A Grocery Chain Just Fired Its Self-Checkouts – They're Bringing the Humans Back
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A good example I can think of personally is at McDonalds. It takes 22 finger clicks on the screen to order a medium iced coffee and approximately 140 seconds. There are numerous slow animations, the screens are slow to appear, slow to respond, multiple upsells, positions of buttons change on reflow after clicks. In person it takes "I'd like medium ice coffee light sugar", approximately 7 seconds for that and then the card processing time. Self service is 20 times worse.
Someone else mentioned theft reporting. Having recently spoken with a criminal defense attorney in a social setting, this is an out of control problem. He is in a medium sized city and has seen the number of shop lifting bans increase over 500-1000x. He would typically see a dozen or so per year but since self checkout became dominant in the area he is seeing thousands per year, nearly 1% of the population. This becomes a major problem in an area like this, if you get banned by walmart and safeway you have to travel 2 hours to get groceries, there are no other food stores. There is no recourse, the stores have no interest in trying to resolve these cases where, as the other commenter described, very common human errors resulting from terrible UI are criminalized.
The self-checkouts at Target where I live are hilariously bad if you are paying with cash. Up to the point where you pay everything is fine, but then if you indicate that you are paying with cash, it says that it is preparing to accept the payment. It takes 20 seconds before it will let you put money in, like there is some sort of data processing it needs to do first. And every third or fourth bill that you put in gets jammed up and you have to pull it back out and re-insert it.
After you put in enough money to cover the amount due, it prints the receipt right away, but it takes another 20 seconds before it gives you the paper money change, like it has to do some more hard-core processing to figure out that 40 dollars minus 37 dollars equals 3 dollars.
The coin change takes even longer, like there is some advanced algorithm it uses to make change that takes it half a minute. Then, as a final "fuck you" to the customer for daring to pay with cash, the receptacle where the change comes out is set up so that unless you put your hand in front of it, it spits half the change out onto the floor.
It's so bad that it doesn't even make me angry any more, it just makes me laugh.
Absolutely just refuse to use the machine. They will accommodate you. If enough people do it then they will get rid of them.
Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit. Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.
I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.
I use an app to buy groceries and I assume that any mistakes that I make will be corrected if checked like a human would do.
I'm pretty sure that I would not have to pay anything if I was targeted by the police but the case was dropped for whatever reason. I would probably just get a letter saying that the case was dropped.
It feels like they could never say no to any security feature, no matter how inconvenient and ineffective it is.
On top of that they have tons of prompts for donations and other spam that slows it down further.
There are a few stores near my that I actually avoid no because their self-checkouts are so customer hostile (and they have no or very little regular checkouts). I won't shop at a store that treats me poorly.
However most stores by me have mandatory delays after every item as it weighs your bagged of scanned items to make sure you didn't slip something you didn't scan in there. It painfully slows down the process even the times where it doesn't misfire.
from three or four dozen to zero and probably worth pointing out that they just put them in like 2016-ish.
You are supposed to run the whole payment process yourself. Become an expert yourself over time how to navigate all the issues and fineries of the system. You are doing a cashiers job. But no advantage for you.
Human tills have been removed and only because of that the queues on the self checkout are shorter. I am sure for some tasks self-checkout can actually be quicker but more often than not there is no difference or it can be longer.
So now you are standing there and have been good and done their job, for no reward. And once a food price crisis comes up, will the supermarket remember your unpaid contribution to reduce their cost?
Really, don’t do other people’s job.
Where do you draw the line here? Do you put your own gas into your own car? Because up until recently and still in one or two places that's someone else's job. ah you have an EV... ok do you buy your own clothes? That's the job of a personal shopper. do you prepare your own food? That's the job of a chef or a cook. Do you dress yourself in the morning? That's the job of a valet, hard t. Do you park your own car? That's the job of a valet, silent t. Do you locate your table and seat yourself in restaurants, cafes or at the cinema? That's the job... etc.
It's poor form to invite someone to dinner at your house, then make them cook it when they arrive.
That's where the line is drawn. Not having a personal valet-silent-t isn't doing someone else's job. It was never a position to begin with.
I'm trying, but I can't fathom what point you think you're making comparing the living standards of plebes to the Queen of England's unless you were born to landowners during apartheid or are a current member of the Saudi royal family.
https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2010/03/gas-pump_fire_that...
https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/...
My reward is not having to stand in a long line. I avoid cashiers like the plague, except in the case where a register just happens to open up near me and I'm the first or second one on line.
Not to mention that self-checkout lets me decide what goes in what bag without having to put it on the conveyor belt in a specific order.
Self checkout is just all-around far better than cashiers.
We also have an upscale local grocery chain in town with baggers that will take your stuff out to your car if you want, but I hate it because it simply takes too long. Never go there unless I only need a few items, or something that only they carry. Their olive oil is sublime!
Even with lines, usually faster in the human-run checkout.
If you want faster lines, find one with only men in it. Men usually aren't the main grocery shopper in the family, so they're usually buying less, and usually aren't dealing with rambunctious kids, so they can focus on unloading and loading groceries. No purses either, so the credit card is usually in the machine right away.
I've pointed this out to my wife a few times and she simultaneously curses her fellow women and grudgingly accepts that I'm right and uses the logic. She's quite efficient, but I have to admit that if I saw her in line I probably wouldn't get behind her if she was smiling. (If she was wearing her resting bitch face, probably fine - typical sign of professional women who aren't inclined to spend any more time than necessary in the grocery. You find a woman in a pantsuit, she's probably faster than most men.)
I like self-checkouts at the grocery store because: (1) It is one less person touching my groceries. A cashier has touched everyone else's stuff, which has been touched by everyone else. (2) I'm at least as fast as the cashiers at the stores I go to, and generally faster. And at the stores I go to, there is almost always a open self-checkout, so I don't wait in line. (3) I want certain things in certain bags, because the bags will go into different-sized coolers in my car. (4) Some cashiers don't bag things very well - heavy things bagged with bread or chips, cans on top of easily bruised fruit, cold stuff not put together, and so on.
But not everyone is as picky as I am. :-)
To add to this: in any of the stores that have self-checkouts I walk straight past the person tasked with "checking the receipt against your (now paid-for) goods" at the exit. (looking at you, Wal-Mart).
For years, these retailers have insisted "No we're not treating you like a criminal after spending a couple hundred dollars in our store, we're just making sure the cashier rang you out properly wink wink". Well, you don't get to fire your trained cashiers and expect me to subject myself to that any more.
The prices reflect that.
In the cheaper supermarkets they’re going the other way.