Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely: 1) they have very bad interfaces 2) they don’t trust customers at all 3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and 4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)

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.