that’s why one line for multiple checkouts is better
Where I live the grocery stores all have groups of 6+ self checkouts that are reliable enough that only one or two might be out at the same time but generally work, all of the ‘too many items’ issues have been sorted out, and they are in places where people just naturally form lines and take the next free one. It works great and is so much better than checkout lines ever were as one person going slow doesn’t hold up everyone else.
Went on a work trip to a larger city and holy hell I understand why people there would hate self checkout. Forced lines, machines that constantly required human assistance, etc. That would suck to interact with regularly.
I have the same experience as you and live in a big city, I guess it depends on what country and how up-to-date the hardware is, it used to be like you said but the past 5 years it’s been great and I always use it.
Yeah, self-chekout in the 'burbs is fantastic, we have like 4-8 machines and most of the time, at least half are available.
Not only the self checkout. I usually end up behind someone who’s new to the concept of exchanging goods for legal tender and needs an introduction to it.
This is of course after they have told the story about why they’re in the store, starting with the new testament and moving on from there…
I spend a lot of time thinking about how it’s not my place to judge these people, but I think very few of them would manage to sit the right way on the toilet without outside assistance.
“Can I go ahead of you in line? My kid is acting up. Great thanks. (To cashier) I’d like to buy this alcohol and cigarettes with these food stamps that I acquired totally legally. No? Let’s take several minutes to discuss if there’s any way around the law. Now that that’s over, I’ll pay with a check. Oh, also, can I get 20 scratch off tickets? I just want to scratch them off while you wait. Here, I have a giant roll of cash that I will use, but don’t worry, I wasn’t doing this to make things go faster. Now is my chance to try to do a cash-changing scam on you.”
I remember self checkout arriving in 2008 when I was living in the arse-end of Ireland. Took quite a few years for it to arrive anywhere in France, I guess because we could clearly see it was gonna kill more jobs… anyway, they didn’t take over but for little old me who is used to it, it’s a godsend when I’m faced with families doing their weekly shopping or, worse, pensioners…
And yet, somehow, after all these years, I regularly meet people who indeed seem to have never faced one. No hate on them, I just find it amazing! And I always wonder what suddenly pushed them over, made them decide “today is the day I face my fear and confront the Beast!”
Oh man! I’m a city bus driver, and the amount of people that struggle with getting fare in the box is too damn high! I don’t understand how you could make a bus full of people wait for you to dig through your pockets at a pace that would make glaciers impatient. You’re standing at the bus stop, you know you’re getting on the bus, know you’ll need fare, yet here we are.
I want to get a documentary crew to follow some of these people around for a while just to see what they do with their days. I genuinely wonder how some people function.
Yup, I rode the bus a lot for a few years, and the first time I went, I checked what the fare was and made sure I was ready, and even on the 100th time, I still kept my fare in hand before getting on. I honestly don’t understand why you wouldn’t, surely you want to get where you’re going instead of digging through your pockets in front of the driver…
some people just living life on hard mode.
Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don’t use self-checkout. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.
I avoid self checkout for different reasons.
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I’m not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.
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I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.
- It’s often very time saving to go through checkout. It is really that much hassle to scan your own items? If you’re using a card you typically handle that yourself anyway and many places already have you bag your own goods.
- you’re not going to get in any real trouble if you forget one item. If they happen to check and you did, simply go pay for it, or say “oops, missed that, here take it back I’ll get it next time” if it’s not needed.
number 2 works less well if you are off white
I got a question, how much are you being paid for this?
No. seriously. What business is it of yours if someone chooses to not use a self check out?
About the second point, this is copy pasted from a Dutch magazine that looked it up (auto translated)
Forgot to pay for something? That can have serious consequences.
Forgetting to pay for something doesn’t automatically constitute theft. The shopkeeper will have to prove that you intentionally left something unpaid. However, if the shopkeeper believes it was a case of theft, they can call the police. Is this your first time? Then you’ll receive a reprimand, a kind of warning. However, you will have to admit to the theft. This won’t result in a criminal record, but it will be registered in the police system.
