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Speak for yourself, I would much rather deal with a self checkout than having to make niceties with some stranger. I can get in, buy my stuff, get out and be done, it's efficient and fast.
This is a boomer mentality, I guarantee you a MAJORITY of gen z/ millennials prefer self checkout
Millennial here. I fucking hate people and conversing with them, especially small talk bullshit, but I hate companies and their profiteering more.
I would rather more people had jobs and were able to earn a wage and the companies had less profit than using those infuriating machines. I don't even get cheaper prices for having to do the work myself on those infuriating machines.
I think I would be less annoyed if they gave people the option between the two so people like yourself could use the self service machines and they still employed some people to work checkouts but these days there is usually one or two checkouts designed to be run by staff and they hardly ever have a staff member on them so you are forces through the self service bullshit.
Not a boomer, but clearly older than you. I love self checkout. I don't want to hear about the time you broke your wrist, or what you are getting your girlfriend for Valentines. I just want out. People who hate self checkouts are extroverts who need interaction with others. Introverts are smart enough to use the machines.
Gen X here, wildly prefers self checkout, even if they are, as they often are, badly adapted or quirky.
Can understand why the person taking care of it doesn't like to serve 8 times more people though, especially when they have to "control" every other scan.
On the other hand, you must go insane just sitting and scanning objects for 8h a day for years no?
I like it for other customers too.
Nothing is worse than standing in line behind someone who is talking the ear off a cashier while you’re waiting to get your shit and get the fuck on with your day. Or them taking forever counting change or dealing with their obnoxious children or taking forever grabbing their shit and getting the fuck on.
I never have to worry about that with self checkout. Especially since the lines are usually set up in a way that everyone waits for a self checkout to open than having a single line for each checkout. I suppose the fix for my secondary issue would be to do that for human cashiers too. Just one line waiting for any register to open up.
I agree and I do the same but I think you missed the point that the employees hate it :-/
I worked in a grocery store for 5 years, this is also bullshit, I loved the self checkouts because It didn't assign 5 of us to registers and 5 to bagging stations, the self checkout station was the best position
Not a boomer.
Don't assume, it makes an ass out of u.
You don't have to be a boomer to have a "boomer mentality". When you fail you read what is written before you respond, you make an ass out of yourself.
I used to agree with this. Then I came to terms with the fact that I hate providing free labor to a grocery store while they lay off my neighbors.
Now I go to the normal checkout.
It's slower and I don't do small talk. But fuck Big Grocery.
my grandpa - his kids were boomers - preferred self checkout. He loved talking to strangers. He died 20 years ago when the ui wasn't as good (though honestly little has changed since). Self checkout is so much more efficient.
I love self checkout. Best invention of this century. Sometimes parts of it are implemented poorly and can be annoying, but it's still orders of magnitude better than the staffed checkout line.
Neurodivergent people love them. Or at least some of us do.
Going to the store with my wife is one thing, and it's mostly fine. If I gotta go by myself, my AirPods are in, I'm probably listening to Enya, and I'm definitely going for self-checkout if I have the option. I'm tech savvy and I have worked retail (not grocery, specifically) and I'm pretty damn good at bagging. I'm sure I look like I know what I'm doing. If I need help, I can usually wave someone over and they'll get it figured out and it's not that bad. But I'm not there to make small talk, I'm there to get my shit and leave. I know I also have to bag it and pay for it, I have no interest in shoplifting or cheating the store, but self-checkout offers a lot less friction than going through a line. (Hell, when I/we do go through a line, I want to bag, because I can do it better, and I like stores that don't have baggers. Because usually they have a longer conveyor belt and I'm not right in front of the cashier. I'm just doing my own thing.
Lies. Self checkout is great. I use it everywhere where is possible.
Nobody likes self-checkouts
Tell that to my local Walmart. Every time I grocery shop there, there are lines down the aisle for the self-checkout. Meanwhile, I walk past the self-checkout and jump into a regular checkout line with maybe one person in front of me.
I remember when self-checkout first became a thing and people complained that it was corporations' way of cutting jobs and understaffing stores to save a buck. People were very anti-self-checkout.
But force people to use it enough and they eventually adapt. Especially the younger generations who don't want to deal with other people. They'll willingly stand in line for half an hour if it means they don't have to give a simple greeting to an employee at the register.
