Hard times

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FLEX TAPE MOMENT

I'm a grocery store worker and I'd rather just lower our stock count by 1 than have to go stand lookout at the exits of the store. Big chain supermarkets budget for theft and it doesn't affect the workers.

I understand the whole "why should I pay for things when they don't" dilemma but people stealing non-essentials likely suffer in other ways

I've got news for you: they increase prices regardless of theft.

I’ll copy the response I used when someone else responded the same way:

Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.

Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.

Respectfully stfu and leave that on reddit

Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.

Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.

Apartheid apologist strikes again. Do you believe you're a good person mate?

Fuck the downvoters. This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here. Might go back to Reddit.

I once was that guy who took a cartful of groceries to the self-checkout. The goddamn thing had to call staff no less than 6 times because we couldn't fit everything on that damn scale.

I'm not doing that again.

Here's the thing most people don't understand. It's possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I'm out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.

Here's the thing most people don't understand. It's possible to bag your stuff elsewhere. You can scan your stuff, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their stuff at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart to self checkout, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I'm out the door before Nancy and her 10 items. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your stuff. If everyone just took their stuff to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their stuff, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.

Here's the thing most people don't understand. It's possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I'm out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.

Here's the thing most people don't understand. It's possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I'm out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.

Yeah I really hate it when they give you self checkout but make everything function way way worse than what the cashier uses. I've never even considered shoplifting before but I've come pretty close on machines that refuse to scan because they're stuck on something 5 items ago when I'm moving quickly. Especially if it still beeps when I scan new items but refuses to actually scan it because it's hung up on something that it was slow to get the weight of -- really throws me off. It's not my job to baby your machine for you. I'm not getting paid for it. Just let me scan my shit and go.

They are giving you a discount already by not increasing prices.

Ha, yeah. I like it when I set off the alarms at stores and then ask, you want to look at my stuff? They just wave and say, naw, your good. Couldn't get caught if I tried.

Yeah that's not what I do. I just get tagged by racist people apparently

That sounds absurd. There is easily 5000 regular shoppers in a grocery store. Plus people buying there irregularly. They would need to reliably identify every single one of them, with face recognition only having 80-90% accuracy. and If we talk 5$ missacounted per shoppinge once a week that is 4 years of shopping.

The amount of data needed to be stored and analysed for that is insane.

And then we are not even at the point, where they can prove theft on every single instance, because they need to prove that the system did not malfunction, or a simple user error occured.

I call bullshit on that.

Are you being sarcastic? There is 1 person manning 10 checkouts and cameras that aren't monitored. As someone who worked in the Front End of a grocery store for many years, I can tell you that they don't have the resources to keep track of 99% of theft.

I’m so far below $1k that it isn’t a worry, it’s only small dollar items. That and they aren’t catching me every time, even with all the cameras. Even if they did know every single time I “missed” an item at self check out, I’d be surprised if I’d taken more than $100 of food by now. That and they’d have a hard time proving it was intentional every time and not a simple mistake.

Nah, this is Lemmy

r/lostredditors

I've had people try to slip me deals when an error occurs but I'm so genuinely in the moment I can't see it. Leads to awkward exchanges where they're trying to push free food on me and I'm just like "nah just a mistake bruh here ya go!"

And then facepalm 10 minutes later when the situation catches up.

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It might be regional. Where I live they just skip the whole call the manager thing and the manager is the one monitoring the self checkout line and is the one you go to to ask for help. Thankfully I don't buy much of anything that'd be 21+ so I don't mind just going to the one open cash register to do that there.

It also depends on the system it's using, as well as what you're buying.

If you're buying anything thay requires ID, or requires being brought in from the back (a fridge, for example), or if you just have a ton of stuff, yeah, don't bother with self-checkout. But if you're just going in to buy a phone cord or a soda, yeah, sure.

And there are some god-awful self-checkout OSes that scream at you to PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA, or HAVE YOU SCANNED YOUR FREQUENT SHOPPER CARD? and those can piss off and die. But there's some that don't do that, and are set up to actually be user-friendly!

The Home Depot near me somewhat recently changed out their self-checkout machines with UI and UX in mind, and holy shit, it makes so much of a difference. The screen is very uncluttered, high contrast colors are nice for drawing attention to the usual buttons to push, and the buttons per screen (scanning > payment type) change the side of the screen the buttons are on so if you just spam-tap, you won't accidentally hit the wrong button.

Produce all have a code you can just type in instead of having to search. It's right on the sticker for things that have stickers, for things like sweet potatoes you have to look at the price sign and it will have the code on it, then just write it on the bag with a sharpie.

If you do regular shopping self checkout isn't really the place for that it's more useful for few items

All the self-checkouts in Dutch supermarkets have handheld barcode scanners you take into the store with you, and it's GREAT.

Unexpected item in bagging area!!!

When do we get the employee discount for doing their work?

Kinda the opposite for me really the space is always open and is quicker then waiting in line for the cashier

That's not self-checkout's fault. I don't hate self-checkout. I hate idiots.

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"I'm not good at learning new things and this is kind of like learning a new job just to shop here, haha"

Her link works for me, yours doesn't.

It's absolutelly possible to just go through the thing as if the cashier was an automaton, in which case it's still faster than self-checkout.

Personally I like the challenge of getting a laugh out of a tired cashier (especially if it's a pretty woman), but nobody forces you to engage that person beyond a purelly utilitarian acting your side of the process you're part of whilst the cashier acts theirs as if you were both machines.

It's a weird problem to have not to be able to stand facing another human who doesn't really care about you enough (or has the time) to engage in small tall, whilst being fine with standing facing a machine with particularly unappealing software which cares not at all for you and won't engage in small talk ever, but I suppose if using the machine solves your discomfort with machine-like human-action then it's a valid reason.

Well, as I've wrote somewhere else, I have some minor expertise in evaluating business processes because of my job and I lived in London (UK) during the time when the largest supermarkt chains really started pushing self-checkout (the retail market is quite concentrated there)

I've also seen some attempts at that done were I am now, Portugal, in some supermarkets as well as how cashier operation can be done extremelly efficiently at the Lidl supermarket I used to shop in when living in Berlin.

From my observation when they install self-checkouts the supermarkets will not only reduce the numbers of manned tills but seem to purposefully reduce the number of people manning the available tills so as to push people to use self-checkout, and this happenned both in that transition in the UK and here in Portugal for the few supermarkets trying that, all noticeable because checkout via manned tills becomes slower when self-checkout is introduced compared to before that, something which logically does not make much sense without the "pushing people to use self-checkout" motivation (logically, with more tills in total waiting times at any till, manned or not, would become shorter, not longer).

Also there's an interesting psychological effect applicable here which is that time passing when waiting feels a lot longer than time passing when busy (such as when doing the actual self-checkout), which in this situation means that even if the total time from queuing to leaving is longer because it takes you longer to scan all articles and pay, it can feel shorter if the waiting time is shorter.

(A interesting "sciency" experiement here is to actually measure it with a chronometer)

So yeah, if you look at it from an "in the moment" and not at all systemic point of view, it does seem that when there are self-checkouts they're faster than manned tills, both because you're not really counting operating-time like you count waiting time and because the supermarkets very purposefully underman their tills to push people into self-checkout, probably because their long-term objective is to cut down on manpower hence boost profits (which is also why they won't give you a discount for using self-checkout as that would go against the whole profit-enhancing motivation).

You obviously never been to a German grocery store. Those cashiers are intimidating!