This says much about respect and social competence in this society when the first instinct is to mock and abuse someone with different priorities than yours.
I’d rather “work” than wait behind people with 100+ items. I can be out the door in 2 minutes.
even faster if u skip some items from being scanned
I was once mistaken for an employee somewhere and my sleep deprivated response was to say “I am wearing pants so clearly I dont work here.” I have no fucken clue what that means but I think it was a threat.
I refuse to use them as a union worker, when I’m told to use the self checkout as I’m in line for the only cashier I just refuse. I’m doing it for you kids
Corporate gaslighting be like:
Not wanting to do free work for a company (they don’t even give you a discount if you use self-service) is being a boomer?
That’s the first time I’ve seen the word “boomer” on the opposite side of the word “sucker”.
Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!
Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!
That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.
In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.
Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.
In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.
So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.
Exactly! Back in my day, people used to fill up my gas for me and carry my things up to my hotel room. Young people are getting lazy and entitled! Corporations need to make them work harder. Makes it hard to humiliate the poors if they make ME do the work.
Tbh back then the pay was more fairly in line with cost of living for some of the jobs. however, it has been a good 20 or so year since it was more fair. Nowadays, it is absolutely scary the cost of living. it’s down right criminal.
Okay boomer
Self checkout in the PNW rules.
Self checkout in South (east) Florida sucks.
Why? Because the volume is on 11, and the customer base is as dumb as a rock. Seriously, stand at any self checkout in SF for 10’ minutes and watch.
In 11 minutes you will either want to kill them or yourself, sometimes it’s a tossup.
“Not another minute! Pretty soon I’m going to stop playing who-shall-I-kill-first in my head and just go for what feels natural. I’m thinking me first, then you.” - Bernard Black
Even though ya specified south Florida I still read it as fucking San Francisco.
I’m on Team Boomer on this one.
I am and I’m not. If it’s like 2 items, give me a self checkout. If it’s over 15. Bring on a cashier.
I always prefer self checkout because too many people suck at bagging.
Don’t put a leaking pack of meat with my deli you dumb shit. All while I see people pushing full carts that have meat touching produce…
The only place I trust to bag for me is Trader Joe’s. Tetris masters over there.
You buy meat pack that’s leaking?
Reading the comments, do people not like self checkout? Is it another one of these American things, that baffle the rest of the world? Like grocery baggers. I’m European, living in Poland and Denmark and if given the choice, I will always pick the store with self checkout. It’s simply faster. Only old people don’t use self check out, not because of boomer ideology, but because they need the cashier’s help.
Depends on the SCO system. If I can swipe the item, swipe the card, and walk, then yeah, great. But if it can’t handle small items, can’t handle packages, and in particular makes you scan the receipt, no thanks. You cut an employee, eat the shrinkage and leave me alone.
I’m from France living in Sweden and I’ve seen people not wanting to use self-checkout because it’s used to cut cashier jobs. Where you’d get 4 cashiers, you just get one person watching the self checkout. I’m personally ambivalent about because I do find it faster and convenient, but it is indeed a loss of jobs
I recently moved, and my now nearest store does not have self checkout. It’s horrible. I spend more time waiting in the line than actually finding my items in the store. During the three years i used my previous local store, I only had to wait for an unoccupied self checkout maybe two times.
Okay
I get being mean to walmart because corporations are bad but being needlessly rude to random employees rubs me the wrong way. Most of us can’t get a job anywhere better despite having a degree. We have to deal with the mental abuse of people constantly treating us like dog shit just because we exist. The job situation is so fucked right now. I should not be having to compete with people that have masters degrees and decades of experience for tech support jobs that pay $15 an hour. Fuck this broken society.
The last time I was not underemployed was 2018.
Maybe your decades of failure is just obvious to everyone but you
I enjoy turning this one around. “Oh, you’re one of those socialists who wants everybody else to do your work for you, too lazy to lift your own groceries. Nobody wants to work anymore!”
i’m sure you use that zinger all the time
When I bring my banana through the cashier lane they give me a dirty look. But when I ride one of the lawnmowers inside and try to mount a self check out, I get kicked out of the store. MAKE UP YOUR MIND!
