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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Tempest in a teapot.
Did they call someone over when they saw the discrepancy? Because, you know, mistakes happen.
I frequently have something not scan, or not come up right. There's a button for help, there's always someone right there anyway, hell, had a clerk walk up and help when he noticed I hit the wrong button. They pay attention.
"I was annoyed"... That a system misreported something? If I was annoyed every time that happened I'd never not be annoyed.
What's with this sudden "self checkout rage bait" this week? Who's pushing what agenda?
I think people are far more invested in trying to find some conspiracy instead of accepting that mistakes happen, be it in code, pricing, whatever.
The closest thing to a fix is ensuring your local consumer laws say the sticker price prevails and call it out to a supervisor if you find an issue.
I don’t get the weirdness of the spike of self-checkout hate lately. There’s a lot of “I deserve to have a human scan items” takes that are bafflingly stupid.
Or it might be that Coles and Woolies are already under investigation for price gouging all while unsurprisingly posting record profits. Most Australians have felt the really quick rise of the cost of living, and are rightly skeptical of both supermarkets which basically hold a duopoly over Australian shops. They already do a bunch of sketchy shit, what’s to stop them from doing more?
You do realize that price gouging and profiteering is a completely different problem than showing/honoring correct prices?
If you’re going to mash all the worlds problems into a single mistake here, might as well blame them for global warming too.
Aight bud, that was to show why there’s already distrust towards both corporations. It’s not hard to see why people would be inclined to believe that Coles/Woolies are trying to fuck them over yet again.
Funnily enough humans have been scamming them at checkouts for decades. Adding stuff to the the scales for example, wrong fruit codes, lots of options.
I know, right? People should be glad that prices are rising while wages are stagnating and now having to do additional work to reduce cost and increase profits for corporations.
I also don't get the entitled assholes in restaurants. You wan't to be waited on? Just go up to the cook directly yourself and tell them what you want to eat. And then bring it to your table that you've cleaned up yourself. In fact, restaurants should get rid of cooks as well. Just go to the restaurant and cook your own meal, you lazy bastards!
So you're a fan of continuing to support an occupation that has a high incidence rate of RSI because you want to stick it to the man and make someone swipe your bag of chips.
You do you. That’s.. really hurting the corporation there.
I'm a fan of stores hiring even more cashiers and them working fewer hours (without a paycut, ofcourse; sonething like 4 day workweek) to spread out the workload and having more people employed and reducing the long lines.
I am a fan of not replacing all the cashiers with selfcheckouts.
I am a fan of putting mechanisms in place that reduce the incidence of RSI. Not to mention the fact that there are occupations with a high incidence of much much harsher illnesses and injuries etc.
I am a fan of people having more free time after they get off work instead of having to spend it waiting in line for someone to finally check their items out and then having to spend a long time doing it themselves.
And I never said it was to hurt corporations but that your comment sounded like bootlicking. But, yeah, I want cashiers because everyone only goes to the store for a single item. Nice strawman you got there.
I stand by my original observation about the anti-self-checkout arguments since my point is being proven lol
You do realize that the elderly and disabled people go shopping too, right?
How is your point being proven? Also, read my comment again, I edited some stuff. Might edit it some more later, IDK. I mean, your only argument seems to be "high incidence of RSI and people are lazy hurr durr."
Not in software. The software is doing exactly what it was programmed to do.
So no software has ever glitched before and output a wrong result? What world do you live in?
Or a HUMAN forgot to update the pricing. 😱
Fact is, I see this all the time with stuff that's labelled for sale. More than half the time I need a clerk to correct things that have a sale sticker and price on them at the grocery store, because that stuff changes daily.
If there're two different items calculations one "real" one and "display" that's an intentional choice made because they know there can be discrepancies.
Yep rounding errors occur, manual changes need to be inputted sometimes, display errors, sales mistakes. Nothing weird about that. In fact their policy probably has specific points to deal with discrepancies between list, scanned and total prices.
Most likely an oversight.
The real question would be how did the clerk/store handle it when pointed out?
I've never once had a grocery store quibble over a discrepancy - they've always just overrode the price, right then, and went on with their day. At most taking a minute.
Compare that to before there were barcodes, and just price stickers on things (yes, I'm that old). This was a LOT more hassle.
Ever see a sitcom where the clerk is calling for a price check over the intercom? Yep, that's what they used to do. Most of the time we'd tell them nevermind, don't bother, because it took too damn long and there was a line of 3+ filled, large carts behind us...because checkout took forever as the clerk rang in, manually, every item. Pulled out their sheets to verify prices, code, etc.
Can't be just an oversight. This has to be an intentional design decision. The "simple" (and economical) way to build this system is to build it so that the scan reads the price from a database and that price is then displayed and used to sum the total.
Keeping two prices, a display and a real one, is a design decision that adds a complexity to the system, makes it more difficult to administer and is an intentional design decision, especially if the numbers are allowed to differ.
A coupon not being applied correctly could be a mistake with that coupon. A sale not being taken into account, a problem with that sale or that UPC entry in the database. Those could be issues with data entry and data management.
This is different. This is intentional. And I'd bet, we've just found someone either cheating the tax man or embezzling funds.