this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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I think self checkouts have their place in the world, but too many suits with low brain cell counts have tried to treat them as the panacea for everything, and got dollar signs in their eyes and started salivating when they saw the prospect of firing all their cashiers. But they really don't lend themselves well to a lot of types of retail establishments.
The Walmarts near me are exclusively self checkout at most hours of the day. They still have a dozen or more normal checkout lanes, but they're almost always unmanned. Instead, they corral everyone into their "open concept" self checkout area which is a nightmare of shopping carts bumping into each other and customers with zero situational or spatial awareness stepping on each other's toes. The best part is, the machines get their knickers in a twist so often that they now have pretty much exactly as many employees standing around the self checkouts to babysit customers and unjam the machines (and watch for theft, I'm sure) as they had normal checkout cashiers in the first place.
Both of our local Home Depots have self checkout "desks," each of which is a big table with the scanner and monitor facing the customer. I suppose their self checkout theft rates have gotten so high that they've converted all of their checkouts back to cashier operated ones, but they kept the same self checkout machines... Just, the employee operates it instead of you. So we've come full circle and just reinvented the normal checkout but worse, because both you and the employee are on the same side of the same counter breathing in each other's faces.
I do like the single self checkout kiosk at the Autozone across the street, though, simply because their entire staff seems to be perpetually doing something that doesn't involve helping customers or addressing the ever-lengthening line in any capacity whatsoever. And also practically no one else has twigged to the self checkout machine at all. So when I just need a can of Brakleen or a quart of oil or whatever the fuck, I can just scan it and bounce while everyone else is standing around in line growing old.
There's a grocery store near where I live that is like this. They have a scale built in to the bagging area, and it's own idea of how much your stuff should weigh, and if you don't add items precisely when it expects you to it shouts "UNSCANNED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA" and halts until an employee assesses the situation and releases you to scan more stuff. But this happens so often that the employees don't have time to check why it's complaining, and just scan their card to shut the thing up.
I've come across the same things in most of my travels. The worst incarnation I've seen of self check outs are the camera based self checkouts I've seen at some Circle K gas stations in the South West of the US.
I think they are too far of a jump for most normal consumers to understand. They use cameras so one can place all the items on the scan surface and it tries to calculate everything at once. Most people including myself try to scan things one at a time and it doesn't work like that as it tries to do it all at once. Eventually store staff then need to come over to help every customer or they just ring up customers in a traditional way over at the main till. In these situations I don't have enough cashier training to use these machines so I avoid them.
I love tech most of the time but I don't enjoy when tech tries to leap frog over a couple of generations than the public can handle. In these situations have staff to take customer's money. Websites dedicate resources to remove barriers to buying on a website. Why are brick and mortars adding barriers with each passing year?
Nothing grinds my gears more than having to line up and wait a long time to spend my money. I think there are some focusing too closely on the numbers and not the larger picture.
I ran into one of those circle k things in Louisiana this summer. Fortunately, it wasn't self checkout. It's just how they had the cashiers checking you out, which was nice because I'd never seen such a thing and she had to explain it to me.
Kinda blew my mind when I saw it work though.
Sounds like they have worked out the bugs since I first saw them earlier this year. They weren't scanning very quickly and us customers had no idea how to even use them as they don't look like the normal self check out systems, well at least the ones I saw.
I think the tech could be really good like the Amazon stores without cashiers but I'm not sure if most at first even understand how they work and are hesitant. I knew I was the first time at a Amazon store. It took hours for the receipt to be emailed to me and I had already left the state as I went to my next stop. However it was correct. Should prove to be interesting times ahead...