I really enjoy using the self checkout. I don't have to talk to anyone, it's faster than the employee scanning, and I bag my shit better and not have to worried about smashed bread or fragile items. It's not for everybody and I get it but it leave it for the people do want to use them.
Man, I love the self checkout. Also didn't they already show that rising costs everywhere WEREN'T from theft, but instead corporations artificially inflating their prices during the pandemic and then leaving it there?
Take away my self checkout, and I'll steal out of spite
It's fine if you have a few things and no one else is using them. These days, you go to the supermarket and you either wait in a long line for people to check out the stuff themselves or you wait on a long line for someone to do it for you. All they did was eliminate jobs.
"Nightmare" says you. "The only thing that makes grocery store checkout tolerable" says I. I'll wait longer for a self-checkout rather than subject myself to a human who will try to make conversation with me (which forces me to take out my earbuds), be annoyed by the fact that I want to use my own bags, underload my bags, take forever, ask me required scripted questions, and put the bread underneath a can.
Frankly this is one of the most disheartening editorials I’ve ever read on Gizmodo. “Cumbersome?” “Confusing?” “Error-prone?” “Terminator?” “Frustrations?” “Wasted time?” Just say you don’t understand how to use them and have no intention to learn. Weird flex for a tech journalist.
It literally ends with the sentence, "It turns out human beings might still have something to offer." I hated the entire article.
Yeah, aside from the factual inaccuracies and the axe-grinding so obvious that it may as well be classified as an op-ed, it's so smugly sanctimonious.
"67% of people prefer self-checkout, but based on no data, that's probably changing, because we think it should and probably a lot of people are upset about the stealing that isn't really happening!"
Don't forget the part about how "67% of people prefer this thing, but all companies are quitting that thing because of a lie they cooked up to convince people to accept price gouging."
Also:
they actually increase labor costs thanks to employees who get taken away from their other duties
Big retailers would love to give hard working people’s jobs to robots, and in many cases they already have.
How on Earth did an editor allow an article containing both of those sentences, only two paragraphs apart, to be published?
They’re correct though? Retailers expected them to be able to get rid of employees, but they didn’t and in fact increased the cost of employees.
The author of this article is speaking out of both sides of their mouth, though. The context of the first statement is "they want to reduce staff and it's not even working!" and the context of the second statement is "they want to reduce staff and in many cases it's working!"
If the author intended to say what you said, they should've said that instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it's a bad thing for labor, taking away human jobs, or it's a bad thing for companies, requiring more workers to do the same job. Or it's a bad thing for consumers, because companies should need more workers but aren't. But the author needs to make one of those points, not simply suggest all three at once.
I'm just going to copy/paste my comments from the last article 2 days ago that was saying this same thing:
This is the ~~second~~ third article in the last month I've found here on the Fediverse pronouncing the death of self checkout and honestly I just don't see it. Most of the stores around me have only just recently expanded their self-checkout areas and I vastly prefer using it unless I've got more than 25 items.
I'd honestly probably stop going to a store that decided to not allow me to check out on my own. Small talk and having to make a minimum wage worker suffer through it is just not something I want when I'm running to the store for a gallon of milk. I vastly prefer being able to throw in some earbuds, get my shopping, check out, and get out to having to interact with anyone while I'm just trying get my shit.
I read the last article like this while waiting in line at a grocery store that had replaced literally every human-staffed checkout (which were never open anyway) with a massive complex of self-checkouts the previous week. It made me laugh.
It’s great at small stores where you’re getting a bag or two. At large grocery stores or Walmart like stores it’s annoying. There’s never enough space to put everything, it’s easy to mix things up if you have to put things back on the cart, and it takes twice as long because you have to unload and load while scanning. A couple of the grocery stores near me have scan guns that you can use while shopping and checkout right from. Walmart has this via their app if you pay for Walmart+, but they still make you go to self checkout to finish and wait in that damn line, and they still block the exit wanting to check your receipt which can gather a line. I avoid going to Walmart for all but a couple items that are super cheap. Even then I’ve paid more elsewhere because of how terrible the checkout experience is.
I actively choose to shop at stores that have self-checkout because they have self-checkout. I don't know why the author is writing as if everybody hates them.
I agree. Boomers hate them though.
Boomers are far from the only ones who dislike self-checkouts.
Nah, they are boomers too. Boomer is a state of mind.
Calling everything you don't agree with to be "boomers" is also a state of mind.
It is a great way to hand wave away anything you, personally, don't agree with. Which ironically is usually seen as "Boomer behaviour".
The mistake here is in assuming that it's either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.
The reality is that they're great for some applications, but suck ass for others.
Here's the deal; if it's just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it's me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it's way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won't be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.
What part about this do people not understand?
I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don't actually have to shop for families of their own.
