Well, that's annoying. I despise having to use methods other than self-checkout. It's almost universally slower, and my experience working as a cashier in college solidified my desire to avoid...
Well, that's annoying. I despise having to use methods other than self-checkout. It's almost universally slower, and my experience working as a cashier in college solidified my desire to avoid that situation. Being forced to interact with customers is hell, and I don't want to inflict more of that on anyone. I vastly preferred supervising self-checkouts; it was less monotonous and made loss prevention duties easier since you could be more aware of the whole area. You also weren't stuck standing in the same painful position for hours.
When shopping, I'd prefer to even avoid the bottleneck of self-checkout kiosks: let me scan items on my phone, pay online and walk out. Or just go full Amazon Go, seeing as places like Walmart are already loaded with plenty of dystopian surveillance without the benefits.
I will say that in my experience working as a cashier sucked when you had bad customers, which there certainly were many, but most customers were either neutral or down-right decent. The latter...
I will say that in my experience working as a cashier sucked when you had bad customers, which there certainly were many, but most customers were either neutral or down-right decent. The latter two made it not bad at all in terms of social interaction.
The one thing that is so stupid for cashiers is making them stand the entire time! I don't think we should be sitting for 8 hours straight and there's lots of evidence to back it up, but I would like the option to sit and rest my legs every so often. At least Aldi has gotten that right.
I despise the user experience of the self checkout kiosks I have tried. It is very frustrating to wait for help when something goes wrong. An app on a smart phone could create a seamless...
I despise the user experience of the self checkout kiosks I have tried. It is very frustrating to wait for help when something goes wrong.
An app on a smart phone could create a seamless experience but the store still needs to deal effectively with shoplifters.
Not just shoplifters. You've now replaced your cashiers with tech support. How many people, elderly to young, are going to have issues? UI, UX, and straight up bugs are all now checkout stopping...
An app on a smart phone could create a seamless experience but the store still needs to deal effectively with shoplifters.
Not just shoplifters. You've now replaced your cashiers with tech support. How many people, elderly to young, are going to have issues? UI, UX, and straight up bugs are all now checkout stopping occurrences that cost money in 5 or 6 directions.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but at my store, you check out a scanner that has a screen but also the laser bar code reader. I've been using them for years and it has literally never failed. I can...
I mentioned this elsewhere, but at my store, you check out a scanner that has a screen but also the laser bar code reader. I've been using them for years and it has literally never failed. I can see that a phone app would be harder to make bulletproof though.
The hardware doesn't need to fail for there to be a problem. I am very very familiar with such scanners, and even more aware of how they can fail (rare) and how the barcodes can be incorrect (much...
The hardware doesn't need to fail for there to be a problem. I am very very familiar with such scanners, and even more aware of how they can fail (rare) and how the barcodes can be incorrect (much more common).
When an employee sees a shot barcode that won't scan or rings up for a more expensive item, they know what to do. When a user sees a shot barcode what do they do?
What about unreadable barcodes because it didn't get on the item right?
There's all sorts of edge cases that a human interface smooths over that these digital systems are going to push onto the consumer, and eventually back on to themselves.
Your argument sounds reasonable in theory. In practice these scanners have been in use in supermarkets in my country for over a decade. It isn't experimental technology, it is widely used and the...
Your argument sounds reasonable in theory. In practice these scanners have been in use in supermarkets in my country for over a decade. It isn't experimental technology, it is widely used and the surrounding systems are mature.
These days I can decide to either pick up the physical scanner, scan from my phone or use the self scan counter. The app on my phone also allows me to make a shopping list which is actually synchronized to the physical scanner if I decide to use that one. Meaning that my shopping list is checked off while I scan the items which is incredibly convenient.
The issues you raise are also easily solved by having an employee available at the self checkout counter for support edge cases.
The problem I am seeing in other countries and from conversations like these is that a lot of supermarkets abroad half ass the implementation and see it as a one time investment. Probably because they see it as just a cost reduction while supermarkets here see it as a marketable service offering.
Yeah, that's pretty much my experience. Supermarket self-checkout has been pretty bad a lot of the time, but there are some cases where it's pretty smooth. The self-checkout at Kohls (a big...
Yeah, that's pretty much my experience. Supermarket self-checkout has been pretty bad a lot of the time, but there are some cases where it's pretty smooth. The self-checkout at Kohls (a big clothes store) and Home Depot (a big hardware store) are actually pretty good; it rings things up quickly, and in the case of Kohls it actually has an interface for their infamous coupons that is pretty easy to grasp and use.
On the other hand, the ones at supermarkets tend to be these older machines that are very slow and unresponsive, which sometimes results in scans being entered in twice by accident, and that always means stopping everything while you wait for one of the self-checkout "nannies" to override the system to remove it. Some of them want to be extra sure that you're actually buying the thing you scanned and will stop you if you don't put it in the bagging area which has a scale, which is a huge problem if you are buying a lot of things that have odd shapes that might be off-balance on the scale - though to be fair, that's fairly uncommon these days.
That's fair, I'm just saying that none of those things have ever happened to me in all these years of self scanning groceries at least once a week. So they seem to have ironed out many of the...
That's fair, I'm just saying that none of those things have ever happened to me in all these years of self scanning groceries at least once a week. So they seem to have ironed out many of the kinks. Even the produce scales are very intuitive.
Fewer and fewer elderly people are going to have computer literacy issues though, and I'm unsure that young people are going to have any difficulty besides, possibly, the very first time they ever...
Fewer and fewer elderly people are going to have computer literacy issues though, and I'm unsure that young people are going to have any difficulty besides, possibly, the very first time they ever encounter a self-checkout.
I have no evidence besides anecdotal, but I think that while this is the prevailing mindset it's not actually going to be true. There are a ton of young people today who are computer illiterate...
I have no evidence besides anecdotal, but I think that while this is the prevailing mindset it's not actually going to be true.
There are a ton of young people today who are computer illiterate beyond phone calls and texting, and I know many people who were considered the top of computer literacy in their time, who hate self checkout for being "confusing".
The UX and UI for systems has changed drastically over the years, and it's not just "knowing computers" but "know what UI designers expect from you".
The ability to use a self-checkout machine doesn't remotely rely on actual computer literacy, though. Young people whose primary exposure to computers is using apps on their phones are almost...
The ability to use a self-checkout machine doesn't remotely rely on actual computer literacy, though. Young people whose primary exposure to computers is using apps on their phones are almost definitely going to be better versed in the "knowing what UI designers expect from you" problem because they're already used to solving it for various apps and services they use all the time. Self-checkout UI/UX is not particularly exotic on that front.
My comment here: https://tildes.net/~tech/1csy/us_stores_increasingly_reverse_course_on_self_checkout#comment-bgi0 And as someone constantly dealing with users and their interactions in a trained...
And as someone constantly dealing with users and their interactions in a trained and paid environment, I think you are vastly underestimating how much can crop up or has complaints that you'd never think about normally. And again, that's with people paid and trained. Not just customers.
This is kind of my point, self checkouts are highly intuitive to kids who know their way around a phone or tablet because the UI is so similar. This is what computer literacy means in the modern...
know what UI designers expect from you
This is kind of my point, self checkouts are highly intuitive to kids who know their way around a phone or tablet because the UI is so similar. This is what computer literacy means in the modern world IMO.
Someone already hit on my point here, which is that the people I'm talking about, who are old now, were highly computer literate with their UI's and now aren't. Hell I'M not computer literate with...
Someone already hit on my point here, which is that the people I'm talking about, who are old now, were highly computer literate with their UI's and now aren't.
Hell I'M not computer literate with some modern UI's (i hate tiktok/twitter style interfaces) and often have to spend more time than I like hunting around the screen to find what I want (or in twitters horrible case figure out where the conversation even started).
People vastly underestimate how much is handled just on expectation, and as tech and culture changes, those expectations change, but people eventually stop. Just like all of us posting on an "ancient" old reddit style page rather than some newer social media, the stuff I think is new and hard to use will soon also be the "old" style.
It's a moving target, and the real issue is training/adopting those who aren't comfortable with the new style.
I agree with you 1000% about Twitter’s UI. I’m amazed that anything so terrible and unintuitive ever succeeded. It’s genuinely bizarre to see other apps copy it, when representing a conversation...
I agree with you 1000% about Twitter’s UI. I’m amazed that anything so terrible and unintuitive ever succeeded. It’s genuinely bizarre to see other apps copy it, when representing a conversation around a topic is basically a solved problem.
I strongly suspect that most people who get paid to make UI decisions never took a single training class in their lives and just copy whatever's popular at the moment - which often means choosing...
