Comment by bgwalter 4 days ago
Don't use self-checkouts. You do all the work, slower than the cashier, and are treated like cattle. Often there is a supervisor breathing down your neck and demanding the receipt before the exit doors open. Now there is facial recognition.
In my experience usually there is 10+ self checkout lines of which maybe half of them are open, only 2 accept cash and the line for self checkout is 3x longer coupled with the fact that people take roughly 10-15secs per item + 10-15secs to find the “finish and pay” button, 15-20secs to pull out their card, or phone, 5-6 secs to get the receipt and leave. If there is a single elderly person on the line or somebody buying an item that needs the employee “blessing” then then that time might reach the full minute.
There is no evidence anecdotal or otherwise to back this assertion.
Many stores near me appeared to cut cashiers before they added self-checkouts. If anything, adding self-checkouts increased the number of available options to get out of the store faster.
I'd place my bets on curbside pickup getting pushed more before cashiers get added given how popular it's become as an option.
Germany's discounters (ie, nearly all grocery stores) have long been hyper-efficient about checkouts. There is exactly one lane open until the line gets too long, then they open another. When the number of customers subsides, the second lane closes and the employee goes back to other tasks.
Only in recent years have self-checkouts started appearing in any significant number, and the formula hasn't changed. I guess theoretically stores might be able to cut back on employees, but it would be literally one or two people at most.
What do you mean "all the work"? Grocery shopping is preparation, logistics, actually to the place(s), handling the items from shelf to cart, cart to register, checking and paying at register, move from register to own container, container to vehicle, vehicle to home, unpack at home.
Of all of this hassle, the cashier merely handles a single step. You already do all the work.
I'm not sure what you mean by "treated like cattle". I haven't really had a bad experience with self-checkout, granted, we probably don't live in the same country / culture.
The receipt checking happens with the cashier as well, just implicitly. If anything, they are treated badly, with having to stand most of the time in the US. Absolutely unnecessary.
Facial recognition I don't like either, but stores (and others) will do that anyways, with self-checkout being, at most, an excuse to develop/improve/deploy such systems. Theft would be a problem/excuse anyways for stores, and advertising is a pretty big trojan horse in this regard as well. Self-checkout doesn't make a difference here.
Try unloading an entire cart and scanning each one individually and putting it back, after spending a tiring hour shopping. I will be very surprised if you still feel the same.
Do you not do the same with a cashier?
(This is getting tangential, but I do exactly what you describe, and I really appreciate that I can do it on my terms, without having to accommodate three other people: the one in front of me, the cashier, and the one next in line.)
I was thinking of Costco, where loads are big and they do a good part of it for you, except for the smaller stuff.
Ah, I see. I don't live in the US, so I never experienced that. In Hungary, there is zero service, the cashier sits behind a counter, the shopper unloads everything to a conveyor, cashier beeps every item, shopper puts them back into their cart. For heavy items, the cashier comes out with a portable beeper, and does the job with that. And now with self-service, it's on the shopper to do the exact same.
"You already do all the work."
Uh, no? Ralphs absolutely has a full order and pay online thing, then you just drive to the store and get your groceries delivered to your car. I used it just yesterday as I can't go anywhere after my oral surgery.
I drive to the store, pick things up off the shelf, carry them all around the store, take them to my car, drive home, bring them into the house, but moving the items twelve inches across a bar code reader is "work"? I need some low paid worker to do that trivial part so I can feel some sort of status of having been served?
No, it's to offload the burden/liability of being accused of shoplifting. If a cashier messes up, it's on the store. If you do, it's on you. Thanks but I'm not willing to assume that liability with little benefit to me.
I use self checkout all the time and have never been accused of shoplifting. Other stores in other neighborhoods might be different, and I wouldn't be surprised if skin color makes a difference too.
> slower than the cashier...Often there is a supervisor breathing down your neck
Not sure what stores you're going to go but this is nowhere near my experience.
You scan faster than a trained cashier? Do the self-checkouts in the US use RFID? Here in the EU I have to scan, clumsily and slowly.
I was a trained cashier many years ago because I didn't grow up privileged so I had to work retail (and dishwasher and waiter) jobs.
Not only do I have the muscle memory, still after 30 years, I also have the added incentive of knowing the value of my own time, not being fatigued from hours of work, the ability pre-position items in the cart at an optimal orientation for handling and scanning, and foreknowledge of what items I have and a plan for how best to bag them that was made prior to my arrival at self-checkout.
So, yeah, I scan faster.
Much faster.
edit: oh man this has brought up a bunch of frustrations. Why do customers just pile shit on the counter? When I interact with a cashier, like at a gas station on a long road trip, every item I place on the counter has the barcodes oriented towards the person, so they can just "zap zap zap zap" the items rapid-fire without handling them. My bag (I live in a civilized state that has banned plastic bags) is ready and waiting, items are organized and presented in an order that make sense for ease of bagging. My payment method is ready. The experience is efficient and quick.
It takes no mental effort to do any of this and yet I am constantly stuck behind people who act as though they are purchasing things for the first time in their entire lives and the process is as foreign to them as communicating in the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence is to me.
Awesome, what do you do with all the full 20secs saved? Jokes apart I’ve made the decision, after a near-death experience, to never rush anywhere for any reason, to live every minute and to enjoy even stupid moments like waiting in line, I might be wrong but I’m sure happier than before.
