> And they will be able to provide better and faster service.
On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.
This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.
Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems
Concur - if I have a cart, probably would use a checkout person - but, when you get used to buying stuff from the store 1-2x a day, you rarely have a large load.
Yea if you only have 6 items sure... I never go to the store when I am only buying 6 items.... If I only need 6 things it can wait until I need more
I go to the store 1 or 2 times a month, not everyday
But once I moved away, I started using home delivery and it's even better. My shopping now consists of ~15mins browsing a website, and ~15mins receiving and unpacking bags, and I only need to do it about once a fortnight.
- swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner
- walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag
- when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder
- swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leave
Obviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.
Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.
About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US.
It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.
Over there fresh fruits/vegs/bakery don't have any stickers/packaging/etc. You pick them, put in a bag and cashier rings them up along with barcoded items. They got a fatass book with pictures for newbies/self checkout and all experienced staff have muscle memory...
I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(
Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.
A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.