- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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.
All they did was eliminate jobs
That’s awesome. Jobs suck. Nobody likes jobs. We should automate even more things so people don’t have to do work.
That’s great once we’ve got a UBI or can ditch capitalism entirely, but until then it just means fewer jobs for those that need them.
I agree with you in principle, but we still have money and bills to deal with. Which also suck, but we still need money for the bills and the nice things we want in life. So we need jobs. Unfortunately.
Humans survived for millions of years without jobs. I am doubtful that we actually need them.
“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.
Yeah, aside from the factual inaccuracies and the axe-grinding so obvious that it may as well be classified as an op-ed, it’s so smugly sanctimonious.
“67% of people prefer self-checkout, but based on no data, that’s probably changing, because we think it should and probably a lot of people are upset about the stealing that isn’t really happening!”
Don’t forget the part about how “67% of people prefer this thing, but all companies are quitting that thing because of a lie they cooked up to convince people to accept price gouging.”
The only people upset about the “stealing” are the companies that let it happen.
Said this the other day - 30 years ago I worked retail, our security would detain you in a secure office with cameras, and let the police handle you.
Every security shift had at least one cop working security as a second job, or were retired cops.
These companies stopped detaining shoplifters because their insurance gave them a deal not to. Well, then they don’t get to complain about theft.
Self-checkout likely has little bearing, since the systems use scales, have an attendant watching, and use cameras on your face and the checkout itself.
I smell a lot of bullshit. There’s no way the vendors of these systems didn’t address all this stuff before deploying them - otherwise they could be held contractually liable for failures. No way vendor security leadership, nor the grocery chain security leadership let these systems go out without addressing these concerns.
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.
The author of this article is speaking out of both sides of their mouth, though. The context of the first statement is “they want to reduce staff and it’s not even working!” and the context of the second statement is “they want to reduce staff and in many cases it’s working!”
If the author intended to say what you said, they should’ve said that instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it’s a bad thing for labor, taking away human jobs, or it’s a bad thing for companies, requiring more workers to do the same job. Or it’s a bad thing for consumers, because companies should need more workers but aren’t. But the author needs to make one of those points, not simply suggest all three at once.
I think the article is bad because it’s not actually written to convince someone who likes self checkout, it’s written for people who already agree with the author that self checkout is bad. But the problems aren’t with the self checkout, it’s corporate greed. I think there’s a compelling argument that all three points can be true at the same time (due to the staffing cuts that self checkout was used as an excuse for but were actually across all departments), but the author doesn’t make a compelling argument for any of them.
Regrettably, I work big box retail. What you don’t see is the stock rooms. There’s stuff piling up back there that’s out of stock on the sales floor but the store hours have been cut so severely that there’s nobody to pull them from the stock room and get them on shelves, and the too few people who are actually scheduled to do that are instead working on the check lanes because corporate has cut staffing there too and that’s an immediate fire to put out rather than a slow burn. And that causes the store to have empty shelves which ultimately leads to less sales because you can’t find what you’re looking for - and good luck finding someone to go check the back that’s not running around like a chicken on fire because they’re on a stupid short time limit grabbing an order for pick up (and that person is probably also supposed to be stocking the floor, and they’re slower than someone who does it all the time, not to mention the wasted labor hours of management calling for backup that either doesn’t exist or isn’t on walkie). And understaffing is an awful experience for employees too, so our wages are higher than fast food because when the store does want to replace someone they can’t because the job sucks, which leads to more understaffing… if someone brought in a blank stack of union cards tomorrow with the promise of adequate staffing, my store would be unionized by next week (and probably closed by next month…). And if you could figure out where I work, that chain would probably go out of business because of how awful it ultimately is for the end consumer, but you can’t because basically all of retail in the US is in this same death spiral that ends either with unionization or another company being formed that doesn’t actively suck this bad. None of this actually has anything to do with self checkout, however, that was just one of the excuses these companies used to cut way too much staff, and an excuse the writer can use to weasel his way out of saying the actual reasons why retail sucks - decades of anti labor practices and unfettered capitalist greed.
Yeah, and see…it’s the fact that the author is doing the grocery stores’ PR spin for them that makes me most frustrated. Like, they want everyone to think that it’s this completely insurmountable problem caused by external factors, so they have to close self checkouts; but this would all be eminently solvable with hiring.
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.
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
secondthird 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 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 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.
Legally they can’t stop you, but they are doing it anyway. I haven’t tried ignoring them.
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.
Boomers are far from the only ones who dislike self-checkouts.
Nah, they are boomers too. Boomer is a state of mind.
Calling everything you don’t agree with to be “boomers” is also a state of mind.
It is a great way to hand wave away anything you, personally, don’t agree with. Which ironically is usually seen as “Boomer behaviour”.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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!”
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.
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’m not making a joke.
It’s a terrible design and these should all be scrapped until they make ones that don’t suck.
I haven’t had trouble with this or seen anyone who has in probably a decade. They already have made ones that don’t suck. (As much, to be fair)
Now you’re just making shit up.
Very much not. I’ve shopped biweekly since around the beginning of the pandemic, and the trouble I have is when the overhead camera thinks I’m stealing, like, a fast food soft drink I have in my cart or something. I haven’t heard “unexpected item in the bagging area” or anything like it for years, literally. And I only have to wait for a person in the case of the aforementioned camera debacles, or if I’m buying alcohol.
I hear it happen to a stranger almost every time at Lucky or Safeway.
Happens to me if I try to scan even half as fast as they do at the real checkout scanners.
See my comment here for my recent revelation. In short: the problem isn’t with self checkouts, it’s that the stores you’re going to aren’t maintaining them well.
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.
- You put your stuff on a large transport band, emptying your cart (probably have those as well)
- When you’re up you move your cart at the large area after the cashier
- The cashier registers everything and pushes it to you into that big area
- You put everything in your bags while they are working
- Cashier finishes, you make your payment
- You pack the last 3 items that are remaining
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.
You think they’re going to spend more money on the biggest money sink in a business, humans? They’ll do away with self checkout and not increase their cashier count, maybe even decrease it, because if they get rid it of it, it’s a cost saving move, not a customer satisfaction one.
I’m sure you’re right. Anything to save money and increase revenue.
You’re always subsidizing a company by shopping there though right?
I usually find that the self checkout line moves faster, but choosing a line had always been a guessing game.
I need to buy groceries.
I don’t need to support replacing humans with shitty robots.
If you want to talk about shitty robots, grocery stores have shitty robots. The thing can only wander around and look for spills and stuff, and then it just beeps and an employee has to come clean it up.
Basically they automated the assistant manager position.
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.
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.