I will say, one of the positives I've seen to the self-checkout are all the people who use it as an excuse to hurt large corporations. Customers aren't "stealing products," they're just not trained well enough to notice when a product doesn't ring up correctly. I'm kind of sad to see that this practice of "undertrained customers" hasn't hurt businesses enough that they've given up on the self-checkout yet.
Me personally, I just avoid them altogether. Why wait in long lines and go through the work of ringing myself up one item at a time when I can just dump my cart onto a conveyor belt and swipe a card? It only costs me a very brief "hello" to another human being to skip all that extra work, and it keeps more positions for employees available.
Self checkout is amazing.
It’s purely to save on wages and related expenses. At my local the self checkouts have one person watching to help when the self checkouts call them (weight/item mismatch, receipt paper low, etc). The amount of people these self checkouts process would require 2-3 tills minimum for standard foot traffic + approx at least 2 for peak times. This requires those 2-3 being paid for a full shift plus two other, checkout trained staff nearby to be available to open lanes for overflow. All handled by a total of 2-3 checkout staff instead of 4-6.
So less wages, less money lost on training checkout capable staff, less management having to maintain a roster of sufficient staff, with sufficient hours to keep them around. Checkout staff generally wouldn’t do many other tasks back in the day beyond click and collect either and had a lot of idle time, because obviously you can’t be far from a till.
Even if they were more practical, which they simply aren't due to their often terrible user interfaces, I would never dream of helping billion-dollar companies streamline away jobs. Solidarity, people!
I don't get it, you guys must shop at some really shit grocery stores. I haven't had an issue with self checkout UI in like 15 years. Sure, I've had a few annoying "please put item on scale" issues but it's been years since I've even seen that.
You have a good point about helping a corporation but this whole "they're worse" mindset people in this thread have is insane
I don’t disagree but I’m just presenting why every other retailer has them. As another commenter said though, I too am not a “small talk” type of person and hate that these stores train staff to try and engage in small talk with customers. I wasn’t checkout but was trained so I could help with overflow. I always only ever greeted people, with maybe one other follow up remark and then just got them out of there. Since I knew as a customer, I just wanted my shit scanned and to go home. For me it was more customers who seemed to want to have a yarn.
I'm the same. I really don't need all that small talk, hell I'd even say I hate it. But this is not about me or the other customers, it's about the employees, who need those jobs. So I take the plunge and only queue at cash registers with staff.
I love it as an alternative to express lanes, but if I have more than 5 or so items... I'm not super interested in doing everything myself if I don't have to.
I love self-checkout.
In college I worked at a big department store in the front-end, and eventually became a manager. I trained people on how to use the cash register, and it was the one thing that pretty much everyone with a pulse was expected to do. And it was the easiest thing to train. Why is this?
There have been decades upon decades of software design involved. I have a ton of criticisms of capitalism for how it often over-optimizes things or optimizes for the wrong things, but POS software is something that (at least in my time there) was mostly free of the bloat and nonsense that management usually tries to cram everywhere. In every programming course I have ever taken, one of the first examples taught is sone sort of basic POS interface for something (usually a pizza shop). It's universal and one of the most translatable skills- the POS system I used at my uncle's pizza shop was very similar to the one I used working at a bowling alley, and also similar to the one I used at the department store. Which is also similar to the software used at every store with self-checkout I've ever been to.
The worst parts of cashiering for me was the human interaction. Touching the toy that someone's snotty child has had in their mouth throughout the whole shopping trip. Getting hit on by people I wasn't interested in. People in a bad mood looking for someone to take it out on. As a customer, I always hated dealing with slow cashiers, or the rare cashier who didn't know what they were doing, or the cashier that was super chatty and bubbly. My goal, on both sides, was always to minimize the time spent facilitating the transaction so we could all get on with our lives.
From a management perspective, we had 14 lanes but usually only 2 or 3 open at once on a weekday. If there was a sudden rush we would call up more employees from elsewhere. Weekends we would have more staff, maybe 6-8 cashiers for most weekends. On Thanksgiving weekend we would usually have to have about 16-18 people on the schedule- enough to cover breaks, help to restock receipt paper, coverage for people calling off, etc.
All of these problems are solved by self-checkout. I do see the problem where this is costing jobs. It's often helpful to have humans around who can answer questions or deal with problems. Most stores I've been to lately have a combination- a section of self-checkout lanes with somewhere around 4-12 lanes overseen by 1 employee, plus some number of lanes with cashiers.