I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can't even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There's no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we're putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs...
Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they're more fun to drive than a shopping cart.
If you read the article they are only a "nightmare" for big box retailers who are crying about theft. I love the self checkout and generally use it every time unless I have a specific reason not to
Who would have guessed that when you let the clients check themselves out they are going to miss scanning some items? It's not like they are trained or paid to be employees and of course their motivation is to scan less not more.
I despise Fry’s Electronics but they got manned checkout correct. A single fucking queue sharing all the resources (cashiers). Like at a bank. Having to pick & guess which mini-queue would go faster always gave me anxiety. And the “less than 15 items” queue was not always quicker.
Self checkout, in lots of cases, brings grocery checkout to a single queue, and for that reason, I welcome it. Obviously, stores that forcing people to pick self-checkout mini queues should be burned to the ground
Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I'd share:
The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you're gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.
A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don't think they've implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.
Just came back from a trip to Japan and that's how they do clothes. Drop everything on a basket, pay and leave. The staff is super nice but you don't have to talk to anyone at all if you don't want to
I love self checkout
It's so much faster than waiting in line to pay and I don't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to
YMMV wildly. Walmart of all places generally has a good ratio of self checkout to actual cashiers, but there's this annoying trend with a lot of the local stores where they have only 4 self checkouts period but will only ever have one, maybe two other checkout lanes operating. Doesn't matter if there's a line stretching the full length of one of the grocery aisles, 2 non-self checkout lanes and that's it.
I like self checkout as a concept. I don't like the implementation or what it stands for.
Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021
Ah yes, the 'Nightmare' that a clear majority of people prefer.
This is yet more 'wahhhh shoplifting' bullshit from companies whose interests are directly opposed to the interests of their customers.
People want self checkout to be less shit, which it easily could be. In Australia I didn't even have to put things in the bagging area, just scan them. It made the whole process so much smoother.
See, that sort of thing is why I hate supermarket self-checkout. Other places it can be fine, but unless I'm doing the old 'ten items or less' thing and it's an off-peak time, there's a big line at the self-checkout. It's a toss-up whether self-checkout or going to one of the two checkout lanes they have open with people on them is faster at this point, which basically means I'm subsidizing the company by doing what an employee could do more efficiently and everything would be a lot faster if they just opened up more human lanes.
You think they're going to spend more money on the biggest money sink in a business, humans? They'll do away with self checkout and not increase their cashier count, maybe even decrease it, because if they get rid it of it, it's a cost saving move, not a customer satisfaction one.
In Sweden we have had a version of self checkout for 20 years in the largest stores, and here it seems to work fine.
Instead of having to scan everything at a station, each product is scanned with a handscanner when walking through the store, and put directly into shopping bags. Then only the payment and possibly a randomly occuring verification is left before leaving the store.
The random testing is usually just an employee scanning three to five items from your bags, and occurs like once every four months (as long as you're not actually stealing and caught).
Please, no. It's my jam.
Oh wait, it's for self checkout. Not self scanning.
I prefer self checkout because I get to bag my groceries the way I want. It's infuriating to line up my groceries in the correct order only for the cashier/bagger to mix them all up in my bags anyway. If I insist in bagging them myself, then I have to awkwardly do it while the cashier and the next person in line watch and wait for me to finish. At least for self-checkout, there are multiple counters and no single person waiting for me.
They expect me to do free labor for a huge evil corporation, but give me a scanner far worse than they give their paid employees, which scolds me every 10 seconds for not having enough space to put things.
Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021
And it's fucking weird how vocal and entitled some of the 35% are in wanting the majority's preference to go away because they don't like it.
I simply won't use them if there is cashier available.
I'm not your fucking employee & prices never once came down due to their prevalence.
Meijer is the only one that has their self checkout figured out. 2 different sections in my store with 10-12 checkout stations. So a minimum of 20 self check out stations open and they’re always open and working. They never give me the errors like Walmart and Kroger.
Walmart might have 20 checkouts as well but half aren’t working or open plus there’s 3x the people at Walmart so there’s usually a 15 minute wait.
Kroger is the worst with the errors. They might have 20 checkout stations but 5 might be open.
Going to Walmart or Kroger is always a hassle. I avoid those 2 unless I need one or two items.
Aldis and Meijer are my go to.
The article doesn't match the headline very well. Maybe they aren't going to expand as much but they mostly aren't going away either.
The article also isn't very good, and may as well be an editorial.
I also don't consider them a "nightmare", so that sounds fine to me.
It is GREAT as an option but not as the primary. I love it for small trips for a small number of things .
However for any medium to large shopping trip I would prefer to have someone there scanning while I unload and load.
I use self-checkout as my primary, including for produce, when shopping for a family of six. It's always faster, even though I'm doing all the work.
I am much more comfortable using self checkout
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