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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

This is why Target self check out is the best. They have confidence in their theft deterrence so their machine has a lot of leeway and yells at me less for weight issues.

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If I were confident that I wouldn't mistakenly be accused of theft, I might use self-checkout. But I'm not, so I don't.

Thats the risk right. If a cashier makes a mistake and doesn't scan and item, nothing happens. If you make the same mistake, you could be hauled off to jail, prosecuted, lose your job. Why put yourself through that risk. Its common enough, that its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.

On the flip side, you could also sue and win lots of money. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/walmart-shoplifting-la...

> its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.

It has, a couple of times (that I noticed). It's a hassle because it meant that I had to return to the store to pay for the item that was accidentally skipped.

How much do they pay you to work as a cashier there?

It's impossible to prove or falsify of course but lower cost to them from having to pay fewer cashiers in theory shows up for the customers in lower prices. The other benefit is self checkout usually crams more lanes into a smaller area so you can checkout more quickly than waiting for the 2 lanes at best I'd often see staffed outside of peak seasons before self checkout.

There has never been any instance of a company passing on cost savings to its customers unless forced by market competition.

Since WalMart and dollar stores compete in the same space to some extent they have competition. And most things you buy at target can be bought from smaller specialty stores that while not direct competition between them all you have same same variety of things available. (and different prices and quality levels so you can make your own trade offs)

So do big box retailers and grocery stores not have any competition then? I don't want to be snarky but it's not exactly a mono or even duopoly space in most towns for grocery stores and big box retailers are more often single choices in medium and smaller towns but above that you've often got a choice of big box retailers to go to too.

Source:

17 an hour except at a few high CoL stores.

The payment for me is in not having to wait in line behind 3 different people who are buying 100 items each, and are using many different coupons.

Pointing the beeping raygun is actually pretty fun

I can check out faster by rarely having to queue for the register, and I can scan things faster than a tired bored retail worker and know it's accurate. Self-checkout is also much less likely for me to catch a cold/flu/etc. as I'm neither in close proximity to the employee who was in close proximity to every other customer that week, and is touching every one of my items after touching every other customers' items. And, I can bag the goods the way I want them bagged, either for easier carrying, cold items together, or for how I want it organized to un-bag at home.

So, I consider self-checkout a real plus, not them stealing my labor. The exception is when the system is ill-designed or ill-tuned, so it halts and I'm effectively debugging it for them, except nothing is fixed b/c the employee just logs in and waves it through. With that exception, I still much prefer self-checkout.

I would pay more for self check out since I am much faster than the employees ever are and I value that more than extra cash.

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