I'm autistic so I really like self checkout but they've definitely gotten shittier over time. Many of the problems with them are really just the store itself being shitty and not self checkout.

I prefer self-checkout. I'm fast and I don't really like small talk.

What really sucks is that modern self-checkout requires so much babysitting and cashier assistance, because they assume everyone is a criminal. The supermarket has become the panopticon.

shop at aldi. the prices are better, a lot of the food is better, and you don’t give your money to kroger.

we switched to aldi and our grocery bill went down by 1/3 immediately. kroger sucks.

the Kroger corporation

There was your mistake. Kroger is a nightmare from dystopian hell.

It used to be a friendly place but no, that wasn't enough money for them.

My local grocer is part of a small chain (3 locations, all in the same county). I know the owner by name, he's a regular at my restaurant. They don't have any self checkouts, just an express checkout and then 5 normal ones. It works out great. They've also got a State Store inside (where I live, only the State government is allowed to sell bottled spirits), which is a huge bonus. I went there yesterday since my vodka stash was running dry, and I needed to stock up on trash stickers for Spring cleaning. I picked up some cheese and buns while I was there. Had a chat with the butcher, small talk with the cashier, helped an old lady load her groceries into her car. It was a genuinely enjoyable, and very human, experience.

Contrast with the Walmart supercenter. They have 50 self checkouts, and just one manned register, which is only really used to buy age restricted products like cigarettes. I don't physically go there anymore because the checkout experience is damn near torture. It feels sterile, more like a warehouse than a grocery store. If I need something from Wally World, I get it delivered to my door, usually in an hour or less.

I like the ones where you scan the item while putting it into your cart much more. I can sort everything into my reusable bags right away. No needless shifting from the shelf to the cart to the cashier to the bag to the cart into the better bags in my car.

Only easier thing is when we order online and they put everything into sturdy baskets you can borrow instead of bags.

One of my pet peeves has been stores blocking off half the self checkout except when there's high volume of customers. I didn't need to be waiting in line. You have perfectly fine self checkouts there, but no, I have to wait, and possibly walk to the other side of the store for no good reason.

I like self checkouts but I'm not in the US so ours aren't garbage.

The only stupid thing I've seen is a certain hardware store where the self checkouts are closed 90% of the time, and there are only two normal checkouts, so you often have to wait in a huge line while the self checkouts just sit there, chained off and doing nothing. It's ridiculous.

All the criticisms of self checkout are valid. Can't argue against them.

However I've been kind of a fan since they first came out. Simply because I don't have to make smalltalk with a cashier.

I have to to deal with customers all day at work. Shopping is a chore I want to be over with without having to further drain my limited extroversion tank.

At my local supermarket, I scan every product while I shop, then scan my phone at the self checkout terminal, and then walk out. The payment is via the app. My groceries are at this point either in the trolley, so that I can load them into my pannier bags on my bike, or if I came on foot, they're already in my backpack or in the shopping bags I brought with me.

So. Much. Better than queueing at a checkout counter and having someone scan my groceries and then having to handle them again.

Personally I love using the machines. I don't want to hear a clerk's personal opinions or comments. People have lost a sense of professionalism.

However. If you are going to only have 6 machines available, and people waiting for long periods, you need to give Self Check users a 10% discount for their hard work. Either that or have all 30 machines open at all times.

You sound like someone who complains about pumping your own gas.

I prefer self-checkout, a lot faster. Especially when you can scan your products with your phone while shopping.

I love them. Much shorter queue times because so many are set up in one zone. But they only work if people with carts still use stationed checkouts.

Was this at a Kroger or related store? Their stupid self checkouts are over tuned and constantly bitch about not scanning even if it scanned. The Walmart ones, for example, do not, ever. Not vocally anyway.

I only use self-checkout if it isn’t annoying. Albert Heijn in the Netherlands has self-checkouts which are mostly quiet. You can scan your groceries there, or get a scanning ‘pistol’ at the entrance to do it beforehand. You are checked at random by underpaid 16-year-olds, the only real downside. This is really annoying when you’ve already packed your groceries, as they have to scan them all to see if it matches what you’ve scanned yourself. And those 16-year-olds as a result have to deal with annoyance and even aggressivenes by customers.

On the other hand, self-checkouts at the Lidl here (used to) show you on film and be overly loud, every step being explained at volume level 10. If self-checkout sucks this much, I’ll just wait in line at the normal cash register. I’m pretty sure it has improved there as well in the meantime, but I now go to the cash register at Lidl anyway.

Well, it is convenient if you have only like three items and in front of the regular checkout there is the mid-afternoon small-change-paying pensioner queue of doom...

