Self checkout has been rife with problems, internally and socially, but supermarkets keep pushing them. I can only conclude it is cost cutting.
The scale freaks out too often after I scan an item and put it on the bed, because the weight is slightly off for whatever reason. Then I have to stop scanning and wait for an employee to come over and scan their badge to authorize the sale.
I've gone back to just waiting in line at the standard checkout unless I have < 5 items in my cart.
It may not prevent loss but from a customer experience, a good barcode scanning gun and legible barcodes is about as friction free as it gets.
There is no scale on the Home Depot units. You can scan as fast as the scan gun accepts scans. I’ve scanned 2-3 items per second with these.
Using an I7 is a move to future proof. These units will likely be in service 10, maybe 15 years from now.
It was truly fantastic, especially since the app would notify me afterwards how long I spent at the store, and seeing that number always made me feel good. TLDR on this: my average shopping experience from the moment I entered the store to the moment I left took around 3-4 minutes, with plenty of them being under a minute long.
scan barcode, place item on plate mostly works except when barcode is crumpled or something.
without barcodes it's a more of a crapshoot. Usually more than 1/2 of my basket doesn't have a barcode (fresh produce, etc.)
Maybe the ones near me are just too sensitive to weight variations.
Oh and one of them really loves to scan a points card 2x, then try an apply the second read as a product and fail.
Every time the machine gets confused, you have to wait for an attendant. All things being equal, the cashiers are faster than self scan. If the lineup for cashiers is longer, it can still be faster, but otherwise it's slower in my experience.
It only serves the shop owner because he can have a single drone operating a few self checkout machines instead of a single line, but is that a net positive for society ? doubt, going to a supermarket is alienating enough, we didn't have to make it worse.
And of course they had to add a gate so now you can't even leave the shop without showing the receipt, when you don't find what you want to buy you have to call and wait for an adult to allow you to leave the premise like you're a fucking toddler getting out of the playground area.
This seems to be true of all businesses, and I really hate it. Flying sucks, trying to reach a human for any reason sucks, lines are huge everywhere. Life just seems a lot more stressful purely to put a few extra bucks in shareholders' pockets.
As time went on, they hired a cleaning crew to clean the floors with a machine. They'd miss things. After my time, they started having their employees cut boxes and just plop entire boxes onto store shelves, ripping the fronts off of them. I'm sure it saves a little bit of time, but you end up with a store that is a complete mess full of discarded cardboard. All of that adds up to a terrible customer experience.
One thing that really bothers me is that older stock is not brought to the front and they just push it back with the new stuff.
It's doubly frustrating because sometimes products change so you'll find what you're looking for after digging through three layers of assorted items.
I don't really blame the apathy directly, but there are doubtless solutions over the horizon.
All of these stores have budgeted in losses. My managers were almost fired for the sheer amount of negligence they gave the store when it came to ordering product. Each location has a certain cadence to them when it comes to what people are buying. My managers didn't understand it, so they ended up with 25 rolling carts packed solid with backstock (these are 8 feet tall and have two shelves), and another 20-30 pallets. If you're unfamiliar, for a normal sized grocery store, you should really only have backstock on the top sides of those carts. Instead of filling the shelves with the product they'd already bought for the store, they were buying entirely new product! I managed to wrangle the order gun from them for the grocery department and they went from losing $30K a quarter in inventory to gaining about $15K. I kept an inventory in my head of what we had in the back and made sure not to order it.
How? Because when pallets inevitably tumble in the distribution centers, the centers can't waste time sorting through inventory to determine what's damaged. So they count it as a loss and toss the product into crates so that store employees can sort through them. Good stuff goes on the shelf, damaged stuff goes in the trash. Apparently the distribution centers damaged a lot of product, lol. My managers got cash bonuses for turning things around, and I got a 6 pack of beer.
I feel like it's the case for literally every single industry, everything is getting worse for the end user point of view. Public services, jobs, hospitals, cars, new houses, online services, mobile apps...
I think globalisation allowed things to get better and cheaper up to a point and now that we can't delocalize to cheaper places we have to cut corners somewhere else and the entire stack is suffering from it
When the savings are not passed on to the customer (and they usually are not, as in this case) it's more accurate and descriptive to call it "profit maximizing."