I feel like most memos in Walmart break rooms are this kind of fodder for shitposting material
So this is pro-self checkout? Why would you be pro self checkout? Besides the extra time and effort for the customer to check out if they have more than a couple items, I recently read an article saying that even for the companies they haven’t worked out: besides the problems and delays they cause where they have to provide employee assistance anyway (“Unexpected item in bag”, etc), they’ve lost more to theft and are having to spend more money on adding more anti-theft tech, etc. One company they interviewed is phasing them out.
(edit after reading some comments) The article also talked about people getting in trouble for accidentally not getting something scanned.
I LOVE self-checkouts for small shopping. No human interaction bullshit. Just beep your stuff, whip out your card and go. Rarely do I encounter technical problems.
For me it’s not the time spent at the checkout that matters, it’s the time spent waiting at the checkout. Also over here cashiers don’t bag your items for you, so you have to do that anyway
Also also, they have these really handy hand scanners over here so I can already bag my items while I’m walking through the store, and then the only thing I have to do at self-checkout is hand in the scanner and pay for the groceries. That is genuinely a lot faster than normal cash register shenanigans.
Also over here cashiers don’t bag your items for you, so you have to do that anyway
I’m a lot faster at bagging when I’m not also scanning. The human cashier divides the labor to two people, which makes it faster.
Scandinavia?
Self checkout is great for stealing!
It’s not stealing, I paid for that six-pack of bananas and two steak shaped bananas!
Because the store is packed, they only have 2 cashiers on shift and I want to go home.
It’s almost as if they do underman the tills on purpose to force people to do the checkout work themselves for free …
Yeah, I wish they’d staff more tills too.
Wait a minute, do you mean to tell me that the mighty MBA class are actually just short-sighted, trend-hopping, avaricious shitbags?
Yeah, if you can’t pay people enough to notice and/or care if I steal from you, I get to steal from you. Them’s the rules.
“If you aren’t able to stop me, I get to rape you. Them’s the rules.”
That’s how fucking stupid you sound.
So, to be clear, are you saying that stealing from a corporation is equally as bad as raping someone?
Why would you be pro self checkout? Besides the extra time and effort for the customer to check out if they have more than a couple items
In what alternate reality does self-checkout take more time and effort?
- If you go to a cashier then you have to wait in line. At my local supermarket there is one cashier vs. 16 self-checkout machines. Even if you go at an extremely busy time there is almost always a self-checkout machine available.
- With self-checkout you simply scan the items from your basket and put them in your bag. With the cashier you have put all your items on the conveyor belt, wait for them to be scanned, then put them in your bag.
- If you have more than a few items you simply grab a hand-scanner or just use the app on your phone and scan the items as you put them in your cart. Then you just go to a self-checkout machine and pay. No unloading the cart at checkout, you just pay and take your cart to your car.
the problems and delays they cause where they have to provide employee assistance anyway (“Unexpected item in bag”, etc)
What do you mean unexpected item in bag? The self checkout machine can’t look into my bag.
The article also talked about people getting in trouble for accidentally not getting something scanned.
Never seen that happen. You get random bag checks before you pay (so at that point it’s technically not theft). If you missed something, they simply re-scan all the items and you pay the correct amount, that’s all.
In the name of theft prevention and legal compliance, they do not give self checkout customers the same powers as actual cashier employees:
- Self checkout customers cannot verify their own age for age-restricted items.
- Self checkout customers cannot scan something and report the number of duplicates (e.g., scan a can and punch in that you’re buying 8 of them).
- In most stores, self checkout customers are policed by the system to make sure that each item is placed onto a scale that weighs everything, and stops the process if weights don’t match up.
- The ergonomics and flow of self checkout doesn’t allow for a conveyor belt style rapid scanning, because a self checkout station is a tighter space and tends to require bagging as you scan, instead of scanning and bagging separately and independently.
- The frequency of produce code entries means that customers tend to be much slower to enter foods that don’t have bar codes.
As a result, self checkout tends to be slower for customers who have more than 20 items. That might be offset if there’s a longer line for regular cashier, but if there’s no line the employee cashier is much faster.
