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.

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!"

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.

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.