Im surprised how many people here hate self checkout. I am much faster at scanning and bagging my own items than most cashiers. I almost never get errors, and if I do I know what to do to clear them typically. I always look at self check first, and then human lines second. Plus, none if that “how’s your day? Want to apply for a store credit card?” talk from a bored looking cashier.

Self Checkout hat serious drawbacks:

• the cashiers are not free to be transferred to more important work, they are fired. this is objectively bad.
• regardless if you are scanning the items when putting them into the cart, or you are scanning them at the checkout point - you are now doing the cashiers work, but you are not compensated for your work. the price you pay is the same. you are now an employee, but without being paid. this is objectively bad.
• when a scanning error happens, you are now responsible for it. the industry word for it is theft. you are a thief if your scan isn’t correct. the responsibility shifted away from a worker with (depending on locale, forget the US for a moment) insurance and workers rights, allowing for smaller mistakes. But the retailer isn’t picking up the responsibility, it just heaps it on the customer. As they did with the work. this is objectively bad.
• depending on the efficiency of this system, the retailer chains (not stores, the chains) are increasing profits. the workers and the customers don’t see a dime of that. this is objectively bad.

A store near me in germany has recently switched a number of rows to self checkout. Absolute chaos, nobody wants it, long rows on the few chashier points. I saw it exactly one time, told me what i think, they tried to sell me the convenience, i told them what i wrote here plus that they are located in a commercial area, not a mixed housing/commerce area. Nobody goes there to buy a handful of stuff. People came for “Hamsterkäufe” (german colloquial, hamstering essentially: buying large quantities for reserve), self checkout is not convenient. I will not visit there anymore, there are other stores who don’t do this crap.

They better have some pretty specific definitions of “theft” vs “errors”. I think everyone has had the experience of missing something, wondering if you should go back and scan it or if that would get security called on you, etc.

Then you hear the stories like Walmart keeping a running tab and if you go over “$x” it’s grand theft and that’s when they arrest you.

It is the stores job and responsibility to make sure their stuff is all scanned, and rung up correctly. Not the consumer’s. You can’t just offload the labor costs and also shift the risk on the customer.

That’s why I hate self checkout, at least.

I had someone at target try to direct me to the self checkout… I politely declined with “I don’t work here”

If I’m doing the work, I should damn well get the employee discount.

I hate it and won’t miss it. The workflow is brittle and the anti-theft measures throw too many false positives. Every third time I use it, it requires staff intervention. I’ll always go to a checker if I have the choice of doing so.

What country is this? They seem to becoming more prevalent here. (Canada) My observation is that people generally look at the cashier lines. If there’s too long a wait, they head for the self-checkout. Or, if they only have a few items, they head to the self-checkout.

Fuck the fucking idiots who ruined this

So is this a US specific thing or not? The article doesn’t really make that clear.

Is it possible there are less businesses doing it because many companies have already done it? I know a lot of people aren’t in favour of self-checkouts, but decisions go to where the money and convenience are. We don’t go to tellers or the few gas stations that serve because of convenience. We troubleshot our computers and do our own renovations because hiring workers would be too expensive. If you don’t like self-checkouts, don’t use them. It’s as easy as that.

I hope they keep them at least in parallel. I’m so much faster usually when doing self-checkout, because I often only buy a few items and can just skip the line.

Hell yeah brother!

Self check-out should be for maximum 5-5 products, no more. They should be Fast lane only.

@BillionaireStew

Mayor Mamdani said self checkout should, by law, provide a ten percent discount. That might have helped.

Because self checkout should provide a discount. And grocery store workers should be unionized.

I do enjoy self checkout, but yesterday one demanded that I put my bag of rice back in my cart before I could continue. Something about heavy or fragile items. The problem was that I didn’t have a cart, but I did have several more items.

“things have gotten so bad that it has made many people need to steal, so we can’t keep self checkouts open”