Another possibility is that theft will be reported to the police. In that case, you may even have to appear in court. The police will then have to prove that it was intentional – and therefore theft. The shopkeeper can also handle the matter themselves. In these cases, offenders must pay €181 in damages. In some cases, a ban from the shop will also follow. Last year, tens of thousands of shoplifting cases were handled this way.
Further:
- Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you’re packaging a week worth of purchases.
- You still need an employee to come over and certify that you’re over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there’s usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
- I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it’s just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
- They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
- They’re non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
- They often don’t take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it’s just a number on a screen).
Even if you’re not using a card, or discount/member program, you’re still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.
If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.
You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you’re not being tracked b/c you used cash.
Even if you’re not using a card, or discount/member program, you’re still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked
You will be all right mate, you just need to wear a little tinfoil hat, that stops this kind of tracking.
They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.
Your “argument” is akin to a claim that people shouldn’t worry about having a good lock on their door because it’s always possible to break the door down with explosives.
“Don’t be the low hanging fruit” is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.
But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.
Clearly you’re not in tech, shadow profiles are a thing and the ROI on tracking “people like you” is pretty high.
Clearly you never actually done Tech projects in large corporate environments if you think complex shit is implemented across all sites just because it can be done, rather than because the expected profits exceed the cost and the hassle.
Also you seem to be under the impression that the social media guys would just give searchable access to their store of pictures (or provide a search service) to those big companies for free, which is a hilariously naive take on how Tech businesses work.
Automated following customers in a store with overhead cameras for the purposes of studying how they move around and purchase things is only done for some stores and has entirely different requirements for camera positions, external dependencies (no cross-referencing with external data to ID anybody is needed) and acceptable error rates (the data is not for selling to others so the error rates can be higher), because they don’t need to actually ID anybody to extract “human movement patterns” out of that data and it’s fine if the system confuses two people once in a while because there is no external customer of that data getting pissed off when the same person is reported as making purchases in two places at the same time or other stupidly obvious false positives.
Meanwhile matching the list of items bought with payment information, both of which already get sent from the tellers to the backend systems (for purposes of inventory tracking and accounting), is easy peasy and has a very low error rate.
You’re ridding a massive Dunning-Krugger there in thinking you’re the expert.
I never said they’d be tracked around the store. Matching items bought with who bought them using data taken at POS, including pictures of the face is what I said. AI and website scraping make putting a name to a face a low bar to get over. Or a company could use any of the plethora of OSINT tools to find who a customer is.
I’m happy to see someone who dislikes them as much as me.
I recently went to the self checkout because I was in a hurry and only had 5 items (one of them ice cream).
One item (croissant) didn’t have a bar code, I accidentally selected chocolate croissant. When I wanted to correct this, I had to click 3 menus just to delete an item. After I deleted it, the counter locked. It told me to wait for assistance. After a while I just picked up my 5 items and went to a different self checkout counter. Still nobody came to unlock the other machine.
There’s a good argument to be made from the point of view of customer convenience and expediency for using self-checkouts to pay for a small number of items, but even then most existing implementations of that concept are so fucking bad that there are all sorts of stupid problems, like my case of the thing not working unless I had a bag (it literally had no button to just skip it) and yours were a normal human mistake is complex to correct even though the users are amateurs and hence naturally more likely to make mistakes hence the thing should have been designed differently.
I’ve actually worked with UX/UI designer at several points in my career, and one thing that pisses me off about most self-checkouts is just how bad their UX/UI design is.
That so many self-checkout implementations are like that is probably explained by, having moved the costs of wasting time to the side of client, those businesses are not financially incentivized to make the self-checkouts efficient to use, which probably also explains all manner of weird choices in everything from their shape to even the order of their menus - in a manned checkout it’s their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it’s bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it’s not their problem so they don’t care.
