here, except sometimes it misses discounts even from their stupid apps (“digital coupons”) and mysteriously some stores like Walmart, who should be technologically flawless, end up charging more at the register than was listed in the aisles.
In my experience with the US the strategy is to minimize cashiers, ideally have one person running a full service lane and managing the self checkouts between their customer line. Oh and they can handle returns and exchanges too. And online order pickup. Oh and also “frontline” customer complaints. $10 an hour should cover this.
The stocking crew is separate and it’s a 50/50 chance if they’re trained on registers.
Edit: this obviously depends on the store and staff size, but this seems to be the procedure for most big box retailers.
We can’t feasibly stop automation, nor should we. We SHOULD be taking the profits back from billionaires that they’ve stolen since time immemorial. Automation means less work overall. But we need to ensure the workers actually benefit from that.
Self checkout is not automation. It’s making the customer do the work.
Automation would be: Stick an RFID-tag to all your items, make me check in with my phone at the entrance. Automatically “scan” all the items when my cart and my phone leave the store at the same time. Bill me.
Yeah. That’s like saying a buffet automates waiters.
Those Amazon just walk out stores like you’re describing are extremely expensive to setup though. Even a spall space requires tons of cameras and sensors, all items to be placed on shelves a certain way, lots of networking backend, etc. Most business are unable to do so right now and I’d say most buildings can’t accommodate it. My work looked into putting one of those in one of our spaces as a test and the cost/work to make it happen in even a small area of our business wasn’t worth it
So it will take more time until the tech is cheaper. Or, hear me out, this one is crazy: We employ cashiers!
As the customer you’re already taking stuff out of your cart and putting it on the counter. Maybe automation isn’t the right word, but it’s certainly more efficient than having a human clerk. It removes a bottleneck.
But it’s not a bottleneck. It’s the opposite. An experienced human checker will tap in the code for oranges way before you find it in their stupid menu.
It is a bottleneck, because the experienced human checker is only entering orange codes for one person at a time. There could be ten people all checking themselves out simultaneously. Even if one or two get slowed down by a menu, it’s still a net decrease in average time spent at checkout.
And introduces others: “unexpected item in bagging area”
True, but isn’t that an implementation issue that can be fixed, rather than an inherent issue with the concept?
I went to a gas station that had this… it was kind of incredible. Put like 10 items on a sensor and it recognized all of them. Then put them in a bag.
Or a fuckton of cameras: https://youtu.be/NrmMk1Myrxc?si=olYDaZnChc4LN47k
I think in terms is control, more people feel as though they can stop/protest automation more than they can take profits back. I think that was the luddite mentality? I speculate, it’s been a while since i learned it in school.
They tried the latter, and when that failed, they tried the former.
I would love to use self checkouts more often, and need to interact with people less, but the frustration of trying to get those fucking grocery bags open is more traumatic than just going to a cashier.
As a previous cashier, best way to do it is to take your middle finger and swipe down across the center. Like a vertical slap on the bag’s face. About the middle of the bag, pull your arm back towards you. It will usually separate the outside wall of the bag from the stack, and when you pull towards you, the bag will “stick” to your finger and then open at the top.
I hated moving slowly as a cashier, cause lines made me mad. So I had to find the quickest way to do everything, and that method works great (for me) until about the last 4 bags.
I completely forgot that there would still be some places with plastic bags at the register. I have a bin I bring and everything just drops in no problem.
Especially at Tesco with Scan&Shop. I don’t even need to scan the items at checkout, just scan them as I shop.
The only cashiers I know would rather not ever have to talk to customers either. But they are pretty sour people in general and I don’t know if that’s common and of course it’s basically saying they wish they had a different job. So I’m with the automate whatever you can just pay more taxes crowd. There will always be a place for human customer service, but now we have choices.
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*$7.25 an hour, and I was loudly and publicly threatened with the loss of my job because a customer thought I “wasn’t smiling enough” over the Christmas rush and called the manager over.
I’d just had my brother cremated less than a week ago.
We generally aren’t sour to each other when you’re not looking. Can confirm years of watching customers literally stomp on shit directly in my line of sight so they can turn around and demand a discount because this item is inexplicably dirty or broken has made us very sour at everyone else.
One of them paid for a candy bar, ate the whole thing right there in line, and immediately demanded a full refund because “she didn’t like it.” Under the watchful direction of the same manager because “the customer is always right,” I had to do that.
I wish people would come through my line and say nothing to me.
$16-20 here, but yeah, that’s sort of my point I guess. I mean they’re renting a studio on 25 hours a week and still hate everybody, so my thought was in their case less human interaction is the true solution. Of course they hate self check, too, for same reason as half this thread which is that when you do have to interact it’s more awkward.
I don’t want to interact with a cashier either but fuck if I want to scan my own shit either.
It’s also way more awkward when something goes wrong and now I have to initiate.
“Warning! Shopping bag content is 0.00003pg heavier than expected. Please call an assistant or remove the excess items.”
Thankfully, Walmart stopped weighing items entirely. Not sure how it affects theft, but it sure makes the checkout process smoother. Don’t need to wait after scanning each item. Don’t need take reusable bags out of your cart. And they replaced almost all of their checkout lanes with self checkouts.
Too bad Walmart is evil, because their checkout is 👌 and Sam’s scan-and-go is just 💦. Every other store is just bad UX.
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Doesn’t every store have cameras everywhere recording everything?
These detect extra things you didn’t scan. I had to have an employee come check my items because I was using a cardboard flat to hold the canned goods I was buying. It locked up as soon as I moved the cardboard to the bagging area.
They always had that.