Self checkout customers cannot verify their own age for age-restricted items.
Age verification happens asynchronously and causes zero delay for anyone who doesn’t look like a teenager. The employee overseeing the self-checkout gets an alert on their tablet-thingie, they take one look at me and press approve. You can just keep scanning items while this happens. Usually the ‘your age may be checked’ alert disappears within seconds.
Self checkout customers cannot scan something and report the number of duplicates (e.g., scan a can and punch in that you’re buying 8 of them).
They can where I live.
In most stores, self checkout customers are policed by the system to make sure that each item is placed onto a scale that weighs everything, and stops the process if weights don’t match up.
I’ve never seen that, and I’m not aware of any supermarket chain in my country that does this.
The ergonomics and flow of self checkout doesn’t allow for a conveyor belt style rapid scanning, because a self checkout station is a tighter space and tends to require bagging as you scan, instead of scanning and bagging separately and independently.
The conveyor belt slows things down. You take an item out of your basket, scan it and put it in your bag in one go instead of it being two separate actions. You’re only handling each item once instead of twice. Besides, if you’re planning to get a lot of items you scan while shopping, not at checkout. You get a portable scanner, put it slot on your cart and just scan each item as you put it in your cart.
As a result, self checkout tends to be slower for customers who have more than 20 items.
If you scan while you add items to your cart it takes less than 10 seconds to check out, regardless of how many items you have
That might be offset if there’s a longer line for regular cashier, but if there’s no line the employee cashier is much faster.
My local supermarket has a grand total of 1 regular cashier, versus 16 self checkouts. If you go during a busy time you have to stand in line. Since the regular cashier is basically only used by people who don’t want to or can’t use self-checkout for some reason (that is: usually elderly people) this line doesn’t move very fast.
When it’s a quiet time of day there often isn’t a regular cashier at all and you have to ask the person overseeing the self-checkout who then has to call someone to help you out as they cannot leave the self-checkout isle unattended so you end up waiting for a cashier to arrive.
Self checkout is always faster, by an order of magnitude.
From my personal experience, scanning things by yourself instead of more experienced cashier is somewhat slower (maybe 20-40% for large amounts?) for reasons you provided. The thing is, you don’t have to replace one cashier with one self-checkout, instead you may put like 5 of them and assign one employee to supervise them and solve things that need intervention like verifying age. Also when not in use (low amount of customers) they probably cost tiny fraction of employee’s wage. Idk about thefts though.
Self checkout isn’t supposed to be for more than 10 or 15 items in most stores… obviously it would be less convenient in those cases.
Self checkout works fine for large amounts of items. You grab a portable scanner at the entrance and scan items as you put them in your cart. When you arrive at checkout you already scanned all your items and all you have to do is pay.
self checkout cannot remove anti-theft devices.
I’ve never seen anti-theft devices on items in a supermarket.
on clothing and tech???
They are HUGELY advantageous to shoplifters. My local grocery store did it for a few years and stopped all together.
I just like the feeling of privacy. When the staff redirects customers to the cashiers because there’s less queue than at the self checkout, I pretend not to hear with my headphones on.
Same. I’m one of the few people that prefers self checkout. Covid was a magical time for me while grocery shopping. No one awkwardly had to smile after eye contact, everyone gave space and avoided each other, just get in and get out without ever taking out my headphones. Self check out is always faster where I’m from too.
As a hermit forced to live and work in the modern world, COVID is the high I’ll never get again.
Ditto. Then, when we went back to “normal,” I felt like I had to pretend to hate it because everyone else hated it so much. For me, it felt like freedom and relief.
I only prefer self checkout when I’m buying rubbers and lube. Anything else I’d rather have the checkout person scan and bag for me.
If you have social anxiety, the checkout person conversation is one of the easiest interactions for you to practice those skills on. “Hello, here are my items, thank you” is about the gist of what’s necessary.
I don’t need practice. I can do it fine. I just do not want to.
Oh I have absolutely no social anxiety, I just prefer to keep what I’m buying to myself when I can, rubber or not.
