Honestly, the thing that drives me the most crazy about self checkouts is people using them with full carts. They’re perfect if you’re just grabbing a few things: Just as fast, if not faster, than the ‘N items or fewer’ checkouts, and no need to interact with anyone. But if you’re showing up with 6 bags worth of groceries, and everything in your cart has a coupon or at-cash discount with it, then you need the cashier anyway, so just GTFO of the way. Having the nanny cashier who’s looking after 8 self-checkouts come over every 10 seconds to deal with another one of your discounts, or to let you swap bags because you’ve already filled the item placement area, slows things down for everybody.
My local grocery store has twelve small self checkouts and three big ones for people with full carts. This does a good job of keeping the smaller ones for people with a few items.
I remember when self checkouts were originally introduced at my local grocery store it explicitly was designed to be an X items or fewer line. However, it seems like stores have gotten away from that over the years to the point where some stores are basically self checkout only.
Agreed. I really only use the self checkout if I have less than 15 items out of consideration for other people’s time. More than that, and I just go to the checkout lane.
It’d be a different story if they just did away with 90% of the useless checkout lanes that stay closed year-round and quadrupled the number of self-check stations.
Honestly, the thing that drives me the most crazy about self checkouts is people using them with full carts. They’re perfect if you’re just grabbing a few things: Just as fast, if not faster, than the ‘N items or fewer’ checkouts, and no need to interact with anyone. But if you’re showing up with 6 bags worth of groceries, and everything in your cart has a coupon or at-cash discount with it, then you need the cashier anyway, so just GTFO of the way. Having the nanny cashier who’s looking after 8 self-checkouts come over every 10 seconds to deal with another one of your discounts, or to let you swap bags because you’ve already filled the item placement area, slows things down for everybody.
My local grocery store has twelve small self checkouts and three big ones for people with full carts. This does a good job of keeping the smaller ones for people with a few items.
I remember when self checkouts were originally introduced at my local grocery store it explicitly was designed to be an X items or fewer line. However, it seems like stores have gotten away from that over the years to the point where some stores are basically self checkout only.
Agreed. I really only use the self checkout if I have less than 15 items out of consideration for other people’s time. More than that, and I just go to the checkout lane.
It’d be a different story if they just did away with 90% of the useless checkout lanes that stay closed year-round and quadrupled the number of self-check stations.