I strongly suspect that most people who get paid to make UI decisions never took a single training class in their lives and just copy whatever's popular at the moment - which often means choosing a questionable element from a popular thing and implementing it in a way that makes no real sense.
I can't count the number of times when I've seen a vital link or control being hidden in a practically invisible hamburger menu.
It also demonstrates my point about trends. None of the major twitter competitors want to rock the boat and risk people running away from their app because it's "unintuitive" because they expect...
It also demonstrates my point about trends. None of the major twitter competitors want to rock the boat and risk people running away from their app because it's "unintuitive" because they expect twitter (flaws and all).
The next generation or the one after though is going to make and popularize its own apps with their own advancements and steps back, and that's going to change again how people expect things to work.
I'm at the point right now where I find folders and what not almost archaic in my average personal computer use workflow. The new generation was already that way (phones don't really have them), and I see launchers and what not as a much superior lookup system for most of the world, and I suspect it'll catch on more.
Orrrrr i could be totally wrong and we'll all be using some form of "talk" interface for modern applications as that tech gets better and better.
There's a lot of ways these things change, and they're never as solved or clean as people think.
I suspect you’re right that the folder metaphor will probably become almost unused in time, but I like it, if only because I can put files of any type together based on how I want to group them....
I suspect you’re right that the folder metaphor will probably become almost unused in time, but I like it, if only because I can put files of any type together based on how I want to group them. The problem with launchers is that if a file wasn’t created by that app, the app can’t see it.
I'm talking about multipurpose launcher/searching systems. Look at Everything or Flow Launcher if you're interested. And to be clear, I do a agree that custom groupings are good (but am coming...
I'm talking about multipurpose launcher/searching systems.
Look at Everything or Flow Launcher if you're interested.
And to be clear, I do a agree that custom groupings are good (but am coming around that tags are a better way to do that)
As someone that's used computers since the C64 and writes software every day, I worry about old age because companies can't just leave a working interface alone. They all feel this constant need...
As someone that's used computers since the C64 and writes software every day, I worry about old age because companies can't just leave a working interface alone. They all feel this constant need to tweak things. That's fine, but annoying, to most people. As you get older your plasticity to change decreases and those kinds of UI changes become bigger and bigger problems.
I thought I was the only one with those concerns. I'm very much just an end-point user, but I also am quite concerned about advanced old age and the ever-changing UI. It has the potential to make...
I thought I was the only one with those concerns.
I'm very much just an end-point user, but I also am quite concerned about advanced old age and the ever-changing UI. It has the potential to make everything from communication to banking quite difficult later in life.
(It also makes me more sympathetic to the oldsters in our family who are grimly hanging on to their cheque books, despite the banks having made it quite clear that cheques will be obsolete in our country within a couple of years.)
At least one shop in the UK is doing this, and it's pretty good. Feels a bit weird just walking out with stuff though. Scan items on phone app Put items in bag Use Apple Pay in the app to settle...
At least one shop in the UK is doing this, and it's pretty good. Feels a bit weird just walking out with stuff though.
I've seen variations on this at one of the grocery stores near me here in Germany too -- though it's definitely not particularly widespread yet. I still just use the normal self checkout here but...
I've seen variations on this at one of the grocery stores near me here in Germany too -- though it's definitely not particularly widespread yet. I still just use the normal self checkout here but that's more due to social anxiety and knowing the line will be pretty short because Germans tend to line up for the real-person cashier preferentially even when there are self-checkouts open.
I was a cashier at Walmart around high school days and I also preferred working self-checkouts as did most other cashiers, but the self-checkouts weren't as common then so those were harder spots...
I was a cashier at Walmart around high school days and I also preferred working self-checkouts as did most other cashiers, but the self-checkouts weren't as common then so those were harder spots to get.
The vast majority of interactions with people in the regular lines were fairly neutral, but yeah the forced interaction where it's customers who want to keep things from being so monotonous or robotic might make some jokes that lots of people make or have the same conversation about how the day is going etc. and then there's the times where the company tries to force you to ask customers to sign up for credit cards or donate to this or that. The store I worked at also pushed hard to make cashiers swap shopping carts with the customers during the transactions, which meant there was always a cart behind the cashier and as they bagged items they would also have to transfer those bags into that cart, and then swap carts with the customer once done. This was a loss prevention method to make sure there could be no items remaining in the customer cart that weren't scanned, but created additional friction interacting with the customer and was more work for the cashier.
As a customer though, I both liked and hated the self-checkouts back then, because there weren't very many of them and most customers are much slower going through self-checkouts. As a matter of pure efficiency overall, some people were better off going to a regular cashier as they were slow at scanning items themselves, but I can't blame them for going to self-checkouts either to avoid the interactions or to avoid the lines (even though they were sometimes the cause of longer lines in the self-checkouts). So far these days with more self-checkouts, it's not been as big of a problem just because there's plenty of different ones to choose from.
This is how I feel as well, but unfortunately I live in an area with a high rate of shoplifting. Because of this the local supermarkets have begun really tightening up the rules for the...
This is how I feel as well, but unfortunately I live in an area with a high rate of shoplifting. Because of this the local supermarkets have begun really tightening up the rules for the self-checkouts, to the point that they're nigh unusable. You have about 3 seconds from scanning an item to set it down in the bagging area otherwise the screen locks up and the attendant needs to come manually override. So if you brought your own pair of canvas bags and need to pack them efficiently, or if perhaps you biked to the store and are attempting to load a backpack in a sensible manner, you're utterly screwed.
Those types of self checkouts are annoying to begin with. Here supermarkets mostly work with random checks where once in a while a message pops up on the screen and someone comes over to randomly...
Those types of self checkouts are annoying to begin with. Here supermarkets mostly work with random checks where once in a while a message pops up on the screen and someone comes over to randomly scan some products to confirm you scanned them. If you have a customer loyalty card I am pretty sure they mark you as "ok" for a while. The amount of times I have been checked at my regular supermarket has gone down over time.
Which works fairly well in my opinion. Although some people do get offended that they are picked for ramdom checks and take that out on the employee. Who are often young people (students or highschoolers) so it isn't without issues in that regard.
Scanning items on my phone as I shop is my favorite checkout method (aside from just-walk-out but I don't think it's efficient enough for large stores yet). Have someone spot check your cart as...
Scanning items on my phone as I shop is my favorite checkout method (aside from just-walk-out but I don't think it's efficient enough for large stores yet). Have someone spot check your cart as your leave sam's club-style and you're golden. No need to fiddle with the self checkout kiosk and there's only a short queue as you leave to get your receipt double-checked.
HEB does this relatively well in a few stores, as does sam's club. I imagine it's a bit easier to keep under control at sam's though since it's a membership based store.
Meijer's got this down pretty well here in the midwest too. We do the shop and scan thing for our regular grocery trips, and about 50% of the time it has an attendant spot check three items from...
Meijer's got this down pretty well here in the midwest too. We do the shop and scan thing for our regular grocery trips, and about 50% of the time it has an attendant spot check three items from our cart to make sure they've been scanned, then good to go.
The reduction or removal of self-checkout would coincide with a reduction or removal of my continuing to be a customer at that grocery store. Every store in my area is appallingly awful, and the...
The reduction or removal of self-checkout would coincide with a reduction or removal of my continuing to be a customer at that grocery store. Every store in my area is appallingly awful, and the self-checkouts are the only tolerable way to get in and out and spend as little time as possible in the presence of a store full of generally terrible people.
We have the self scan here, and I never want to do anything else. We even have handheld laser scanners you get by swiping your loyalty card (although the phone app is an option). You can check...
We have the self scan here, and I never want to do anything else. We even have handheld laser scanners you get by swiping your loyalty card (although the phone app is an option). You can check prices, see your total, and see most discounts as you scan. This last is great because you can see whether "save X on three" means you have to buy three or not (usually not).
I lay my reusable bags out in the cart and scan directly into them, so it's not any slower then having to rebag everything at the self checkout, and I sail past the lines to the dedicated kiosks, pay, and am out.
I have a spreadsheet that merges the grocery list with the recipes and a weekly meal plan, then groups the items by section and puts them in order. I've been thinking about expanding it into an app so that I can support an interface that reconfigured the list based on what store you're at, but haven't gotten to it.
COVID was the best time to buy groceries, honestly. My Wegmans let you shop by using an app to scan items. A lot of self checkouts weren't burdensome to use too. Now Wegmans shut off their app, so...
COVID was the best time to buy groceries, honestly. My Wegmans let you shop by using an app to scan items. A lot of self checkouts weren't burdensome to use too.
