Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage.
Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised.
I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers.
It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
Drives me crazy watching people ahead of me try to do this. If the transaction hasn't been completed what precisely do they or indeed you think you are paying for again like handing the store an electronic blank check? I agree to pay...whatever the total ends up being!
Yeah, it's "trusting" the store, but it has never resulted in unwanted charges. I do it for the person in line behind me. I can afford it, if there was to be an issue, and the service desk is about ten feet away.
In Japan, they make a ceremony of giving you your goods before accepting payment.
The only exception is that with some hardware/software is that within a narrow window it may be possible to go back and make a change after putting the pinpad in payment mode.
Remember the pinpad is a second computer not a peripheral.
I have never in decades of paying for things ever seen a checkout where you can tap right away.
The US has systems that make it easy to take the money away.
Giving it back...'nother story...
If you have no transaction what are you paying for
If the payment screen is up as soon as the first item is added how would you show any other screens e.g. loyalty number, donation prompts, ads and other BS.
If the customer taps then verbally says they would like to use a different card or pay cash how would that be implemented? The exact total will be oft unknown until the transaction is fully rung up and people make late transaction changes literally all the time.
People insert cards early all the time which is fine because it sits there doing nothing until the end they also tap early which does nothing but because they are extra stupid this doesn't hurt much
They don't tap long enough close enough or in the right place on their card or on the machine so to them thry are already just molesting the machine repeatedly with the card until it beeps anyway.
I can scan the phone (or a card), while the transaction is still in progress. It doesn't get charged, until the end, but it's entirely possible to scan it early.
Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
The reason that I insist on using the manned lanes, has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the automated process (I know that it may seem that way, with my gray pompadour, but I'm actually fairly comfortable with tech). It's just because I know that the reason the store uses them, is to fire cashiers, and it's sort of a "stay with them until the end" kind of thing, in my mind.
Like I said, not really the way people think, these days. We tend to be extremely selfish. I participate in an organization that encourages us to adopt a mindset that takes other peoples' existence into account. It's really just symbolic, I know, but I do it for myself; not for others. I feel that symbols are important.
I don't understand why people do this.
The ones that truly suck (in my area) are the CVS ones. They have a glass jaw, and it's quite easy to make a mistake that requires the exasperated attendant to come over, and get it unstuck.
That has nothing at all to do with the person using the machine, and everything to do with the geeks that wrote the software. Whenever I see someone (regardless of their age or "digital native" status) struggling with tech, I blame the designers; not the user.
In my experience, if we want to design stuff to be used by humans, then it starts with getting comfortable with our own humanity. Empathy is useful, when designing stuff.
If we don't like people, then we're unlikely to design stuff that people like to use.
For those who might be curious, The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, is an excellent book for getting in touch with empathetic design.
It really depends on what we are designing, and who we are designing for.
> little to do with liking others
Sounds pretty bleak. I've come to understand what a profound disadvantage misanthropy is.
Software that is "correct," but not something that people "like" using. A "necessary evil."
Heck, I've written it myself. I have two shipping apps that basically do the same type of thing; but one is an app that I use, regularly, and the other, is to server those that want a different approach. That one is actually a lot more "powerful" than the one I use.
It's also a lot less popular. It's 100% "correct," and dead as a doornail.
Don Norman wrote a sequel to DOET, called Emotional Design, where he talks about this kind of thing.
Human emotions can't really be measured, and HN is full of "Inspector 34" types. They just can't grok emotions.
Ah, well... more for me to play with...
Have a great day!
Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
[0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
(I find ways to make it worth my while..)
If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.
and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.
One outcome I can see though, is that if enough is skimmed off the top through self-checkout, then maybe the beancounters will realize that self-checkout isn't as 'efficient' as they thought, and will reinstitute human checkers.
Just like how we hope that the hotel that laid off the doorman eventually realizes their mistake and hires him back.
Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts.
Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep. In the meanwhile, life is to be enjoyed.
Regarding supermarkets I guess I'm lucky then, because I have supermarkets nearby focusing on customer service with many cashiers. And they are absolutely ten times faster at scanning my groceries than I would be, since it's their job and they do it all day. Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
So to me as a customer it's quicker, more pleasant, and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers. That's something I'm very glad to support with my grocery buying buck. Instead of having that money go to pay for the groceries that other people steal in the self checkout.
I already look forward to that a lot more than most people think I should.
> life is to be enjoyed.
I never really figured out how to do that reliably.
> Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
If they have baggers, that would be a genuine advantage. I've literally only seen them in films though (unless you want to count really tiny stores where the cashier will also bag for you).
As things are though, I have to bag myself, and that's the main bottleneck, so even if the cashier can scan more quickly than me, that doesn't actually make the whole process go any faster. Scanning at the self-checkout is marginally slower than just bagging, but in my case at least, it's usually just a case of swiping an item past the scanner, hearing the beep, and putting it a bag. Some items have barcodes in weird places, but if they're items you frequently buy, you quickly figure that out.
> and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers.
I'm not sure this really should be as much of an advantage as it might be. Sure, them bagging groceries is better than nothing, but the fact that the alternative is nothing is what should be fixed in that case, rather than having them do jobs that are mindless busywork, or just barely above that (not that I have anything against them. If you want to be a bagger, go for it, good for you, but I'd quickly become even more suicidal than I already am). Sadly, we're apparently not quite ready to have that conversation yet.
The baggers in my local supermarket are high schoolers getting some extra money, while probably studying. It's good for them to learn the basics of what it means to do a job, and be exposed to other people in the community except for psychotic screeching teachers or TikTok brain rot. It's still good that these jobs exist, even if grown ups are doing them. It might be somebody who is between other stuff, or needs some extra cash because of changes in life situation, or for some reason isn't at the moment capable to do another job.
More jobs are always more better, no matter what the jobs are, because it puts firm upwards pressure on other salaries. Bagging groceries is an easy job, so it pressures every other job which is worse to pay better. Otherwise your potential employee will say "I'll just bag groceries instead, if you don't pay me better".
Yeah. It's just the place you spend 8 hours every day.
Imagine the job instead was digging holes (not for any actual purpose. Just digging and filling in holes so that people could 'have a job'). Would you be saying the same things?
Bagging is at least an actual service, but it's not far away in my mind.
By the way: If you'd like some cheering up, shoot me an e-mail (from my profile). Things don't have to be hard, and most of the times solutions to our problems is much easier than they seem, but gets ignored because we think it has to be hard.
How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
> It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway
I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.
Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.