Dear grocery store owners: I don’t work for you | Hacker News Reader

Dear grocery store owners: I don’t work for you

washingtonpost.com

6 pointssonabinu10 comments

Agree completely with the sentiments of this article. It started when I put an empty bag on the scanned-articles area, to hold items I'd just scanned, and the machine complained that I didn't scan that 'item'. Then the 'helper' arrived.

I shop in the place when it has humans working the registers. I'll sort the groceries by type, I'll gladly bag them as well. When the humans are gone, so's my business.

I prefer self-checkout at the grocery store because I'm able to catch pricing errors proactively in real time, not at home squinting at a cryptic receipt.

I no longer see any advantage to me using a traditional checkout.

I prefer it too. I'm definitely faster and better at bagging. I don't get home with broken eggs and squished bread.

I also can avoid the cashier commenting about my items ("I've never seen this before.", "what is this?", "Wow, this is expensive.", etc)

The receipt checkers though, yeah that one gets to me. Whatever advantages or time savings I realized by working with the robot just went out the window when I have to queue up in the "papers please" line.

One time I bought some Fiji water, the lady was staring at my receipt and frantically looking through my cart. She finally asked what "fiji" was and I told her it was the water. "Oh, I don't usually buy that off-brand stuff" she commented. What, that doesn't really make sense and also no one asked you what _you_ prefer.

just wait until he hears about vending machines.

I wish more stores had hand held scanners. It’s super cumbersome when dealing with large items.

Just mute it. There's a button and everything.

Ok, boomer.

Yeah, this actually does 100% seem to be an age test. If someone could complains about self check out they're 99% likely to be over about 50 now. GEN Z is fine or prefers. Gen X is mostly fine, it's older folks that get unhappy.

As a 53 year old GenXer I assure you, most of us are fine.

Not all. I know a few who hate technology.

mostly hate it when things scale up. I work next door to a neighborhood walmart. so i tend to visit almost daily.

SOMETIMES they have a legacy lane open, mostly its yellow vests (customer service?) hovering around the self checkouts. I go in grab my 2-4 items i need for lunch or dinner that evening or both...

all the tiny self checkouts are clogged with people with an entire cart full of shit and they scan one item, slowly, bag it, grab another item... it takes forever - simply because they're not familiar with the flow. These types of customers also don't know how to bag groceries ending up with 2 or 3 items per bag spread all over the floor because their cart is still full. (taking another 5 min after checkout to put back in their cart) This is where an experienced cashier excels.

the Card only / cash only lanes also suck. at least a couple of times a week someone goes there because its open and has the wrong form of payment. slowing things down even further.

I don't mind doing my own work at the up to full hand basket level. once it gets into grocery cart scale - expedite things with a human!

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