Now Wegmans shut off their app, so I shop at cheaper places because it was the largest reason why I shipped there (plus their produce section is the fucking worse, I'd rather go to Walmart for produce). But since self checkout got so popular during COVID each grocery chain has rolled out software that makes the process so slow and burdensome to prevent theft that for the first time in a decade I actively look for a person to do my groceries.
It really fucking sucks. And don't get me started on things like "we don't do plastic bags, even if you do self check, please pay 10 cents for each bag". I don't mind it, but if I'm doing self check I'm saving you money. Give me the bags for free, or eat the cost because groceries shit up like 30% in the last two years.
Fyi I understand what they're doing and a lot of the context around this, I just think my experience is now so much worse then it used to be. I feel like I'm paying more and getting a worse experience for it.
I would agree with you in regards to app checkout. I would do all my shopping at Amazon Fresh stores if the prices weren't so bad and the money weren't going to Amazon. I would even consider...
I would agree with you in regards to app checkout. I would do all my shopping at Amazon Fresh stores if the prices weren't so bad and the money weren't going to Amazon. I would even consider shopping at Wal Mart if their "Scan and Go" feature in the app weren't locked to their stupid Walmart+ subscription, and this is the store with produce so bad they've got shelves full of pre-wilted lettuce.
Glad to hear it. I try to avoid self-checkout unless I have fewer than a literal handful of items. I'd rather help justify someone's job with my patronage. This last line from the article made me...
Glad to hear it. I try to avoid self-checkout unless I have fewer than a literal handful of items. I'd rather help justify someone's job with my patronage.
This last line from the article made me chuckle though, emphasis mine:
Costco said it’s adding more staff in self-checkout areas after it found that non-members were sneaking in to use membership cards that didn’t belong to them at self-checkout.
"Sneak" is a strong word for walking into a store.
The self checkouts at our Costco are mind bogglingly bad. They don’t have detachable hand held scanners, making it hard to scan large items…..at Costco. Also that sentence explains why they...
The self checkouts at our Costco are mind bogglingly bad. They don’t have detachable hand held scanners, making it hard to scan large items…..at Costco.
Also that sentence explains why they started requiring to see my membership card while in line for self checkout. Always thought it was bizarre since you have to scan it at the machine.
Odd, they have the handheld scanners at the Costcos around here. It's kind of iffy if you can use them or if it's supposed to be employees only but I was able to scan everything with it and pay...
Odd, they have the handheld scanners at the Costcos around here. It's kind of iffy if you can use them or if it's supposed to be employees only but I was able to scan everything with it and pay pretty easily.
My Costco, which is only about 1yr old, has guns at the checkout, but they don't work without some kind of employee badge scan. If you walk up to a self-checkout with a cart full, they'll come by...
My Costco, which is only about 1yr old, has guns at the checkout, but they don't work without some kind of employee badge scan. If you walk up to a self-checkout with a cart full, they'll come by and ask if you need help."
Ours has the guns and we're able to use them freely. You just have to scan your card at the register before anything starts working. Though that doesn't do anything to prevent non members from...
Ours has the guns and we're able to use them freely. You just have to scan your card at the register before anything starts working.
Though that doesn't do anything to prevent non members from using them.
That said, we almost never make it out of Costco with less than a cart-full and it's easier for us to just get it done at a manned register.
It makes sense here, normally you aren't allowed into the main store area without a membership card. If you don't have a membership, you are directed towards the customer service counter where you...
It makes sense here, normally you aren't allowed into the main store area without a membership card. If you don't have a membership, you are directed towards the customer service counter where you can get one. However, with the self checkout lines, it is both very easy to get into the store proper by walking past that counter and through the self checkout area. Then you could grab whatever merchandise you want and check out at the self-checkout using someone else's card, since the machines have no way of knowing if the person scanning a card is its rightful owner.
Membership fees make up the bulk of Costco's narrow profit margins so it makes sense that they want to police this issue aggressively.
I'd rather go to an actual cashier than have to wait behind 5 people who take longer to scan 7 items, and there's always someone who is confused by the self checkouts, or having to wait for the 1...
Glad to hear it. I try to avoid self-checkout unless I have fewer than a literal handful of items. I'd rather help justify someone's job with my patronage.
I'd rather go to an actual cashier than have to wait behind 5 people who take longer to scan 7 items, and there's always someone who is confused by the self checkouts, or having to wait for the 1 attendant covering 4-10 self-checkouts.
It's funny, my experience at my local little grocery store is the exact opposite. Come the dinner time rush and there's a big line for the cashier checkouts, but then the 4 self-checkouts usually...
It's funny, my experience at my local little grocery store is the exact opposite. Come the dinner time rush and there's a big line for the cashier checkouts, but then the 4 self-checkouts usually have several free, so I wander past the line up to a self-checkout and can checkout faster than the line moves. Even when I'm buying beer and need the cashiers to swipe their card, still faster for me than waiting in line.
Conversely many stores near me have only one or two open regular lanes and have a large self checkout corral (usually with 30-50% of machines inoperable). My current store is pretty good about...
Conversely many stores near me have only one or two open regular lanes and have a large self checkout corral (usually with 30-50% of machines inoperable). My current store is pretty good about getting someone over to unlock your machine when it gets stuck but at the last store I frequented the staffing was so sparse that it was almost always faster to move to a different self checkout machine if it locked you out.
One time at the latter store I tried using the “I brought my own bags” option but apparently the bags were too heavy so it locked me out and called an attendant over to fix it. No one came, so I moved to another machine, tried again, locked out. Tried just putting my bags on without telling it, locked out, on to the next one. Finally I just did the whole checkout process without bagging anything, then bagged it all up after paying and left. I looked over as I was leaving and the three machines I locked up were still flashing yellow and waiting for someone to come fix them.
I don’t mind self checkout when it’s a machine that trusts you to do it right, like at Sam’s or HEB - even if you have to get your receipt checked on the way out. But machines that constantly think you’re trying to steal from them are so irritating to deal with, doubly so when staff wants to check your receipt as well. At that point please just pay someone to handle this properly.
Can we give chairs to them as well, still don’t get why the US has this mentality of forcing people to stand all day when every where else I been to they have seats.
Can we give chairs to them as well, still don’t get why the US has this mentality of forcing people to stand all day when every where else I been to they have seats.
I think the chairs likely reduce your item scan speed. I am only guessing because I worked at Walmart as a cashier about 15 years ago so I never actually got to sit down, but the way the registers...
I think the chairs likely reduce your item scan speed. I am only guessing because I worked at Walmart as a cashier about 15 years ago so I never actually got to sit down, but the way the registers were designed, sitting down would reduce mobility and access to the conveyor belt and bagging area. From what I've seen they haven't redesigned them in a way that would optimize for sitting. You can rely on the conveyor belt to bring the items closer to you, but there's only a limited area you can grab from, and if you want to optimize how you bag items for customers then you need access to more of the items on the belt, which means you need to be able to reach further to get them.
Of course cashiers are there for their full shift no matter what so it's not them who are trying to maximize item scan speed, because they aren't going to go home any faster. I think stores are incentivized to do this because it means they can employ fewer people to get the same amount of items scanned through. This to me is probably the reason why they were so hard set against cashiers sitting.
And Walmart back then definitely tracked item scanning times, it was sort of part of performance reviews even. I think 400 items per hour or something like that was the mark we were supposed to hit, but I'm going back many years to remember that. There were tricks we had to do on the computer to put it into a non-time monitoring state, like if there were no customers or if we had to wait for a manager to come over or such, in order to prevent that from calculating into the time, otherwise 400 items per hour would be impossible to hit in some cases. I could be wrong on that time frame as well, I remember 400 specifically, but 400 per hour seems kind of low but in any case it was not a number you could reach by just going at your normal speed necessarily. I remember being below it when I first started out because it was a lot for me to get used to before I could get into the flow of things.
Yeah the cashiers at any supermarket in Germany absolutely disprove this, they're lightning fast to the point where it stressed me out when I first moved here. Even outside of Germany, Aldi in the...
Yeah the cashiers at any supermarket in Germany absolutely disprove this, they're lightning fast to the point where it stressed me out when I first moved here. Even outside of Germany, Aldi in the US (Aldi Süd owns it for the Germans who care) lets the cashiers sit and I don't notice any perceivable difference in checkout time. I also more generally doubt that standing actually reduces your ability to reach for things on the checkout. If anything, the ability to have a height-adjustable chair would increase the reach for shorter folks, and in my experience reaching for particular items from farther down the conveyor belt generally did not particularly improve efficiency anyway -- the fastest and most efficient would be when you didn't have to reach for something but could just grab things and scan them rapid-fire without searching for them on the belt.