This is also another reason for me to be against self-checkouts: the financial dynamics are different with self-checkouts than with manned checkouts since the costs of inefficiency on the former are on the customer, whilst with the latter the costs are on the store (which has to pay a salary for somebody who is less productive than they could be), so stores have less (and more indirect, hence harder to measure, hence often ignored by MBAs) financial pressure to make self-checkouts efficient to use than they do with manned checkouts.
What I also don’t understand, how in this day and age when we have AI that are better at image recognition than most humans do we even need to scan items? A couple of years ago I was in a supermarket that had a conveyor belt, where you place your items. Basically identical to a normal check counter. But instead of a human the items go through a small tunnel with a lot of camera’s (possibly a scale) on the inside. All items scanned automatically, no extra responsibility of forgetting to scan an item, etc. Not sure why I never saw that concept again, it worked great.
I suspect that outside a well controlled environment (like that small tunnel with a lot of cameras), image recognition still yields too many false positives and false negatives to be acceptable compared to scanning a bar code (then again, maybe scanning barcodes is what that tunnel does rather than image recognition).
That said, there was this whole idea of using RFID tags on products so that checking-out was merely passing by a scanner with your filled trolley - which would scan all of its contents at once - and paying (or even have your card directly charged).
However I believe this failed to take off because neither product manufacturers nor the stores wanted to spend the few cents per box that would take to add the RFID tags.
So in order to save the few cents per-box that would enable pretty much instant checkout, we have these crap self-checkout implementations were clients get to do all the work of cashiers in a teller which is worse than that of cashiers, and without even getting a discount for it (actually prices just kept going up) - the whole thing is fucking insulting.
Ha I remember reading some article in the early 2000s about the future of grocery shopping, and it said just that. We could all load up a cart and walk into a pay booth and pay. It would have been really great if that actually was a thing. Everything was going to have an rfid tag.
in a manned checkout it’s their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it’s bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it’s not their problem so they don’t care.
It still cost them money as they need to install more checkouts to serve the same number of customers.
I don’t usually blame maliciousness where sheere stupidity can be at play.
whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout
The store I go to most often has those rotating plastic bag holders at the end of the belts which makes it effectively impossible to put stuff into your own bags. And they have the fucking gall to put up signs asking you to bring your own bags! I do self-checkout there no matter how much shit I have in the cart.
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Well then don’t be a fucking moron. Sorry for being a dick towards those kind of people, but the voice prompts walk you through the entire process. All you gotta do is listen to them. I didn’t have any issues when I first tried one 20 years ago. They’re self-explanatory.
I mean at this point they’ve been around long enough that everyone should know how to use them by now, unless you recently moved from a country that doesn’t have them. But again, the machines walk you through the process every time.
Mate, not the previous poster but I’m a senior software engineer with an EE degree and broad enough experience that I could design and implement myself a self-checkout from the ground up, both hardware and software, including UI and backend integration, and I still tend to avoid self-checkouts for those reasons and a lot more (many which I listed in another post here).
There are two very opposite ends of the curve for people who don’t like self-checkouts: those who can’t deal with the tech (who you deem “fucking morons”) and those who have evaluated self-checkouts as a process and found it to overall be inferior to the existing process for their own usual use conditions or who look at it in a broader context and find it to have indirect social damage.
That you can only spot the “being a moron” as a reason to avoid self-checkouts is a pretty good indicator of your own intellectual limitations.
Fortunately, I’m the sort who goes, “Who the FUCK are you looking at?”, when I catch people staring.
I don’t need them to be speedy Gonzalez but to just not be actually illiterate buffoons
Screen: scan items to begin
Them: staring at the machine, slack jawed until the employee comes over
For me it’s mostly privacy concerns. Now the fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.
fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.
What?
What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!
If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.
If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity.
App/account - yes. Card - no.
That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.
I realise USA is quickly descending into totalitarianism but what you are presenting is a tinfoil hat level of madness.
In what reality do you live in lol? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of “data collection companies”. European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.
If you don’t think all this data isn’t being collated and used then you don’t understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they’ve already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.
I like self check because it’s less interaction with people, mostly. Also, you can rip 30 packs of PBR near the handle and just scan the can instead on the box.
