Same with pumping gas. Self serve is the norm in so many places.

I don't hate self checkouts, I hate the people who use self-checkouts. The mom with a cart filled with food to feed 4 people for a week, holding a baby in one hand and trying to scan and bag with the other. The guy apparently shopping for his whole apartment complex, scanning 4 items, paying for them, then scanning 6 different items, slowly working his way through an overloaded cart. The Gen-Z narrating each item into their phone for some reason, also struggling to bag items single-handed.

One of them isn't bad, but two of them will strangle the entire kiosk farm, and make it seem like everyone is a self-absorbed idiot. Never go grocery shopping on a weekend morning.

here they don't talk, don't weigh, don't time out, and can be cleared remotely when you buy age-restricted stuff and don't look like a twink. my only gripe is that some of them won't allow you to delete duplicate scans without help.

That sucks for you and your area

"Please place the item in the bagging area!!!"

I didnt realize places still did that, I haven't heard that annoying line in a few years.

where is this that you are made to stop? I just keep walking and say ‘if you wanted to see my receipt then open another cashier lane and scan items yourself. It’s my property now.”

I'm split on this. On the one hand if they didn't have self checkout, they'd need more checkout people. On the other hand, before self checkout they didn't really give a fuck if you had to wait in line (especially Walmart holy shit that was one of the biggest reasons I never went there, the fucking checkout line).

Back in the day, I shopped at the one grocery store in a bit of a food desert. They'd have all...I don't remember 10? 12?...checkout lines open all day, and you're still guaranteed to spend half an hour in line. If they could have replaced 2 checkout lines with 6 self-check kiosks, or 4 & 12, it would have helped a lot, but they hadn't been invented yet.

Now, I shop in a better neighborhood where they have 6 kiosks, one staffed checkout, and 8 lanes closed. Start with a technical solution to a real problem, and some MBA is going to come in and figure out how to turn it back into a problem.

"If" in one hand, shit in the other. Which fills up first?

Until you get stuck between Ethel (who is trying to fill out a paper check and make small talk because she's lonely) and Bob (who has no sense of personal space and smells like he doesn't know how to wipe).

Non-self-checkout sucks.

following the airline model

? Are you talking about, like, baggage prices?

Iirc, airline margins are super thin, and their customers are extremely price sensitive. In order to stay competitive, airlines need to be able to sell their customers on the lowest possible flight price, while still not losing money on every single flight. The solution is to charge the customer more directly for the scarce resources they use on a flight. Extra weight on the plane means more fuel used to reach the destination. Charging for each checked bag rewards people for travelling light, while giving everyone a free bag punishes the light traveller with higher fares. Sure, the byzantine fee structure in the booking process is annoying - but at the end of the day, flights are now extremely cheap historically speaking, and a pay-for-what-you-use model makes sense.

Of course, the actual solution is to have a better system of busses and trains. And the airline industry is always lobbying against that. But I'm not sure what the comparable action in the grocery industry would be.

Because I care about leaving, so I do everything I can to be faster. In economics, this is known as the principle-agent problem. At my local walmart, it is known as "I'm not a septuagenarian who's been hitting a vape pen for the last 5 hours."

At my local shop, some of the cashiers are extremely slow at bagging… Often I end up when bags that are way too heavy, and sometimes my bread is all smushed. I don’t fault them, I can’t imagine they’re being paid a reasonable wage.

I am absolutely faster doing it myself.

Amusing that you think the employees scanning shit aren't also the ones bagging it.

But to answer your question, I'm faster because I have an incentive to get shit scanned and bagged, vs just riding the till for 8 hours.

Hint, they're probably not. They perceive themselves as faster, but on average the employees are.

Because I worked as a package clerk as a kid, some 30 years ago. They spent a week training us to be cashiers and how to pack groceries as optimally and quickly as possible. And most places around here, the timing of the cashier is not good, especially since we usually have to pack our own groceries anyway.

Grab two items, scan only one barcode. That's all I can say. /s

They done failed.

And I guess they really care about cost too, because if they wanted it as easy as possible, it would have a treadmill and a box with a 360° barcode scanner or something and the person could be spared from the whole bagging area thing.

But yeah, that simplification and accessibility ends up being what alienates me because of how significant it is. Hopefully there are enough of us that they'll keep some cashiers around.

walmart is trying to take over the local grocery business here, so we've got big mega walmarts and small local grocery walmarts in the region. one of the megas and three or four i can't remember of the groceries in my town specifically. the mega has it figured out. like twelve self scans that can be monitored by one or two persons, all of them have hand scanners, and a few lanes with cashiers manned for the folk who are desperate for human interaction or just don't use self checkouts for reasons. the grocery, they have like three self checkouts that are not quite so good and a bunch of cashiers. maybe they are still afraid of the banana trick idunno.

Then you havent visited many, its incredibly common in all parts of the world