In theory this should lead to cost savings which should be passed on to the consumer. More efficiency means increased productivity, so we all need to be working less, right? The problem is capitalism- the people with power take these efficiency gains as profits for themselves instead of sharing them with society. There have been plenty of studies showing things like how we work more hours on average than a medieval peasant, or showing that if labor hours went down from productivity gains we would be working ~11 hours per week.
Receipt checking is a separate thing. Costco has 2 employees check me out: one to unload and re-lpad the cart, one scanning things go the register. And a 3rd person at the door checks my receipt, even though I didn't do any self-checkout at all.
Part of the pain is transition. We still have 80 year old people trying to write checks, or who never moved on from the days when you had to manually swipe the credit card imprinter. In a couple decades these people will be gone and will be replaced by Gen Alpha adults who think I'm weird for carrying a piece of plastic on me instead of having a smartwatch with my accounts tied to it that just automatically pays.
Self checkout is a mixed bag (lol). I like it cuz I can bag my own stuff -- very important for fitting into bike baskets. I don't like it cuz every once in a while it bugs out. Today my bananas weighed 0 lbs so I had to ask someone for help.
You can bag your own stuff at a regular checkout. Hell, if you go into a German supermarket, there's no bagging at the checkout, you put it all back into your trolley and then go bag it in a specific bagging area.
I personally prefer self-checkout when I'm at the grocery store, but I 100% agree about running the things. I was working at a grocery store when they first started rolling out, and there wasn't any training on them back then. I am not at all surprised to hear that hasn't changed. I distinctly remember the way the # of tills that needed help would seem to spike all at once, like one problem would cause another and soon you have four people all needing help with different things and being very unhelpful about it. Felt like playing a surreal game-show version of whack-a-mole for eight hours.
I just want to say, the RFID box checkouts are way better as a customer, as there is no bloody scanning. Just shove it all in there and check the listing.
I love self check-out. It saves time and money, and it improves the lives of the employees. (At the moment we are in a transitional phase - in ten, twenty years we will shake our heads at the stupidity of manned tills).
I will shake my head at the stupidity of manned tills when food and living supplies are finally treated as a human right and there isn't even a till.
It does not improve the lives of the employees. Especially not the ones who were fired because upper management demanded cutbacks to make line go up. It's a pain and a hassle and instead of having meaningful connections with happy or at least bored customers, we now have meaningless interactions with angry customers.
The hell kind of training do you need to operate a self checkout? Make it boop on the products, put em in bags, then either give it the card beeps or cash and get your change. Simple as.
The only thing that gives me trouble is the dumb anti-theft system that sometimes thinks stuff in my right hand is being stolen because I have too many items and no cart, but that's the dumb ass system not me, it literally watches me scan it it just doesn't like where in physical space I was holding it before I scanned it, fix yo' shit.
Im just shocked by all the comments that seem to love it. Im on the side where its useful if you only buy like 5 items, but i want nothing to do with it if i have a cart full. I am also not a fan of some systems in general.
One store by me forces me to put every item down to check its weight and its super finicky and will not like it which then means someone comes over to override it so i can continue. This is frustrating and in no way helpful at all. Another place has the worst barcode scanners where im waving each item in front of it like 5 times before it scans. Outside those issues im fine.
I also try to plan my big orders for store pickup now and order online which helps and is the best thing that was created. I am also tempted to try the scan as you go through the store methoe, but never seem to pull the trigger when i go.
As a customer, the only self checkout worth having is the kind you mostly find in clothing stores, where you dump all your purchases in a tub and RFID does it's magic to detect all the items in a second. You pay, you pack, you go. Only once have I encountered it in a grocery store (REWE in Hamburg) and it works even with the fruits and vegetables! The printed label you get from the scale in the fruits and veggies section also has RFID ! Magic. All the rest is absolutely trash, it's annoying and doesn't saves time at all unless you have less than 5 items.
You get Zebra scanners to scan things as you pick them off the shelf which makes the process so much simpler. Once you get to the register you scan a QR code on the screen and it populates everything.
Way easier then scanning yourself at the stand
Probably there are different kind of self-checkouts. Only kind I've interacted with is "scan code/put here to weigh, bag is here, money goes there, till next time". Which is why I love them: can do everything at my own pace while still deep in thoughts, disturbing no one. Yeah, sometimes soft is buggy and help is needed, but not enough to make me hate them. Is there any other kind of self-checkout that is harder to navigate?
I'm not against self checkout. I like both for different reasons. But if all my stuff is barcode packaged you bet I'm going straight for self checkout. It's faster.