Retailers in Europe, like Booths supermarkets, and the United States, like Walmart, are pulling back on having self-checkout in light of complaints and shoplifting.
I avoid self-checkout as often as possible. In my mind, that’s taking a job away from a physical person, it’s a cost-savings for the retailer, but customers never see any benefit from it. I choose the person checkout everytime as my little bit of solidarity with my fellow humans.
I'm the opposite. I use self-checkout as often as possible, because it means I have to interact with as few people as possible. I loathe people being forced to ask me how I'm doing, because we both know they don't care. Or when they ask "Did you find everything?"- does it fucking matter? Either I did, which is why I'm checking out, or I didn't, in which case it doesn't fucking matter because thanks to their shitty implementation of JIT their stock has been converted from on-prem inventory to rolling warehouse deliveries every single day. Just let me get what I want and get out.
I have never seen cashiers ask such things. At most they'd ask whether I have the discount card or if I want one of the featured discounted items. Usually I don't miss anything when wearing headphones.
I see massive benefits from being able to get out of the store quickly when I am done instead of getting stuck behind some old person with a ton of coupons to argue about.
It helps that they sorted out the oversensitive weight checking and still staff a couple of lanes when it is busy so people have a choice.
Self checkout is often not the quick option for me. Accidental double scans, coupons, random tests all requiring assistance who is already occupied make waiting behind an old person a more consistent experience.
you can be annoyed about something someone is doing without making some personal judgement about that someone
if my train is late because the train driver had a heart attack im aware that its not the drivers fault, but im still not going to be thrilled about my luck
Have you considered switching to pickup when you can? pick what you want from the comfort of your home, drive to the store at the designated time, an employee has picked all your goods and it is brought out to you. Same price for you, more labor for the company to pay for.
If you’re just ordering non perishable items that’s fine. Otherwise you might get nearly-expired items, over-ripe produce, etc. It’s all up to the whim of the employee, and they may be having a bad day…
I make sure that I am on very good terms with them. I help them get the groceries into the car and I joke around with them. It helps that I am sincere and they know that.
I really don’t like doing pickup for most trips because I care about the quality and ripeness of my produce and also purposefully select the furthest away expiry dates for certain things I go through slowly, it becomes a lot to ask someone else to do if there are 20 comment lines for these little details, but if I don’t it just results in wasted food and money :/