When I worked as a supermarket cashier for a brief time in the US, by far the biggest drain on my scanning times was needing to bag people's groceries for them when we were understaffed (which was almost always) and I thus didn't have another employee there as the bagger. But it's probably unlikely that Americans will give up that particular entitlement en masse anytime soon.
The bagging aspect makes the biggest difference when talking about scanning times and sitting. I can believe if you don't have to bag, that you can scan items as quickly while sitting and...
The bagging aspect makes the biggest difference when talking about scanning times and sitting. I can believe if you don't have to bag, that you can scan items as quickly while sitting and standing, but if you have to bag the items, I still strongly suspect that it would tank the item scanning speed if you are sitting, or would reduce the bagging experience when someone puts somewhat incompatible items together in the bag because those were the only items that were reachable on the conveyor belt from a seated position. To specify my thought more, I think scanning and bagging items while standing will be faster than scanning and bagging items while sitting. If you're only scanning then I doubt it makes much of a difference.
My understanding is that Aldi in the US does not have the cashiers bag the items (that they don't even have bags at all for that matter).
I disagree on your assessment selecting items from the conveyor belt would be relevant when it comes to speed of scanning while bagging, be it sitting or standing, from my experience as a grocery...
I disagree on your assessment selecting items from the conveyor belt would be relevant when it comes to speed of scanning while bagging, be it sitting or standing, from my experience as a grocery cashier in college. But I do think the ergonomics of actually doing the bagging might be impacted -- though having the cashier doing the bagging at all necessarily is much slower than having either the customer or another dedicated employee do the bagging for anything but very small purchases. I often had to leave my little cashier's nook and stand at the end where the bagger would stand to do the bagging after I'd finished scanning all the items. Most US grocery stores employ some number of dedicated baggers for this task at least for during peak hours (though understaffing is a problem as it is anywhere).
Aldi is the odd one out since its US stores operate more or less how their German ones do (despite their practices being atypical in the US but typical in Germany). Though US Aldi cashiers don't have the German levels of sheer speed -- I as a customer struggle to keep up bagging groceries with them.
Yeah there's different variations of how this setup works so maybe even still I'm not being specific enough, because this experience you are describing isn't anything like what happens in many of...
I often had to leave my little cashier's nook and stand at the end where the bagger would stand to do the bagging after I'd finished scanning all the items. Most US grocery stores employ some number of dedicated baggers for this task at least for during peak hours (though understaffing is a problem as it is anywhere).
Yeah there's different variations of how this setup works so maybe even still I'm not being specific enough, because this experience you are describing isn't anything like what happens in many of the major supermarket or grocery stores in my area.
This has been a typical setup around here, not just at Walmart but at other stores as well, so you have to bag the items as you scan them because there's not much space to put the items anywhere else after being scanned. In order to bag the items appropriately, you need to scan them in a certain order. There is no going to the end and bagging all of them after scanning, because there's no room for that type of task. It's designed that each item is bagged after scanning.
So within arm's reach while sitting you would have access to fewer items on the conveyor belt, and you have to bag them in the order you scan them, then you have limited options of what you can bag items together with. Eventually you either have to slow down to shift items in the bag around, or you'd have to get out of the chair to reach other items on the conveyor belt, or wait for the customer to take under-filled bags off the carousel if there aren't compatible items to bag, all of which would slow down item scan speed. It might seem to be minimal slowdown in one individual transaction, but across multiple cashiers and multiple transactions per day, per week, per month, it would add up.
You are reinforcing my commitment not to shop at Walmart. Safeway always has sufficient room at the end of the conveyor belt for the groceries to wait for either the customer, the cashier or a...
You are reinforcing my commitment not to shop at Walmart. Safeway always has sufficient room at the end of the conveyor belt for the groceries to wait for either the customer, the cashier or a bagger to bag them in optimum order for each bag. Trader Joes doesn't have a conveyor belt, but everything seems to work fine.
Do they look like standard register checkouts you see anywhere else? I'm not talking about in general, the details matter. I'd be curious of a name of a store to see if I can find pictures. It...
Do they look like standard register checkouts you see anywhere else? I'm not talking about in general, the details matter. I'd be curious of a name of a store to see if I can find pictures. It also matters if the cashiers are bagging the items themselves. I'm basing my assumption on having to grab the items off the conveyor, scan and bag them, while sitting. If all you have to do is can them, then I can see scanning speed not being significantly impacted, but if you have to bag them then it means you have to meet customer standards by bagging compatible items together and if those items aren't placed just right on the conveyor, they are out of your reach while sitting and limit the ability to bag those items together.
I forget that it's not unusual in the US for someone else to bag your goods. I remember wondering what on earth there were two people doing at each till when I visited a Trader Joe's and worrying...
I forget that it's not unusual in the US for someone else to bag your goods. I remember wondering what on earth there were two people doing at each till when I visited a Trader Joe's and worrying that I was going to be demanded to tip someone who had bagged my stuff (and not how I like it, although I have to say that I'm not going to blame anyone else for not complying with my weirdly specific Bagging Rules). There was also a person in that shop looking after the queue, it was a very strange experience.
FWIW I haven't seen any cashier bagging stuff for over a decade, unless the customer, usually an older person, just let it all pile up while they scanned it. As soon as the customer makes the...
FWIW I haven't seen any cashier bagging stuff for over a decade, unless the customer, usually an older person, just let it all pile up while they scanned it. As soon as the customer makes the slightest motion to bagging their own stuff they just let it go.
Ah really? Ok, I'm really not in touch with cultural norms over there. Fwiw, my experience was just pre-pandemic in New York, so I don't know if that was a particularly localised experience or...
Ah really? Ok, I'm really not in touch with cultural norms over there. Fwiw, my experience was just pre-pandemic in New York, so I don't know if that was a particularly localised experience or what. It makes sense though, it did seem like a pretty indulgent employer to have so many non-vital workers around, given that the trend these days seems to be understaff shops and then run their teams ragged.
I think this is definitely regional within the US, and it even varies on the individual level. When I worked for a grocery store in the US, I was expected to bag groceries as the cashier if there...
I think this is definitely regional within the US, and it even varies on the individual level. When I worked for a grocery store in the US, I was expected to bag groceries as the cashier if there wasn't a second employee there to bag them. Some customers would start to bag their own groceries (and I would generally continue doing so to be helpful), but some would absolutely just stand there and wait for me while I slowly bagged groceries for them even though there were people behind them in line and they'd have been out the door quicker if they'd done some of the bagging. This was not over a decade ago, so I don't think norms have changed that much.
I don't know about regionality, but it varies quite a lot between stores. I'd say that here in Southern California, many - though not all - stores will bag for you. Some stores even have "bag...
I don't know about regionality, but it varies quite a lot between stores. I'd say that here in Southern California, many - though not all - stores will bag for you. Some stores even have "bag boys" who exist specifically to pack bags for you, while some have the cashiers do it. Aldi has the cashiers dump everything in an empty shopping cart for you and a big table behind them where you can bag them yourself. Places like Winco and Food 4 Less have two conveyor belts at the end so that customers can go to the end of them to bag them. Generally speaking, places where you do your own bagging are less expensive than the places where it's done for you
Yeah when I worked at Kroger's in Ohio there were theoretically dedicated bag boys, but they were usually busy rounding up carts in the parking lot bc we were chronically understaffed.
Yeah when I worked at Kroger's in Ohio there were theoretically dedicated bag boys, but they were usually busy rounding up carts in the parking lot bc we were chronically understaffed.
I'm all for them hiring more workers to staff the checkout lines, I'm sick of seeing (literally) 20 turned off checkout signs and one lit up on the other end of the store, right next to the self...
I'm all for them hiring more workers to staff the checkout lines, I'm sick of seeing (literally) 20 turned off checkout signs and one lit up on the other end of the store, right next to the self checkout.
Plus, if your workers can't bag properly, I'm going to choose self check so I can make sure my eggs aren't on the bottom.
One thing in the article I need to comment on is
found that companies with self-checkout lanes and apps had a loss rate of about 4%
Emphasis mine, apps? So, are they claiming that doordash people are jacking stuff along with my order or are they saying store specific apps for payment or... What? The Times article linked here is paywalled and I'd rather just read the actual study but don't have a chance right now.
From the Times article: The study linked in that article is a dead link. So I just have to assume what they mean is a situation where people have pre-ordered their food with an app (or paid...
From the Times article:
the use of self-service lanes and smartphone apps to make purchases generated a loss rate of nearly 4 percent
The study linked in that article is a dead link. So I just have to assume what they mean is a situation where people have pre-ordered their food with an app (or paid in-store through an app?) and this makes it easier for people to walk out without going through a cashier so they feel emboldened to steal.
