- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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.
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?
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.
Depends on the store. Some of them are terrible. Tiny areas to checkout an entire grocery car sucks. Especially when it weighs as you go, then hits the weight limit and apparently just starts ignoring the requirement.
It’s like with DRM. More anti-theft stuff just makes it harder for paying customers.
Annoys the paying customers, and the thieves will find a way to circumvent it in 5 minutes of playing with it, lol
More or less yea.
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.
For me there are two things that makes me reject all self checkout. Most importantly, it is taking people’s jobs and making me do the labour for no discount, companies only offer them because it pads their profits. Second, the user experience is almost universally terrible. I don’t want to take the risk just to get pissed off.
Self checkout should have those mobile scanners that you can use to check items out while you’re still shopping. We have them here and it is a godsend for larger purchases. You scan the items, put them in your bags and at the self checkout, you can just register your card and pay.
I agree that it’s got to be how young Lemmy skews. No one who has ever bought alcohol at a self-checkout has said, “This is so quick and convenient!”
I think the problem is that there aren’t enough checkout lanes for either to be practical anymore in a supermarket with a cart full of items. But I agree, it’s not an either/or thing.
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.
I like the idea for groceries, but how do you do produce?
Look into Amazon fresh stores. They have that concept. You just place the item in the cart and it shows you the list of items you have in the cart while at the store. After that I think you just go to the register and it chargers your Amazon account.
But how do you do it with produce? Say you want to buy three apples. I can get that it could figure out amount with a scale, but how does it know you’ve bought apples?
That one you would type the produce cause it could tell it was produce. Only been once so I don’t remember how it calculated the weight.
Got it. Thanks.
Stores near me require you to weigh and print a label in the produce section. You scan the label at the register like anything else.
In the produce section you either type in the four digit number or select from a list.
Interesting, thanks!
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
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.
These corporations are saving money hand over fist by eliminating jobs, and use this as an excuse for why their profits aren’t EVEN bigger! Their missed profit from an article here or there that we “forget” to scan doesn’t remotely amount to their savings off the backs of the American blue-collar.
I like self checkout as a concept. I don’t like the implementation or what it stands for.
That’s essentially how I also feel.
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).
The best thing is when you’ve been doing it for so long that the random checks happen, like, once a year. I actually don’t think we’ve had one since before the pandemic.
We have that at a grocery store in my area, though you use an app on your phone to scan with the camera and the “random testing” seems to happen pretty much every time. If I had one of their scanners instead of their laggy app, I’d be much happier. (Though I guess modern handscanners are Android devices with a laser, so maybe not that much better…)
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From your comment I assume you are American, since I heard that people pack your bags at your stores. In Germany and probably most of Europe a typical checkout process works differently and probably solves the problem.
- You put your stuff on a large transport band, emptying your cart (probably have those as well)
- When you’re up you move your cart at the large area after the cashier
- The cashier registers everything and pushes it to you into that big area
- You put everything in your bags while they are working
- Cashier finishes, you make your payment
- You pack the last 3 items that are remaining
Some stores also introduced a simple “switch” that makes the products of the person after you slide into a seperate area, to save time .
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.
They expect me to do free labor
I’m pretty sure people were complaining about this when supermarkets replaced greengrocers. “What do you mean I can’t just hand a list to the clerk and have him package up my groceries? They expect me to do free labor?” But we kept it around because the convenience was worth it.
for a huge evil corporation,
The smaller evil corporations use them too.
but give me a scanner far worse than they give their paid employees,
I don’t know where you’re going, but at the grocery stores I go to (and the one I used to work at) the scanner is literally the same unit as on the checkout the human is operating because that way it’s easier and cheaper to keep parts on hand to fix them.
which scolds me every 10 seconds for not having enough space to put things.
HONESTLY this is like the ONLY JOKE people have about self-checkouts. You could joke about the thing always being out of bags, or having trouble when you’re trying to buy alcohol, or flagging down an attendant when the thing doesn’t have a barcode, and yet everyone chooses “unexpected item in the bagging area,” which hasn’t been a problem for people who actually know how to use the thing for a decade or more? Why is this the mindvirus that has infiltrated everyone and not, like, social equity?
I’m not making a joke.
It’s a terrible design and these should all be scrapped until they make ones that don’t suck.
I haven’t had trouble with this or seen anyone who has in probably a decade. They already have made ones that don’t suck. (As much, to be fair)
Now you’re just making shit up.
Very much not. I’ve shopped biweekly since around the beginning of the pandemic, and the trouble I have is when the overhead camera thinks I’m stealing, like, a fast food soft drink I have in my cart or something. I haven’t heard “unexpected item in the bagging area” or anything like it for years, literally. And I only have to wait for a person in the case of the aforementioned camera debacles, or if I’m buying alcohol.
I hear it happen to a stranger almost every time at Lucky or Safeway.
Happens to me if I try to scan even half as fast as they do at the real checkout scanners.
See my comment here for my recent revelation. In short: the problem isn’t with self checkouts, it’s that the stores you’re going to aren’t maintaining them well.
Please, no. It’s my jam.
Oh wait, it’s for self checkout. Not self scanning.
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Unfortunately, Kroger and Walmart are a 5-minute drive for us and Meijer would be a 30-minute drive, so we’re sort of stuck with Kroger and Walmart.
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Wait…ok, so I haven’t really shopped anywhere but Meijer or (to a lesser extent) Kroger for about a decade. Is this why I haven’t seen the problems with things like “unexpected item” and such? That could make a lot of sense. It’s been driving me crazy seeing stories like this when the worst experience I have with self checkout is when the camera thinks I’m stealing something because I have, like, a Wendy’s cup.
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The Kroger near me is fine about that, but it’s newer self checkouts so they probably haven’t had time to fall into disrepair yet.
This must be location dependent (and time). I have multiple Walmart and grocery store chains nearby, and the worst I ever see is one Walmart may sometimes have a line at self checkout… But I usually know by how full the parking lot is.
One grocery store never has a line, one grocery store does occasionally at rush hour (both the same chain, about 5 miles apart).
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.
