The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending
Self-checkout is a failed experiment, and a growing number of stores are backpedaling on these cursed machines.
I really enjoy using the self checkout. I don't have to talk to anyone, it's faster than the employee scanning, and I bag my shit better and not have to worried about smashed bread or fragile items. It's not for everybody and I get it but it leave it for the people do want to use them.
Man, I love the self checkout. Also didn't they already show that rising costs everywhere WEREN'T from theft, but instead corporations artificially inflating their prices during the pandemic and then leaving it there?
Take away my self checkout, and I'll steal out of spite
It's fine if you have a few things and no one else is using them. These days, you go to the supermarket and you either wait in a long line for people to check out the stuff themselves or you wait on a long line for someone to do it for you. All they did was eliminate jobs.
"Nightmare" says you. "The only thing that makes grocery store checkout tolerable" says I. I'll wait longer for a self-checkout rather than subject myself to a human who will try to make conversation with me (which forces me to take out my earbuds), be annoyed by the fact that I want to use my own bags, underload my bags, take forever, ask me required scripted questions, and put the bread underneath a can.
Frankly this is one of the most disheartening editorials I’ve ever read on Gizmodo. “Cumbersome?” “Confusing?” “Error-prone?” “Terminator?” “Frustrations?” “Wasted time?” Just say you don’t understand how to use them and have no intention to learn. Weird flex for a tech journalist.
Also:
they actually increase labor costs thanks to employees who get taken away from their other duties
Big retailers would love to give hard working people’s jobs to robots, and in many cases they already have.
How on Earth did an editor allow an article containing both of those sentences, only two paragraphs apart, to be published?
I'm just going to copy/paste my comments from the last article 2 days ago that was saying this same thing:
This is the second third article in the last month I've found here on the Fediverse pronouncing the death of self checkout and honestly I just don't see it. Most of the stores around me have only just recently expanded their self-checkout areas and I vastly prefer using it unless I've got more than 25 items.
I'd honestly probably stop going to a store that decided to not allow me to check out on my own. Small talk and having to make a minimum wage worker suffer through it is just not something I want when I'm running to the store for a gallon of milk. I vastly prefer being able to throw in some earbuds, get my shopping, check out, and get out to having to interact with anyone while I'm just trying get my shit.
I read the last article like this while waiting in line at a grocery store that had replaced literally every human-staffed checkout (which were never open anyway) with a massive complex of self-checkouts the previous week. It made me laugh.
It’s great at small stores where you’re getting a bag or two. At large grocery stores or Walmart like stores it’s annoying. There’s never enough space to put everything, it’s easy to mix things up if you have to put things back on the cart, and it takes twice as long because you have to unload and load while scanning. A couple of the grocery stores near me have scan guns that you can use while shopping and checkout right from. Walmart has this via their app if you pay for Walmart+, but they still make you go to self checkout to finish and wait in that damn line, and they still block the exit wanting to check your receipt which can gather a line. I avoid going to Walmart for all but a couple items that are super cheap. Even then I’ve paid more elsewhere because of how terrible the checkout experience is.
I actively choose to shop at stores that have self-checkout because they have self-checkout. I don't know why the author is writing as if everybody hates them.
I agree. Boomers hate them though.
I'm a millennial, and I will abandon my basket 99% of the time when there's not a staffed cashier lane available, especially if I'm trying to buy more than 2 items.
I actually tried to use the self-checkout at the airport recently when I was buying a single bottle of water, and the cashier jumped in almost immediately to assist anyway. I forget exactly what happened, but it was definitely overly complicated compared to the staffed checkout that I used at the same shop the previous time I flew through that airport.
Depends on the store. Some of them are terrible. Tiny areas to checkout an entire grocery car sucks. Especially when it weighs as you go, then hits the weight limit and apparently just starts ignoring the requirement.
The mistake here is in assuming that it's either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.
The reality is that they're great for some applications, but suck ass for others.
Here's the deal; if it's just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it's me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it's way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won't be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.
What part about this do people not understand?
I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don't actually have to shop for families of their own.