I’ve never paid using these methods either, so I’m also not sure what’s going on here.
I assume they are referring to something along the lines of the app in the cnn article where you scan and bag your items as you shop. checkout app article
I assume they are referring to something along the lines of the app in the cnn article where you scan and bag your items as you shop. checkout app article
If this is meant for restaurants as well, I can believe it. Those shelves where your food is left to be picked up are an easy target. We've had two family-sized orders taken before we got there in...
If this is meant for restaurants as well, I can believe it. Those shelves where your food is left to be picked up are an easy target. We've had two family-sized orders taken before we got there in the last few months.
I generally dislike self-checkout for more than a dozen or so things. The kiosks usually don't have enough space to bag a lot of stuff, but the staffed cashier stations have oodles of room and...
I generally dislike self-checkout for more than a dozen or so things. The kiosks usually don't have enough space to bag a lot of stuff, but the staffed cashier stations have oodles of room and sometimes a bagger to load stuff right back into my cart.
The one aspect I do really enjoy about self-checkout is that in every single store those stations are always 1 line feeding 4 or more kiosks. Which prevents any one person from jamming up the line. With staffed checkouts, it's always a roll of the dice if the line you picked will move faster or slower than another equivalent length line because of various problems.
Trader Joe's does a really nice thing where everyone stands in one line and the next cashier signals the next customer. I've seen the same model at Fry's Electronics and Barnes and Noble books. It...
Trader Joe's does a really nice thing where everyone stands in one line and the next cashier signals the next customer.
I've seen the same model at Fry's Electronics and Barnes and Noble books. It really works well. It's also nice if you are the slow customer.
The TJs thing is very location dependant. For instance, I see it in major cities like New York, SF, and large metro Areas, but smaller cities and even places like Atlanta Metro don't have the...
The TJs thing is very location dependant. For instance, I see it in major cities like New York, SF, and large metro Areas, but smaller cities and even places like Atlanta Metro don't have the feeder model...though I wish they did.
I'm not certain if it's an architectural issue where only stores designed for it can have it or not.
It's definitely location dependent. The location in Ann Arbor, MI could not possibly do this, just due to the amount of floor space they have and the way it's arranged. I generally avoid it on...
It's definitely location dependent. The location in Ann Arbor, MI could not possibly do this, just due to the amount of floor space they have and the way it's arranged. I generally avoid it on weekends, it's an absolute madhouse (a very polite madhouse, but a madhouse).
The last time I went to Trader Joes they all had individual lines. But it was kind of a weird experience because there were so many people in there and tons of checkout stands were open so it was...
The last time I went to Trader Joes they all had individual lines. But it was kind of a weird experience because there were so many people in there and tons of checkout stands were open so it was still very quick.
I wish that every store did this, though, since it's supposed to be the fastest and most fair way to get people checked out. The last time I went through the manned checkout line at a Wal Mart, I spent half an hour waiting in line because the cashier was still in training and the supervisor she needed was running thin between everyone else who needed them.
Agreed about the lines. The one-queue-to-multiple-outputs is simply more efficient. Not to mention that it seems like most people don't account for that difference when picking a line? My husband...
Agreed about the lines. The one-queue-to-multiple-outputs is simply more efficient.
Not to mention that it seems like most people don't account for that difference when picking a line? My husband and I have switched over to doing pickup orders instead of shopping in-store, but on the occasion that I do go in, all of the lines are pretty much even. There will be, say, three people waiting at each register -- and there will also be three people in line for the self-checkouts, even though that line leads to eight different registers on its own.
I think a lot of people just go for the shortest line instead of what will have the shortest time, which is invariably the self-checkouts.
With some of the layouts now and just the fact that there are more of them which means they've become more spread out, some are approaching similarity of the normal checkouts in my experience....
The one aspect I do really enjoy about self-checkout is that in every single store those stations are always 1 line feeding 4 or more kiosks.
With some of the layouts now and just the fact that there are more of them which means they've become more spread out, some are approaching similarity of the normal checkouts in my experience. There can still be a line filtering into multiple kiosks, but the layouts make it such that it might only be 2 kiosks instead of 4, but there's more kiosks just separated a bit more. Though there are some where it's the other way too, one line for even more kiosks, but the store was clearly designed to create this one line by placing shelving and what not to limit where you can approach rather than expecting customers to do it out of custom. When the layout is lacking, some customers can just cut the single line and go up behind someone that is obviously almost checked out, leaving it up to the customers that were waiting in the single line to play line monitor or just deal with people cutting, which then ends up with more people cutting until everyone forfeits the single line.
I avoid self checkout whenever I can because I'd that rather people in my community have jobs. I've worked as a cashier for pay in the past and I see no reason to do the same job for free as a...
I avoid self checkout whenever I can because I'd that rather people in my community have jobs. I've worked as a cashier for pay in the past and I see no reason to do the same job for free as a customer.
There was a lot of talk about retraining cashiers for other, better jobs when these machines were first installed. Like most corporate promises, it seems to have largely been a cover for cutting staff and retaining more profit. The last decade has left me much more human-focused, less inclined to believe the corporate line about these kinds of things.
In many parts of the world cashiers have a nice ergonomic chair to sit in. It seems punitive that we don't do that here in the states.
Not letting your worker sit down so that the customer definitely knows they're not a lazybones is such a weird idea. Where I am, they all sit down, but they're no slower or worse at the job for...
Not letting your worker sit down so that the customer definitely knows they're not a lazybones is such a weird idea. Where I am, they all sit down, but they're no slower or worse at the job for it, obviously. Making someone stand just because you can is just petty cruelty, it seems.
This is my own personal take on it, so feel free to disagree... When I see a person sitting down for their job, it usually means they work at a computer or something. Or to put it another way,...
This is my own personal take on it, so feel free to disagree... When I see a person sitting down for their job, it usually means they work at a computer or something. Or to put it another way, using the computer is part of the job.
Now, if we shift over to cashiers... Well, it may be digital, but it's no computer. So in that case, they're not doing a job, they're relaxing when sitting down. If they're relaxing, it means they're not ready to serve a customer... So why are they relaxing in a work area?
Oh, and the kicker to all this that I expect I'm going to be given a lot of crap for? If you're in a job where you are unable to meet the physical requirements for the job for any reason... You shouldn't be doing that job in the first place.
Here's the thing though...you let a cashier sit, and magically like 40% more of the country is better able to do that job. (Arbitrary percentage). Do we require people on factory lines using...
Here's the thing though...you let a cashier sit, and magically like 40% more of the country is better able to do that job. (Arbitrary percentage).
Do we require people on factory lines using soldering irons to stand? No, because that's a dumb requirement that needlessly restricts your ability to hire people.
I certainly couldn't cashier: I have back troubles and standing in one place for more than an hour or so really aggravates it, but doing work where I walk or move less so. Giving a simple stool so that for work that is 99.9% in the arms gives a rest of back and legs would enable me to do that job with no difficulty.
You'd have a more legitimate case of "not being able to physically do the job" if the requirement was "dragging another human out of a burning building" not "stand there because someone might think you're lazy if you sit."
Here's an experiment. Tape off a 2ftx3ft box in your kitchen, along a countertop. Put your groceries on one side. Stand in the box. Now move your groceries back and forth for 2 hours. Don't leave the box, no phone. You can put on Mariah Carrey's All I want for Christmas on loop for entertainment. Take a pee break then do it for another 2 hours. Eat a lunch in 30 minutes, do for another 2 hours, then another pee break. Then do 2 more hours.
Then report back and tell me that we shouldn't let people who do that for 20+ hours a week have a stool.
This kind of thinking is completely alien to me. I'm used to cashiers sitting down all my life here (they can stand if they want to), and they are definitely not relaxing, they are simply doing...
So in that case, they're not doing a job, they're relaxing when sitting down.
This kind of thinking is completely alien to me. I'm used to cashiers sitting down all my life here (they can stand if they want to), and they are definitely not relaxing, they are simply doing their job while sitting down. And depending on where I'm shopping, they're extremely fast while doing it.
Nothing is relaxing about that. Cashiers just have an easier time when they can sit, and obviously less pain. To me it's just cruel to demand that they have to stand.
I see where you're coming from, I really do, but it's so arbitrary. But the fact that humans are not good at standing in place for long periods of time is an objective reality. So I'd prioritise...