A 30-pack for a six-pack price is a good deal.
But yes, they are shifting labor to customers.
I’m surprised that:
- You don’t get flagged for a human to check your ID
- The weight doesn’t flag you
Mos def.
They check ID but I’ve never had them scrutinize the price. I think they are just focused on the ID.
I hold the 30 pack and scan near the handle (which I have ripped a little) to scan the can (which I have rotated). Place case on ground to save room for other groceries.
Yaknow that tracks. No one at self checkout will give a shit. Underpaid.
No matter what line I pick at the supermarket, that’s the line that will have a technical issue, a grandma with 200 coupons, a guy who wants to scan 50 lottery tickets, and a price check that takes 10 minutes.
Also no matter what spot I pick in line, that’s the spot where people decide to pass through
That the saving grace of self-checkout lines; it tends to be one line for a dozen checkouts. So the dense fucker clasping their block of cheese to their chest - in the manner of fleeing refugee carrying a child - while the machine repeatedly begs them to “please place the item in the bagging area” only slows down the line a little bit, but the Hutt going supernova at the cashier because they can’t use a different supermarket’s app’s discount code for 15% off Kleenex on a 3L bottle of Pepsi and demanding to see the manager grinds everything to a halt until they’re adequately soothed.
My local grocer doesn’t have self checkout but they do have 12 item express and 20 item express with dual/quad lanes.
So you end up with one line and 4 registers blasting through express people.
I often make 2 grocery runs a week. A big one on weekends and a mid week one for fresh protein and whatever Im missing until the next trip.
🤣🤣🤣
I always notice people are super cocky about this kind of thing. Yet self-checkouts are so fucking terrible it basically everyone runs into problems at them eventually. So just tempting fate from everyone in this thread really.
I don’t know how you can go wrong. You scan the thing, set it down, repeat. Press pay, scan your card, done.
“Unexpected item in bagging area” was a common misery for everyone in London in 2012. Don’t know if it’s improved there since.
In NL they now do ‘random checks’ of 10 items, which is basically ‘you having to unpack all your shopping’ and pack again so they can check if you stole.
The concept of self checkout is ridiculous, making you an unpaid employee and then blaming you for mistakes. It tries to solve the owner’s stinginess for not hiring more staff. It’s not there to help you, it’s there to suppress employees.
Unless you get booze, need to use cash, or it’s an item the machine wants to weigh. Or worse, expects the weight to be different than it is.
At least most places seem to have turned off the weight thing (or it got ‘smart’ enough to not care so much).
Where I shop, if you go too fast it confuses the machine and calls an attendant over to clear it while a video of what I was doing plays. Which is bs.
Oh here’s one now.
Eh, I love them. If there’s a line, I’ll go for the human, but if a self-checkout is available and I don’t have a ton of produce, I’ll take it every time.
Either that, or I have to wait for an employee myself for the stupidest reason, i.e. that I’ve brought a canvas bag that they have to verify I didn’t steal.
Your supposed to weigh the bag first, at least in some stores.
I know
myI am, same thing here, but even when I do, if it’s a bag previously bought from the same place, they usually want to verify. Maybe the system’s watching for the store logo on the bag. Most likely they have cameras watching the self-service checkouts to make sure you don’t do anything funky, i.e. weighing apples and selecting carrots on the screen.if it’s a bag previously bought from the same place, they usually want to verify.
Fucking hell, where do you live where stores treat customers like potential shoplifters stealing bags costing 50 pence?
Wait until I tell you about the coin-operated shopping carts.
This has nothing to do with stealing. It is about not leaving them everywhere.
This has mostly to do with not leaving them everywhere, but if they’re randomly left in the parking lot, some people will happily steal them. Plus this was in the same notion of not trusting people to do what’s expected.
Your comments are completely irrelevant to what I have said.