I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can't even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There's no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we're putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs...
Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they're more fun to drive than a shopping cart.
I think the problem is that there aren't enough checkout lanes for either to be practical anymore in a supermarket with a cart full of items. But I agree, it's not an either/or thing.
Self checkout should have those mobile scanners that you can use to check items out while you're still shopping. We have them here and it is a godsend for larger purchases. You scan the items, put them in your bags and at the self checkout, you can just register your card and pay.
For me there are two things that makes me reject all self checkout. Most importantly, it is taking people's jobs and making me do the labour for no discount, companies only offer them because it pads their profits. Second, the user experience is almost universally terrible. I don't want to take the risk just to get pissed off.
I agree that it's got to be how young Lemmy skews. No one who has ever bought alcohol at a self-checkout has said, "This is so quick and convenient!"
If you read the article they are only a "nightmare" for big box retailers who are crying about theft. I love the self checkout and generally use it every time unless I have a specific reason not to
Who would have guessed that when you let the clients check themselves out they are going to miss scanning some items? It's not like they are trained or paid to be employees and of course their motivation is to scan less not more.
These corporations are saving money hand over fist by eliminating jobs, and use this as an excuse for why their profits aren't EVEN bigger! Their missed profit from an article here or there that we "forget" to scan doesn't remotely amount to their savings off the backs of the American blue-collar.
I despise Fry’s Electronics but they got manned checkout correct. A single fucking queue sharing all the resources (cashiers). Like at a bank. Having to pick & guess which mini-queue would go faster always gave me anxiety. And the “less than 15 items” queue was not always quicker.
Self checkout, in lots of cases, brings grocery checkout to a single queue, and for that reason, I welcome it. Obviously, stores that forcing people to pick self-checkout mini queues should be burned to the ground
A few stores, in my area it’s particularly clothing discounters, seem to have moved to that model, and as long as you plan your checkout areas even sort of halfway well, it’s a million times better.
And god what a sad death Fry’s had. It went from the bona fide nerd store to a disaster. Eventually the ones in Dallas-Fort Worth were just zombie husks riding out the leases and selling leftovers on consignment from the few manufacturers who couldn’t be bothered to come repossess the inventory after the store failed to pay their invoices.
Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I'd share:
The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you're gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.
A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don't think they've implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.
Just came back from a trip to Japan and that's how they do clothes. Drop everything on a basket, pay and leave. The staff is super nice but you don't have to talk to anyone at all if you don't want to
I like the idea for groceries, but how do you do produce?
I love self checkout
It's so much faster than waiting in line to pay and I don't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to
YMMV wildly. Walmart of all places generally has a good ratio of self checkout to actual cashiers, but there's this annoying trend with a lot of the local stores where they have only 4 self checkouts period but will only ever have one, maybe two other checkout lanes operating. Doesn't matter if there's a line stretching the full length of one of the grocery aisles, 2 non-self checkout lanes and that's it.
I like self checkout as a concept. I don't like the implementation or what it stands for.
That's essentially how I also feel.
Please, no. It's my jam.
Oh wait, it's for self checkout. Not self scanning.
In Sweden we have had a version of self checkout for 20 years in the largest stores, and here it seems to work fine.
Instead of having to scan everything at a station, each product is scanned with a handscanner when walking through the store, and put directly into shopping bags. Then only the payment and possibly a randomly occuring verification is left before leaving the store.
The random testing is usually just an employee scanning three to five items from your bags, and occurs like once every four months (as long as you're not actually stealing and caught).
The best thing is when you've been doing it for so long that the random checks happen, like, once a year. I actually don't think we've had one since before the pandemic.
We have that at a grocery store in my area, though you use an app on your phone to scan with the camera and the "random testing" seems to happen pretty much every time. If I had one of their scanners instead of their laggy app, I'd be much happier. (Though I guess modern handscanners are Android devices with a laser, so maybe not that much better...)
I prefer self checkout because I get to bag my groceries the way I want. It's infuriating to line up my groceries in the correct order only for the cashier/bagger to mix them all up in my bags anyway. If I insist in bagging them myself, then I have to awkwardly do it while the cashier and the next person in line watch and wait for me to finish. At least for self-checkout, there are multiple counters and no single person waiting for me.
