Many grocery stores have scales in the self-checkout bagging area. If you scan a can of soup, you're going to take that can, put it on the bag scale but not into a bag, scan your other items, put them onto the bag scale but not a bag, and then take all of your loose items and put them one by one into your cart? How is that efficient?

That's literally what you had to do in Germany in Lidl - even with a cashier there wasn't even room enough to bag it there at the till and the whole thing was even shaped so that you could park your trolley in such a position that the cashier would directly put things into your trolley.

Not only that but everybody (including other customers) clearly expected you to operate within that system (for example, moving your trolley in a timelly fashion to the right "docking" spot to recieve the scanned products) and, if you paid with cash, get the change, free the area near the till and do the whole "store the change properly in your wallet" elsewhere were you weren't wasting other people's time.

You had an area you could go to and bag your stuff or you could take to trolley to your car and transfer the goods to the trunk there (in my case, this being Berlin, I had a bicycle with removeable cargo bags, so took the trolley there and then at home just unhooked the bags and carried them upstairs to my appartment).

I've never seen that anywhere else here in Europe, even in other Lidl stores (I'm now in Portugal and after Germany it's all frustratingly slow and inneficient). I suppose a certain cultural mindset is probably required for people to naturally fit into such a system (were if everybody does their bit, everybody gets to pay and GTFO much faster).

Oh, and there were no self-checkouts there and the cashiers were amazingly fast, which makes all sense: self-checkout is really just using amateur and untrained - thus slow and inneficient - "cashiers", so self-checkout tills would probably use more space and make the thing go slower.