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.
It literally ends with the sentence, "It turns out human beings might still have something to offer." I hated the entire article.
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?
They’re correct though? Retailers expected them to be able to get rid of employees, but they didn’t and in fact increased the cost of employees.
Lol, not by my observation.
Every store in my city that installed these systems reduced checkout staff by 75-90% (in the checkout lanes). Walmart, grocery stores, you name it. I bet if we pulled some stats we'd see a major drop in hours, which means a huge drop in insurance, taxes, HR overhead, etc, etc. No matter how much labor rates went up (they didn't), those cost reductions are massive in comparison.
Just consider their software contracts - systems are often licensed/supported at rates determined by scale: transactions per minute, # of objects being stored, etc. If there's an HR system that handles hours, scheduling, pay, etc, etc, they likely pay annually for a system scaled to employee count (it's BS, but it's a metric companies use). Drop your employees by 75%, and on support contract renewal you can drop to a lower tier support. Source: I've been responsible for doing just this - reducing footprint so we can reduce support contract costs. I've save my company somewhere between $70 and $90 mil on one system this way. Not for HR, but it doesn't matter, this is often how support contracts are done in the enterprise world.
I have two grocery stores that had 6 lanes staffed at busy times. Since they installed self checkout, there are two... TWO checkout staff. That's a ~~33%~~ 66% reduction during rush hour. And for off hours they'd have 2, maybe 3. That's now 1 or two. That's 50% or 66% reduction, depending.
It's not like grocery checkout attendants do much more than that - shelves are stocked by the vendors themselves, maintenance by others (Walmart is retail, so different).
I never see more than 2 or 3 checkout attendants these days, some stores have even removed the "extra" checkout lanes, so they couldn't even bring people back in if they wanted to.
And let's not get started on other retail chains, which can be even worse.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't think they can make you do the receipt check at the door if they aren't a membership club... I could be mistaken on that, but I've never submitted to that outside of Sam's and Costco since that's part of the agreement for membership
Legally they can’t stop you, but they are doing it anyway. I haven’t tried ignoring them.
Legally they can't force you to show your receipt. But refusing to show it could constitute probable cause for employees to detain you while they sort things out(shopkeeper's privilege). Detaining you could constitute false imprisonment, though Colorado courts recently ruled Walmart not liable in that regard. The store could also choose to ban you.
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
Please, no. It's my jam.
Oh wait, it's for self checkout. Not self scanning.
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.
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 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
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
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.
Why? I find them much easier and faster, especially if I'd be bagging things myself.
Sure, the cashier can scan things more quickly than me sometimes, but compared to the extra waiting (due to self-checkout having a single line for all registers), it ends up being slower with the cashier.
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.
It's like with DRM. More anti-theft stuff just makes it harder for paying customers.
Annoys the paying customers, and the thieves will find a way to circumvent it in 5 minutes of playing with it, lol
More or less yea.
I like self checkout as a concept. I don't like the implementation or what it stands for.
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.
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 am much more comfortable using self checkout
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.
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.
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.
The original article contains 441 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