From your comment I assume you are American, since I heard that people pack your bags at your stores. In Germany and probably most of Europe a typical checkout process works differently and probably solves the problem.
Some stores also introduced a simple "switch" that makes the products of the person after you slide into a seperate area, to save time .
Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021
Ah yes, the 'Nightmare' that a clear majority of people prefer.
This is yet more 'wahhhh shoplifting' bullshit from companies whose interests are directly opposed to the interests of their customers.
People want self checkout to be less shit, which it easily could be. In Australia I didn't even have to put things in the bagging area, just scan them. It made the whole process so much smoother.
See, that sort of thing is why I hate supermarket self-checkout. Other places it can be fine, but unless I'm doing the old 'ten items or less' thing and it's an off-peak time, there's a big line at the self-checkout. It's a toss-up whether self-checkout or going to one of the two checkout lanes they have open with people on them is faster at this point, which basically means I'm subsidizing the company by doing what an employee could do more efficiently and everything would be a lot faster if they just opened up more human lanes.
Same when I was living in Spain. It was so quick and easy, I almost never needed assistance. There was a noticeable difference when ingot back to the States.
The BBC article that this article is a bizarre summary of is far better (the Gizmodo article even links directly to the BBC article). It give a far better overview of the issues; the main crux is they cost most than anticipated through both theft and cost of the machines themselves. The consumer's disliking it is a less point and more naunced essentially "customer's want the technology to work but it isn't" which is also what you've said.
Personally I preferred the self checkouts because I don't want to interact with someone, but th they fail so much (because of the weighing which is to stop me being a supposed thieving scumbag, not to benefit me) and you end up standing around waving at a random stranger to come and fix the machine awkwardly while a massive queue waits impatiently for a machine. I've recently switched back to the manned checkouts for bigger shopping trips.
They expect me to do free labor for a huge evil corporation, but give me a scanner far worse than they give their paid employees, which scolds me every 10 seconds for not having enough space to put things.
They expect me to do free labor
I'm pretty sure people were complaining about this when supermarkets replaced greengrocers. "What do you mean I can't just hand a list to the clerk and have him package up my groceries? They expect me to do free labor?" But we kept it around because the convenience was worth it.
for a huge evil corporation,
The smaller evil corporations use them too.
but give me a scanner far worse than they give their paid employees,
I don't know where you're going, but at the grocery stores I go to (and the one I used to work at) the scanner is literally the same unit as on the checkout the human is operating because that way it's easier and cheaper to keep parts on hand to fix them.
which scolds me every 10 seconds for not having enough space to put things.
HONESTLY this is like the ONLY JOKE people have about self-checkouts. You could joke about the thing always being out of bags, or having trouble when you're trying to buy alcohol, or flagging down an attendant when the thing doesn't have a barcode, and yet everyone chooses "unexpected item in the bagging area," which hasn't been a problem for people who actually know how to use the thing for a decade or more? Why is this the mindvirus that has infiltrated everyone and not, like, social equity?
I simply won't use them if there is cashier available.
I'm not your fucking employee & prices never once came down due to their prevalence.
Still, 60% of consumers said they prefer self-checkout as of 2021
And it's fucking weird how vocal and entitled some of the 35% are in wanting the majority's preference to go away because they don't like it.
AGREED. Why does the "unexpected item in the bagging area" joke still get a laugh? My 9-year-old doesn't remember a time when that was a legitimate problem.
Meijer is the only one that has their self checkout figured out. 2 different sections in my store with 10-12 checkout stations. So a minimum of 20 self check out stations open and they’re always open and working. They never give me the errors like Walmart and Kroger.
Walmart might have 20 checkouts as well but half aren’t working or open plus there’s 3x the people at Walmart so there’s usually a 15 minute wait.
Kroger is the worst with the errors. They might have 20 checkout stations but 5 might be open.
Going to Walmart or Kroger is always a hassle. I avoid those 2 unless I need one or two items.