I see where you're coming from, I really do, but it's so arbitrary. But the fact that humans are not good at standing in place for long periods of time is an objective reality. So I'd prioritise the person's wellbeing over customers' subjective "I like this/that". Having said that, I guess this is where the market speaks, and if customers express a preference for standing cashiers, that will have an effect. I would try and exercise my power as a customer and avoid such places, we're all free to do so.
I also understand your point, and agree with standing in one place is a Bad Idea. Also, for what it's worth, my time is the customer service business was with fast food... which does bias me....
I also understand your point, and agree with standing in one place is a Bad Idea. Also, for what it's worth, my time is the customer service business was with fast food... which does bias me. After all, in fast food you actually ARE moving around a lot, and so a stool or chair becomes a hindrance more than anything else.
Then it ultimately comes down to "The customer is God in retail", seeing as how they vote with their wallet/choose where to spend their money, and if they spend more money at a place where people are standing rather than sitting... well, maybe that says a lot.
Side note- actually reading the article, it appears the main complaint is theft. And there was a study conducted that when you have someone watching you, you're much less likely to try to do something shady than if it's only self-checkout with no one around (or as the Other Site would try to phrase it... if you see someone taking something illegally from one of the Big Box stores... no you didn't)
I've heard people talking about the "employee discount" at self checkouts, which tickled me, if I'm honest. I can completely believe that theft is a real issue.
I've heard people talking about the "employee discount" at self checkouts, which tickled me, if I'm honest. I can completely believe that theft is a real issue.
I find that to be a rather misanthropic perspective in this case. The whole point of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that we shouldn't discriminate against people who do not have the...
Oh, and the kicker to all this that I expect I'm going to be given a lot of crap for? If you're in a job where you are unable to meet the physical requirements for the job for any reason... You shouldn't be doing that job in the first place.
I find that to be a rather misanthropic perspective in this case. The whole point of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that we shouldn't discriminate against people who do not have the typical body or have medical issues. And the reason why it's so important is that literally everyone who doesn't die prematurely will have a disibility as they age. A person in their 60s might have a back issue which prevents them from standing for long points of time, but are otherwise able-bodied; why would you want to prevent them from working that job? This is especially prudent because there's absolutely nothing about that job that would actually require them to be standing up the whole time.
Having quick checkouts at grocery stores are nice. But personally speaking, if I'm going to be dealing with human beings I would much prefer that they be happy and sociable than rushed and miserable. One of the nice perks of being a regular at a store is getting to know the people who work there.
To play devil's advocate here, when I worked as a cashier I vastly preferred working on the self-checkouts because it was less work for the same hourly pay as working the normal register. You...
To play devil's advocate here, when I worked as a cashier I vastly preferred working on the self-checkouts because it was less work for the same hourly pay as working the normal register. You could easily run 4 self checkouts and still do less work than running one normal register (though our employer often made us run 8 at a time which did keep you on your toes). Neither job had a chair.
"Reversal" here seems to mean it's peaked and they'll be using it somewhat less, because the downsides became more apparent. Whether they take it out entirely depends on the location.
"Reversal" here seems to mean it's peaked and they'll be using it somewhat less, because the downsides became more apparent. Whether they take it out entirely depends on the location.
Awesome! If I have a cart of any reasonable size, I can get through a staffed checkout line 3x faster than self checkout. Plop my crap on the conveyer, let them deal with the scanning, and I bag...
Awesome!
If I have a cart of any reasonable size, I can get through a staffed checkout line 3x faster than self checkout. Plop my crap on the conveyer, let them deal with the scanning, and I bag it all to my own preference. When a thing doesn't scan right I don't have to wait for 1 overworked person to deal with 5 other people before getting to me.
I doubt they'll fully eliminate self-checkout, it's too useful when just grabbing a handful of items, but maybe more than 1-3 registers will be open again.
That has been exactly my complaint about self checkout since it's inception. I don't get a discount for scanning, I don't get a discount for bringing my own bags, so WHY should I use self...
That has been exactly my complaint about self checkout since it's inception. I don't get a discount for scanning, I don't get a discount for bringing my own bags, so WHY should I use self checkout? I have to wait and find a teller if I buy booze, which also slows me down.
I don't understand how the stores have conned us all into free labor. Have some self checkout stations for those who like it, but I DON'T WORK HERE.
nobody's mentioned this yet, but I strongly prefer self checkout because I can compare prices I see on the screen with what I expected to pay. I hate going home to find that the cashier rung up my...
nobody's mentioned this yet, but I strongly prefer self checkout because I can compare prices I see on the screen with what I expected to pay.
I hate going home to find that the cashier rung up my produce wrong, or didn't honour a discount coupon, or more common: that the store did not take down its sale signs past the special rate time, or that the sale only applies to varieties A, C and D, and not variety B of the same type. In some stores, if the price on the shelf isn't the same as at the checkout, you get the lower price etc, but some stores (eg Giant Tiger) will treat you like a criminal and hold all your stuff, hold up the line, Voice Of God for another staff to slower meander to the shelf, and then come back and tell you you're wrong or whatever. They did that to me three times in as many months, and I haven't been back since. (once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action, I like to joke)
let me scan the thing, let me be slow, let me check the price is correct, without holding anyone else up.
I tried one of those Amazon grab and go things at LaGuardia this year and it was amazing. You literally just card in, grab stuff off the shelves and put it in a bag and leave (you can get an email...
I tried one of those Amazon grab and go things at LaGuardia this year and it was amazing. You literally just card in, grab stuff off the shelves and put it in a bag and leave (you can get an email receipt if you use a kiosk in the store). It just worked and I wish more places had that tech, feels like it solves both the shrink and inconvenience problem of self checkout...
I also tried Amazon's palm reading tech at Whole Foods and it felt like a total gimmick when it takes nearly just as long to do apple pay (and doesnt accept all cards yet).
I love using the self check out at Aldi. I can bag my own groceries and put the meat on the bottom of the bag so if it leaks it doesn't get on my other food. Chips, bread and eggs on top. I can...
I love using the self check out at Aldi. I can bag my own groceries and put the meat on the bottom of the bag so if it leaks it doesn't get on my other food. Chips, bread and eggs on top. I can avoid the cashiers that think it's a race and smash the shit out of my fruit and vegetables.
I think Aldi and Lidl put a lot of effort into optimising checkout speed, for sure over things like not crushing someone's bananas. It's why they put huge barcodes on several sides of a product,...
I think Aldi and Lidl put a lot of effort into optimising checkout speed, for sure over things like not crushing someone's bananas. It's why they put huge barcodes on several sides of a product, so the cashier doesn't have to waste time spinning it around to find the bit to scan. They also tend to have a little area just after the tills for you to actually pack the stuff you just bought because you're not intended to keep up with them, you're supposed to just take your stuff away in the same trolley and then pack it into your shopping bags to take home. It's a whole thing for these brands, I gather.
Yes, the whole shopping experience is different with Aldi at least, I'm not familiar with Lidl. I'm ok with putting up with the quarter for a shopping cart, or all of the products still in...
Yes, the whole shopping experience is different with Aldi at least, I'm not familiar with Lidl. I'm ok with putting up with the quarter for a shopping cart, or all of the products still in shipping boxes and any other side effects of them cutting costs, but I dislike my food being a used and the self checkout was a nice solution to that even though it wasn't their reason for implementing it. As for people losing their jobs because of self checkouts, I'd never like to see people lose their jobs, but at some point we are paying people to do a monotonous job that can be accomplished better/more efficiently with technology. This trend is going to continue unless things go horribly wrong in our society. We just need to find new things for people to do, or reduce every ones hours and pay a similar wage, not sure how that gets accomplished though.... And now I'm rambling....
I feel like self-checkout was just a cover for continued enshittification of the store experience. I love self-checkout for a few items, but anything more complex and the use case falls apart. And...
I feel like self-checkout was just a cover for continued enshittification of the store experience. I love self-checkout for a few items, but anything more complex and the use case falls apart. And God forbid you need help with anything or encounter an edge case like an item that won’t scan properly; in my experience I’m lucky to get the attention of anyone at all and even then it’s a crapshoot if they know how to fix the issue in a timely manner. It doesn’t happen often, but in general I’d rather have stores with more staff overall because it incentivizes them to be more helpful and available than stores with lots of self-checkouts.
I also agree with the poster above that mentioned trying to be more human-focused with their behaviors. I’d rather support someone’s job than get bad service and still pay the same amount.
We have a grocery store down the road that put in self checkout machines about 12 years ago, then took them out 7 years ago. Then it put them back in 4 years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing how...
We have a grocery store down the road that put in self checkout machines about 12 years ago, then took them out 7 years ago. Then it put them back in 4 years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.