They can be nice if you don't have many things so I like having the option but I do not like when its the main option. Its also annoying that they intentionally hamstring it. Im buying 8 2liters but it does not like more than 6 or something of the same item and now calls the person over to verify its alright. Right there it invalidated any benefit using the self serve might have had. So some places do it right some go overboard and some have went overboard the other way and completely gotten rid of them.

it was until, chains started realizing people were just shoplifting, stores around me phased them out already.

I have literally never used self checkout without needing to wait and flag a person down to help fix the stupid machine.

A professional is about twice as fast as me in scanning groceries so I'm stuck there for twice as long as I need to be, with enough room to scan maybe 2 bags worth of items. If I have a trolley full I'm fucked.

It is a worse experience by every metric, and the worst part is you have no choice. I can't recall the last time I saw an actual human staffed checkout that wasn't a 12 items or less line.

Thé best self checkout is decathlon.

No scanning. Just throw everything in and you're done.

I've waited in register lines while people hurry through the self-checkout like lightening. I refuse to self-checkout unless there is an automatic 10% discount. My labour means something.

Wait til you learn how grocery stores used to be physically arranged...

When talking about unemployment, I think people focus on wrong aspect. Replacing people with machines is good, that's why we make them. The problem is with how our society functions. Rather than less work for same pay, we get unemployment as a problem.

As for machines, I hate their weight checking. Sometimes it just needs me picking up the item and slamming it onto the bagging area. In the past, some of them used to show weight difference from expected weight, so I would be able to figure out what to shuffle around.
There's also issues with permissions. For example, removing items or completely exiting shopping requires employee permission. What for?
Also, recently 2 shops decided to change the UI. In the past, you could type in number of items if you had multiple, especially useful for pastry. The new UI requires repeatedly pressing +/- buttons. Really nice when you have 15 of something.
Lastly, scanner cooldown. They seem to have a large cooldown. I just want to quickly scan the items, but no, gotta wait 2 seconds between each item.

The only places where it's a bliss are supermarkets with systems like scan&shop. You take a portable scanner and scan everything as you put it into a cart, then just pay at the end in a few seconds.

In a lot of cases they’re not actually saving much money on these systems. They’re not cheap machines, require expensive outside contractors to be repaired, and also still require an employee overseeing them.

It might seem cheaper in the sense that one cashier can oversee 6 customers using the machines instead of serving one customer at a time, but most of the time, there’s only going to be one person checking out. The only time that 1:6 ratio comes in to play is during narrow periods in the day when the store is very busy, like around 5~7 when a bunch of people are finished with work and on their way home.

Perhaps it would save money if they were keeping every check out lane open all shift long without these machines, thus requiring 6 people who’s sole job is to stand there idly most of a shift, but that’s not what they did. There is a lot of other work that needs to be done in the store, straightening shelves, refilling empty slots from overhead, helping customers find stuff. So most of the time 5 of those “cashiers” would be going around the store doing that when things weren’t busy, and then just staff the registers during those rushes. Those staff are still there, doing other things.

The machines are actually more expensive but the margins are the same since they just raise prices to compensate. The real point of the machines is that they give management more direct control over the employees, since they can task them strictly to certain things and not have to worry about them getting pulled off ad hoc to staff registers. The additional cost is passed on to consumers, in a functioning market customers would avoid stores that raised prices to pay for the added cost of the machines, but since most stores do this, customers don’t have much of a choice.

I don’t buy into the claim that self checkout is to save the grocery store money. They still need to have cashiers on staff and from what I’ve seen they all seem to have the same number of cashiers they did beforehand.

At the very least, I wouldn’t assume it saves money unless I saw some solid evidence to back that up.

Instead, I suspect the real reason is that self checkout can better handle large surges in the number of people trying to check out at the same time.

I've written about this before but it seems self checkout is very different in the US (and probably some other countries) from here in Sweden (and, again, other countries). A lot of people prefer it here and it's easy so to use and you rarely need to call for help. The descriptions in several of these comments about it requiring babysitting and cashier assistance was only a thing for a while when it was new about 20 years ago until the tech got better. Now it's rare to see more than one person, even in big stores, needed to help and they often do other things around the self checkout area because they are so rarely needed. I'm sure part of it is cultural, people in the US are definitely more prone to try to cheat it or do other things that forces the stores to have that babysitting.

I like self checkout because I steal from major corporations without fail. They will almost always just scan you in if you add something small and extra to your bag and the machine complains. Never been caught but if I am it must not have scanned. I don't work here. How would I know how to work these things?

This is the privileged opinion of someone who has never bought groceries in a country where they don't even come close to speaking the language, such as Slovakia.

UPDATE: This place doesn't have to become Reddit. We could simply choose not to do that. You can choose.

• Poster: X is useless and evil!
• Commenter: I find X useful...
• Mob: You don't need X.

Why? 🤷

Those kiosks are there to extract capital from customers, like 99% of bullshit that exists