Rushing leads to errors. I don't rush. I also don't anti-rush. Dawdle?
But to answer your question, after a year I use those 30 extra minutes to play Sonic the Hedgehog six or seven times, nibbling on an ice cream sandwich between acts and zones, a sandwich that eventually melts and makes a great mess of things including all over my Genesis controller, which I clean in the kitchen while looking out the window over the sink.
Even a trained cashier cannot scan as fast as a trained cashier on these systems; they're slow by design. I got reasonably fast (but not cashier fast) on Safeway's and hit a wall: I kept running into false positive "unidentified item in bagging area", followed by clerk overrides. I eventually figured out that you can't place the item into the bagging area until the computer has processed it — there's a delay between the "beep" of the barcode scanner recognizing a barcode and the computer adding the item to the tab & then announcing the purchase, and you cannot hit the scale prior to that or it gets out of sync with you.
Also the only place truly training cashiers, AFAICT, is Aldi's.
The line for self-checkout is usually faster, often nonexistent. That easily eats any marginal benefit a fast cashier might offer for my 1 to 5 items.
In the U.S., particularly the Walmarts I've been to, cashiers are usually slower than the self-checkouts now.
Their self-checkouts used to be slow because the registers would verify the weight of items on the scale (the surface where you bag it) before letting you put it in the cart. If it didn't like the weight it would force you to put it back in the bag. I don't think they do this anymore. Asset protection can view a camera pointed at the scanner and bags if they think you're stealing.
Furthermore, it's hard for Walmart to retain people, so cashiers are treated like a dump stat. They won't really dedicate people to checking out anymore unless that's all they can do, e.g. elderly, so someone who's a cashier all day tends to be slow because they're accomodating that person. So you could be the fastest cashier in the world but it won't mean anything as far as raises, etc. Your fast cashiers are often pulled off and stocking unless its super busy.
Last week I went to Walmart and went through self checkout. Probably about $100 of groceries. After paying and clicking to print the receipt there was an error with the receipt printer. They changed the paper but the error remained. They gave me a “trust me bro” you won’t get stopped and sent me on my way. I could have made a fuss but didn’t have anything I would have returned anyways. A bit off putting in how they handled it though.
I spend less time in the self-checkout queue than in the cashier queue. Overall much faster. And I don't think that's just because the shops have chosen to have more self-checkouts, it's a matter of floor space - self checkouts are much denser so they can get much more throughput.
If the option is waiting in line for a cashier versus going to an open self checkout (this is almost always the case where I shop), then yes, self checkout is faster.
Even aside from the line, the only thing clerks are sometimes faster at in my experience is ringing up fresh produce where codes have to be typed in (these codes are usually on a label on the produce, but if not you have to go through a lookup procedure if you haven't memorized the code).
Trained cashier? The local Lowe's and HD have little old ladies running the checkouts. They can't even lift most of the things I am buying, and have to scan them myself.
Supermarkets usually have old slow people running them. The only time I don't use self checkout is when I have alcohol, and it is slower every single time than doing it myself.
I have no doubt that you've experienced all of the above but I'd hazard that it's the exception and not the rule.
Personally, I'm faster at scanning items than most cashiers are. I used to work in retail, though, so maybe that's just me.
I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me. To my partner's chagrin, it's one of the reasons I won't go into Costco.
While self-checkout is less private in a lot of ways (see article) I value it because I have social anxiety and would prefer to avoid too much (or too little!) smalltalk with cashiers -- especially about the items I'm buying.
> I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me.
Not self checkout related, but the Kroger stores by me have all started having security guards check receipts before you can leave the store. They do this whether or not you do self checkout. Accordingly, I have stopped patronizing those stores because I refuse to spend my money at a business that treats me like a criminal. I sympathize in that they are trying to stop theft, but I'm not going to put up with that particular method of deterrence.
I was boycotting Kroger for a long time over a different thing they were doing. The self-checkouts (and a lot of the time there isn't another option) had a camera that watched what you put in your bag. If you didn't move what you scanned very slowly (the camera seemed to be running at <10 FPS) over the exact trajectory it expects it would demand an employee make sure you weren't stealing the thing you scanned. So every few items you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for an employee to notice you, be free to come over, decide they can be bothered, and go through everything.
They got rid of it eventually and I started shopping there again, but if they start doing receipt checks they're back on the shit list.
It depends on the reason why they're stopping you. If they actually think you are stealing, then no, they can stop you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper's_privilege
I'll keep using self-checkouts because they're fine and frequently faster than using a non-self-checkout. There are a few minor headaches like hair-trigger sensitivity of the weight sensors. I don't care in the slightest that a camera is filming to try to deter thieves - don't consider that a downside. The security measures are a bit depressing but only in what they say about where society is going with respect to theft from shops.
At my Walmart there is roughly 10-15 self checkouts vs 3 cashiers where people with full carts are waiting in line. Self checkout is great if you have a few items. Also cashiers aren’t that fast considering they have to scan, bag (in some places) and then take your payment.
Some self checkouts are better than others the worst ones are the ones that don’t let you take your items off the scale after scanning and then they throw an error for you to put them back.
I’ve also never felt treated like cattle but I’d figure a checkout with a cashier is more cattle like since you are being funneled through a tight space one after the other vs an open space like self checkouts.