I was shopping in the pool!

I thought that was used in the porn industry.

Agreed, there is always at least one worker at these places who has a strange sense of misplaced loyalty.

I don't know what "Smiths" is, but unless it's a club like Costco that can impose it as a condition of membership, they have no right to demand your receipt or stop you from leaving.

If they stop you anyway, they had damn well better have probable cause (and no, refusing to show a receipt doesn't create it by itself) because otherwise that's a false arrest.

But how many of them were actually bananas?

I'm a grammar proponent as well, but I'm not seeing the benefit of your comment. Do you think autocorrect errors are fun for anyone?

It's bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it's for

4011 is the new 411.

Not to mention it takes twice as long because you're unloading an entire trolley onto a space that holds maybe 4 items, you're scanning, and you're bagging. There's no area to actually work and put all your shit, this doesn't even include the 4-12 times you need the person to come fix the broken machine, but that 1 person is busy fixing 4 other people's broken machines.

Something that would take you and a professional working together 5 minutes ends up taking 10+ minutes

Self check-outs at a fast food place (or boba tea etc.) are great because you can ensure that everything is correct and to your liking before making payment.

But they’re absolutely atrocious for any transaction where you’ve already picked out a half-dozen items or more.

My experience is from Norwegian shops, so it might differ from the standards in elsewhere.

• item won't scan: very rarely an issue. We can put in the bar code numbers manually if needed.
• you have alcohol: a nearby staff will take a quick glimpse at me and will approve the age from their unit. Only people close to the age limit will have to wait for the staff.
• discount stickers in shops here have the updated price on a barcode on that sticker.
• I don't understand the "2 upcs"-issue.
• accidental scans can be corrected by the user without staff involvement.

Advantage: when somebody is taking so long it seems like they're figuring out their taxes, you're not stuck behind them because the one line goes to multiple stations. At least where I shop.

I have seen only one implementation of this that I like so far, in Decathlon. You dump your shopping basket in the machine's basket, you don't even have to know what is in there and the machine automatically picks everything up by their nfc tags. It has never failed for me and you don't need to search for any tags or barcodes. You pay, you can pick up all yours stuff and dump it in your bag and you are ready to go.

The polar opposite experience is the one you describe and for those shops I avoid the machines if I can.

Wow yeah I bought a six pack of Coke or something and the scanner picked up the UPC on the cardboard carrier AND one bottle, like fuck off you're charging me an extra bottle! Took a while for the attendant to stroll over and lackadaisically fix it at his leisure.

I prefer self checkout since they have to hire at least 2 person that I have scanned everything instead of 1 person to do the scanning.

Or I get something for free.

Wild guess, you're American? Because every story I hear about self checkouts in the US is this. Meanwhile in actual first world countries where they are modern systems you very rarely have any of these issues. Even my experiences in Croatia and Spain from 20 years ago had solved most of this (and please, I'm not dissing them. I'm a Swede and my experience is just that Scandinavia is on the forefront of stuff like this.) I haven't had to grab the attention of a worker for so many years, and from what I see with other shoppers it's the same for them. The workers seem bored if anything because they so rarely have to help someone even with one person minding twenty of them at the larger stores.