This is great news, albeit for the wrong reasons. I spent a chunk of my adult life before self-checkout became a thing. I felt bad about all of those people losing their jobs. My later father,...
This is great news, albeit for the wrong reasons.
I spent a chunk of my adult life before self-checkout became a thing. I felt bad about all of those people losing their jobs. My later father, then elderly, not giving a fuck wouldn't use them. When a store employee pointed out to him that he could use a self check out, he said LOUDLY "No. I want people to have jobs".
I wonder why this has taken so long to turn around. Greedflation and price gouging driving poorer people to steal?
"Won't somebody think of the jobs" would be a lot more convincing if the jobs in question weren't absolutely terrible jobs that people only take because they have no other option. Get rid of those...
"Won't somebody think of the jobs" would be a lot more convincing if the jobs in question weren't absolutely terrible jobs that people only take because they have no other option. Get rid of those jobs and we're one step closer to changing society to not have a shit jobs tier at all. Which is not ideal for the people who need to be scanning stuff in order to make rent or put food on the table, I'll admit.
That's not super helpful without appropriate societal restructuring so that those jobs aren't needed. Right now getting rid of those jobs just means more money going from the poor to the rich.
That's not super helpful without appropriate societal restructuring so that those jobs aren't needed. Right now getting rid of those jobs just means more money going from the poor to the rich.
Sure. But I don't see any evidence that we're going to start restructuring society just because that would be a nice thing to do. The rich are absolutely going to keep stealing everything until...
Exemplary
Sure. But I don't see any evidence that we're going to start restructuring society just because that would be a nice thing to do. The rich are absolutely going to keep stealing everything until they are made to stop, and I strongly suspect things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Status quos don't get changed by keeping things the same.
I've been a cashier. Among the jobs you can get without a college degree ( I've had a number of them ) it isn't bad work. Before self checkouts came the compensations and benefits weren't bad...
I've been a cashier. Among the jobs you can get without a college degree ( I've had a number of them ) it isn't bad work. Before self checkouts came the compensations and benefits weren't bad either.
If every job someone considers a shit job goes away, society will be forced to use universal basic income at the mercies of the 1% paying for it. Not necessarily an improved world.
I've worked retail in various roles and out of all the low end jobs I've had it's the one I would be least likely to go back to. But each to their own. Oh no! Wait no that's exactly what I want to...
I've worked retail in various roles and out of all the low end jobs I've had it's the one I would be least likely to go back to. But each to their own.
society will be forced to use universal basic income at the mercies of the 1% paying for it.
Oh no! Wait no that's exactly what I want to happen. I'm fairly sure that would be a significantly improved world.
The problem is that the 1 percent would likely prefer a world that resembles Victorian London or mid 20th century Calcutta. They won't adopt universal basic income without a serious fight. They...
The problem is that the 1 percent would likely prefer a world that resembles Victorian London or mid 20th century Calcutta. They won't adopt universal basic income without a serious fight. They want survival to be a reward they can dole out to people who are useful to them
It isn't what I want to happen. As a non-expert I can see a lot of obvious problems, problems that people promoting it just ignore. Supermarket cashier jobs are good jobs for unskilled people, or...
It isn't what I want to happen.
As a non-expert I can see a lot of obvious problems, problems that people promoting it just ignore.
Supermarket cashier jobs are good jobs for unskilled people, or at least they were. It is a good thing ( maybe for bad reasons ) that at least some of those jobs are coming back.
I was poorer when self checkout first started hitting the States. It was a 70% off sale on produce, everyday, from day 0. They didn't have scales on the drop area at first. Was even better when...
I was poorer when self checkout first started hitting the States.
It was a 70% off sale on produce, everyday, from day 0. They didn't have scales on the drop area at first. Was even better when in-store scanning was a thing...employee would scan three random barcodes in your cart to check, but the barcode didn't snitch that I had $5 of broccoli and not $2.
I think it went unnoticed for a long time because of this. Produce always has large spoilage rates, so even hefty theft is masked a bit and manifests as less waste over time.
Odd. Australia is still going full steam ahead. It's typical for a supermarket to have 1 to 0 staffed checkouts and just 50 self serve machines. Personally I'm all for it. So much faster to go...
Odd. Australia is still going full steam ahead. It's typical for a supermarket to have 1 to 0 staffed checkouts and just 50 self serve machines. Personally I'm all for it. So much faster to go through the self checkout rather than having to line up behind a bunch of people for staffed checkouts like you used to have to do.
Well, that's annoying. I despise having to use methods other than self-checkout. It's almost universally slower, and my experience working as a cashier in college solidified my desire to avoid that situation. Being forced to interact with customers is hell, and I don't want to inflict more of that on anyone. I vastly preferred supervising self-checkouts; it was less monotonous and made loss prevention duties easier since you could be more aware of the whole area. You also weren't stuck standing in the same painful position for hours.
When shopping, I'd prefer to even avoid the bottleneck of self-checkout kiosks: let me scan items on my phone, pay online and walk out. Or just go full Amazon Go, seeing as places like Walmart are already loaded with plenty of dystopian surveillance without the benefits.
I will say that in my experience working as a cashier sucked when you had bad customers, which there certainly were many, but most customers were either neutral or down-right decent. The latter two made it not bad at all in terms of social interaction.
The one thing that is so stupid for cashiers is making them stand the entire time! I don't think we should be sitting for 8 hours straight and there's lots of evidence to back it up, but I would like the option to sit and rest my legs every so often. At least Aldi has gotten that right.
I despise the user experience of the self checkout kiosks I have tried. It is very frustrating to wait for help when something goes wrong.
An app on a smart phone could create a seamless experience but the store still needs to deal effectively with shoplifters.
Not just shoplifters. You've now replaced your cashiers with tech support. How many people, elderly to young, are going to have issues? UI, UX, and straight up bugs are all now checkout stopping occurrences that cost money in 5 or 6 directions.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but at my store, you check out a scanner that has a screen but also the laser bar code reader. I've been using them for years and it has literally never failed. I can see that a phone app would be harder to make bulletproof though.
The hardware doesn't need to fail for there to be a problem. I am very very familiar with such scanners, and even more aware of how they can fail (rare) and how the barcodes can be incorrect (much more common).
When an employee sees a shot barcode that won't scan or rings up for a more expensive item, they know what to do. When a user sees a shot barcode what do they do?
What about unreadable barcodes because it didn't get on the item right?
There's all sorts of edge cases that a human interface smooths over that these digital systems are going to push onto the consumer, and eventually back on to themselves.
Your argument sounds reasonable in theory. In practice these scanners have been in use in supermarkets in my country for over a decade. It isn't experimental technology, it is widely used and the surrounding systems are mature.
These days I can decide to either pick up the physical scanner, scan from my phone or use the self scan counter. The app on my phone also allows me to make a shopping list which is actually synchronized to the physical scanner if I decide to use that one. Meaning that my shopping list is checked off while I scan the items which is incredibly convenient.
The issues you raise are also easily solved by having an employee available at the self checkout counter for support edge cases.
The problem I am seeing in other countries and from conversations like these is that a lot of supermarkets abroad half ass the implementation and see it as a one time investment. Probably because they see it as just a cost reduction while supermarkets here see it as a marketable service offering.
Yeah, that's pretty much my experience. Supermarket self-checkout has been pretty bad a lot of the time, but there are some cases where it's pretty smooth. The self-checkout at Kohls (a big clothes store) and Home Depot (a big hardware store) are actually pretty good; it rings things up quickly, and in the case of Kohls it actually has an interface for their infamous coupons that is pretty easy to grasp and use.
On the other hand, the ones at supermarkets tend to be these older machines that are very slow and unresponsive, which sometimes results in scans being entered in twice by accident, and that always means stopping everything while you wait for one of the self-checkout "nannies" to override the system to remove it. Some of them want to be extra sure that you're actually buying the thing you scanned and will stop you if you don't put it in the bagging area which has a scale, which is a huge problem if you are buying a lot of things that have odd shapes that might be off-balance on the scale - though to be fair, that's fairly uncommon these days.
That's fair, I'm just saying that none of those things have ever happened to me in all these years of self scanning groceries at least once a week. So they seem to have ironed out many of the kinks. Even the produce scales are very intuitive.
Fewer and fewer elderly people are going to have computer literacy issues though, and I'm unsure that young people are going to have any difficulty besides, possibly, the very first time they ever encounter a self-checkout.
I have no evidence besides anecdotal, but I think that while this is the prevailing mindset it's not actually going to be true.
There are a ton of young people today who are computer illiterate beyond phone calls and texting, and I know many people who were considered the top of computer literacy in their time, who hate self checkout for being "confusing".