That’s why I use my Walmart bag at king soopers
I personally really like self checkout. Even with a full cart im in and out significantly faster than most everyone else. I dont get how people get tripped up at them but my god Is it so many. I would like to have the option to remove something I accidentally scanned without needing someone though. We finally got passed the bag scale issues this is the next hurdle!
As a side note I only do self check with a full cart because im a late night shopper I would never in a million years do it during busy hours.
To be fair it is so much better than it was when they came out.
Can you elaborate? This was before my time, so I’m curious what that early experience was like.
The big improvement has been image recognition on produce. It used to be you needed to either know the produce code, or navigate a terrible menu system. Nowadays, you can just put stuff on the scale, hit the camera icon, and have it show you a few possibilities, which is almost always correct.
There was also a long period where the anti theft system would trigger if you breath on the bagging area, and require a staff member to unlock it. They seem to have toned that down a lot. Even when it triggers, it just nags you without locking anything.
I put something on the scale, hit search, type the first 3 letters of the item, select the relevant item, select whether it is in any additional container (like the produce bags), and it’s done. Takes me 3 seconds to do.
I’ll have to look to see if my grocery store has image recognition. I have not noticed that feature, but I’d be interested in trying it.
And so you blame the person whose thrown into having to use a self checkout with little to no instruction having to figure it out instead of the corpo execs who wanted to siphon a few local jobs into their new yachts?
If there is a cashier available, then I refuse to use self checkout.
These things seem to be meant for people buying a few items, not for 250 items a family of 4 would have In a cart.
Whoever designed these machines had never used checkouts, touchscreens, or money before.
Early Wal-Mart models were the touchiest, naggiest goddamn things, like whoever invented PRESS X TO NOT DIE got fired from Capcom and went straight into commercial UX. You will bend over two times for every item, you may not swipe the same item twice for duplicates, and that half-ounce blister-pack better register on the bag-side scale or else the idiot alarm will go off anyway. As it will if you spend more than two seconds figuring out a screen that just jabbed your ears with a shrill beep to demand instant responses to a modal choice for no discernible reason.
Recently CVS had one that’s ATM-shaped, with an itty-bitty platform for your stuff. The cash slot is at knee height. The lower half of the machine is angled toward the ground. You can’t fucking see it, while it’s still demanding immediate responses to modal options, like you’re playing a game and have no sane reason to look away from the screen. Hi! Press button to begin. Are you buying something today? Press button to buy. Do you speak English? Press button for English. Will you be scanning things? Press button to scan. Okay, begin scanning things. Press button to scan something else. Press button to not scan something else. Press button to check out. Press button to pay your bill. Press button for how you’ll be paying your bill. Press button to activate the cash siphon conveniently located upside-down and backwards two feet off the floor, for use with popular brands of shin-mounted wallets, because the cocaine-chewing lizard person who designed this object has never seen a goddamn vending machine.
It was fine ten years ago! For like a decade, you got a shelf with a scanner in the middle, like a goddamn checkout counter, and you did the thing you’ve watched register-jockeys do since you got to sit in the cart. They didn’t model human customers as idiot robots who’ll instinctively stare at a screen and blindly follow instructions as quickly as possible. They acted like you had expectations, and were perhaps engaged in some manual activity involving a cart, a scanner, and three dozen disparate objects.
What kills me is when I’m behind an old person attempting to use a check like it’s 1989. I haven’t been to a grocery store that accepts checks in the past decade, I just don’t understand why they think it will suddenly change back to how it was, and they always act angry and confused when stores don’t accept their checks even though like I said I haven’t seen a store that accepts checks in the past decade
Holy shit, cheques (as we spell it in the UK). I’d not seen one in decades, my bank stopped issueing chequebooks more than 20 years ago but they’ll still print a one-off cheque for you if you ask. Then I spent some time in France and they still use the goddamn things and it is an absolute ordeal - I swear they spend two solid minutes passing the thing back and forth between the customer and cashier, taking turns to make little amendments. I understand that in France a cheque has a lot more legal clout than in the UK.
I haven’t seen a single grocery store that doesn’t accept checks. Still a thing here in western Washington.