Aldis and Meijer are my go to.
Wait...ok, so I haven't really shopped anywhere but Meijer or (to a lesser extent) Kroger for about a decade. Is this why I haven't seen the problems with things like "unexpected item" and such? That could make a lot of sense. It's been driving me crazy seeing stories like this when the worst experience I have with self checkout is when the camera thinks I'm stealing something because I have, like, a Wendy's cup.
Unfortunately, Kroger and Walmart are a 5-minute drive for us and Meijer would be a 30-minute drive, so we're sort of stuck with Kroger and Walmart.
Our Meijer is quite a bit further away too. If we’re out in the area already we’ll stop by and do a bigger trip. I could put up with the nonsense at Kroger if their damn prices weren’t so ridiculous. Kroger is by far the closest but they’re by far the most expensive for me anyway
This must be location dependent (and time). I have multiple Walmart and grocery store chains nearby, and the worst I ever see is one Walmart may sometimes have a line at self checkout... But I usually know by how full the parking lot is.
One grocery store never has a line, one grocery store does occasionally at rush hour (both the same chain, about 5 miles apart).
The article doesn't match the headline very well. Maybe they aren't going to expand as much but they mostly aren't going away either.
The article also isn't very good, and may as well be an editorial.
I also don't consider them a "nightmare", so that sounds fine to me.
It is GREAT as an option but not as the primary. I love it for small trips for a small number of things .
However for any medium to large shopping trip I would prefer to have someone there scanning while I unload and load.
I use self-checkout as my primary, including for produce, when shopping for a family of six. It's always faster, even though I'm doing all the work.
I am much more comfortable using self checkout
Well if you really want me to buy even more shit online (let's be real, from Amazon) this is a good way to do it.
At best I don't like small talk or dealing with other people through meaningless interactions. At worst I might have minor social anxiety. I hugely prefer to just walk into a shop, grab what I need, check myself out, and leave.
At this point I'm also just as fast (if not faster) than the paid cashiers and baggers (who need and deserve chairs or stools by the way).
So yeah, if self checkout goes away, I'm buying as much stuff online as possible and generally making fewer trips to the store.
I get it, I do. I've been a migrant in a place with a language barrier on top of sharing that general feeling, so... yeah, sure. In principle.
But the times I've used it it's twice the anxiety, in that I keep fearing I'll mess up and need help, which is orders of magnitude worse than having to go through the register. Just the potential of issues is enough to deter me, but the times I've had the scales mess up or the payment method not go through were excruciating.
I honestly would like a system where I just buy all my stuff online and pick it up or it's dropped off. I buy the same shit.
It would be more practical to have an enormous Amazon style warehouse with all the food items.
Then we pick our food orders and a delivery comes out. Maybe with the post service or bin service.
Whoever is already driving around to every single house.
Me having to drive fo supermarket isn't great anyway. Just clogs the roads.
Drone delivery system. Sign me up
The idea that whoever is already driving around could handle the increased load is laughably naive. You cannot increase load without increasing capacity.
Also, I've used my local chain's version of this. It's okay for prepackaged stuff but absolutely awful for fresh produce. They also regularly botch orders, because, well, the pickers aren't paid a livable wage and their metrics are all about quantity not quality.
Boomer AI wrote the title.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Don’t ring the funeral bells just yet, but the self-checkout kiosk horror show could be nearing its end.
Stores across the country are reversing course on the machines, and consensus is growing among analysts and insiders that self-checkout has been a disaster for consumers and retailers alike, according to a new report in the BBC.
Dollar General made enormous bets on self checkout tech in 2022, but it recently announced the project flopped.
Shoppers are reportedly 21 times more likely to sneak items past machines than human cashiers, but consumers also constantly steal unintentionally because the self-checkout process can be so cumbersome.
Not only do self-checkout machines double theft rates, they actually increase labor costs thanks to employees who get taken away from their other duties to help customers deal with the confusing and error prone kiosks.
But a growing number of consumers are souring on self-checkout, thanks to endless frustrations, accusations of theft, and wasted time.
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