The UX and UI for systems has changed drastically over the years, and it's not just "knowing computers" but "know what UI designers expect from you".
The ability to use a self-checkout machine doesn't remotely rely on actual computer literacy, though. Young people whose primary exposure to computers is using apps on their phones are almost definitely going to be better versed in the "knowing what UI designers expect from you" problem because they're already used to solving it for various apps and services they use all the time. Self-checkout UI/UX is not particularly exotic on that front.
My comment here: https://tildes.net/~tech/1csy/us_stores_increasingly_reverse_course_on_self_checkout#comment-bgi0
And as someone constantly dealing with users and their interactions in a trained and paid environment, I think you are vastly underestimating how much can crop up or has complaints that you'd never think about normally. And again, that's with people paid and trained. Not just customers.
This is kind of my point, self checkouts are highly intuitive to kids who know their way around a phone or tablet because the UI is so similar. This is what computer literacy means in the modern world IMO.
Someone already hit on my point here, which is that the people I'm talking about, who are old now, were highly computer literate with their UI's and now aren't.
Hell I'M not computer literate with some modern UI's (i hate tiktok/twitter style interfaces) and often have to spend more time than I like hunting around the screen to find what I want (or in twitters horrible case figure out where the conversation even started).
People vastly underestimate how much is handled just on expectation, and as tech and culture changes, those expectations change, but people eventually stop. Just like all of us posting on an "ancient" old reddit style page rather than some newer social media, the stuff I think is new and hard to use will soon also be the "old" style.
It's a moving target, and the real issue is training/adopting those who aren't comfortable with the new style.
I agree with you 1000% about Twitter’s UI. I’m amazed that anything so terrible and unintuitive ever succeeded. It’s genuinely bizarre to see other apps copy it, when representing a conversation around a topic is basically a solved problem.
I strongly suspect that most people who get paid to make UI decisions never took a single training class in their lives and just copy whatever's popular at the moment - which often means choosing a questionable element from a popular thing and implementing it in a way that makes no real sense.
I can't count the number of times when I've seen a vital link or control being hidden in a practically invisible hamburger menu.
It also demonstrates my point about trends. None of the major twitter competitors want to rock the boat and risk people running away from their app because it's "unintuitive" because they expect twitter (flaws and all).
The next generation or the one after though is going to make and popularize its own apps with their own advancements and steps back, and that's going to change again how people expect things to work.
I'm at the point right now where I find folders and what not almost archaic in my average personal computer use workflow. The new generation was already that way (phones don't really have them), and I see launchers and what not as a much superior lookup system for most of the world, and I suspect it'll catch on more.
Orrrrr i could be totally wrong and we'll all be using some form of "talk" interface for modern applications as that tech gets better and better.
There's a lot of ways these things change, and they're never as solved or clean as people think.
I suspect you’re right that the folder metaphor will probably become almost unused in time, but I like it, if only because I can put files of any type together based on how I want to group them. The problem with launchers is that if a file wasn’t created by that app, the app can’t see it.
I'm talking about multipurpose launcher/searching systems.
Look at Everything or Flow Launcher if you're interested.
And to be clear, I do a agree that custom groupings are good (but am coming around that tags are a better way to do that)
Those UIs aren't a static target. They get changed constantly which makes you have to repeatedly relearn the expectations.
As someone that's used computers since the C64 and writes software every day, I worry about old age because companies can't just leave a working interface alone. They all feel this constant need to tweak things. That's fine, but annoying, to most people. As you get older your plasticity to change decreases and those kinds of UI changes become bigger and bigger problems.
I thought I was the only one with those concerns.
I'm very much just an end-point user, but I also am quite concerned about advanced old age and the ever-changing UI. It has the potential to make everything from communication to banking quite difficult later in life.
(It also makes me more sympathetic to the oldsters in our family who are grimly hanging on to their cheque books, despite the banks having made it quite clear that cheques will be obsolete in our country within a couple of years.)
At least one shop in the UK is doing this, and it's pretty good. Feels a bit weird just walking out with stuff though.
I've seen variations on this at one of the grocery stores near me here in Germany too -- though it's definitely not particularly widespread yet. I still just use the normal self checkout here but that's more due to social anxiety and knowing the line will be pretty short because Germans tend to line up for the real-person cashier preferentially even when there are self-checkouts open.
I was a cashier at Walmart around high school days and I also preferred working self-checkouts as did most other cashiers, but the self-checkouts weren't as common then so those were harder spots to get.
The vast majority of interactions with people in the regular lines were fairly neutral, but yeah the forced interaction where it's customers who want to keep things from being so monotonous or robotic might make some jokes that lots of people make or have the same conversation about how the day is going etc. and then there's the times where the company tries to force you to ask customers to sign up for credit cards or donate to this or that. The store I worked at also pushed hard to make cashiers swap shopping carts with the customers during the transactions, which meant there was always a cart behind the cashier and as they bagged items they would also have to transfer those bags into that cart, and then swap carts with the customer once done. This was a loss prevention method to make sure there could be no items remaining in the customer cart that weren't scanned, but created additional friction interacting with the customer and was more work for the cashier.
As a customer though, I both liked and hated the self-checkouts back then, because there weren't very many of them and most customers are much slower going through self-checkouts. As a matter of pure efficiency overall, some people were better off going to a regular cashier as they were slow at scanning items themselves, but I can't blame them for going to self-checkouts either to avoid the interactions or to avoid the lines (even though they were sometimes the cause of longer lines in the self-checkouts). So far these days with more self-checkouts, it's not been as big of a problem just because there's plenty of different ones to choose from.
I love self check-out. I'd rather take longer to scan my own stuff than wait on anyone else. Plus I rarely run into issues.
This is how I feel as well, but unfortunately I live in an area with a high rate of shoplifting. Because of this the local supermarkets have begun really tightening up the rules for the self-checkouts, to the point that they're nigh unusable. You have about 3 seconds from scanning an item to set it down in the bagging area otherwise the screen locks up and the attendant needs to come manually override. So if you brought your own pair of canvas bags and need to pack them efficiently, or if perhaps you biked to the store and are attempting to load a backpack in a sensible manner, you're utterly screwed.
I finally realized that it was easier to scan, pay, and then bag my groceries instead of trying to bag while scanning.
Ah, I get why you'd want cashiers back at that point. We don't have that problem fortunately. Attendants just watch over and help if needed
Those types of self checkouts are annoying to begin with. Here supermarkets mostly work with random checks where once in a while a message pops up on the screen and someone comes over to randomly scan some products to confirm you scanned them. If you have a customer loyalty card I am pretty sure they mark you as "ok" for a while. The amount of times I have been checked at my regular supermarket has gone down over time.
Which works fairly well in my opinion. Although some people do get offended that they are picked for ramdom checks and take that out on the employee. Who are often young people (students or highschoolers) so it isn't without issues in that regard.
Scanning items on my phone as I shop is my favorite checkout method (aside from just-walk-out but I don't think it's efficient enough for large stores yet). Have someone spot check your cart as your leave sam's club-style and you're golden. No need to fiddle with the self checkout kiosk and there's only a short queue as you leave to get your receipt double-checked.
HEB does this relatively well in a few stores, as does sam's club. I imagine it's a bit easier to keep under control at sam's though since it's a membership based store.
Meijer's got this down pretty well here in the midwest too. We do the shop and scan thing for our regular grocery trips, and about 50% of the time it has an attendant spot check three items from our cart to make sure they've been scanned, then good to go.
The reduction or removal of self-checkout would coincide with a reduction or removal of my continuing to be a customer at that grocery store. Every store in my area is appallingly awful, and the self-checkouts are the only tolerable way to get in and out and spend as little time as possible in the presence of a store full of generally terrible people.
We have the self scan here, and I never want to do anything else. We even have handheld laser scanners you get by swiping your loyalty card (although the phone app is an option). You can check prices, see your total, and see most discounts as you scan. This last is great because you can see whether "save X on three" means you have to buy three or not (usually not).
I lay my reusable bags out in the cart and scan directly into them, so it's not any slower then having to rebag everything at the self checkout, and I sail past the lines to the dedicated kiosks, pay, and am out.
I have a spreadsheet that merges the grocery list with the recipes and a weekly meal plan, then groups the items by section and puts them in order. I've been thinking about expanding it into an app so that I can support an interface that reconfigured the list based on what store you're at, but haven't gotten to it.
COVID was the best time to buy groceries, honestly. My Wegmans let you shop by using an app to scan items. A lot of self checkouts weren't burdensome to use too.
Now Wegmans shut off their app, so I shop at cheaper places because it was the largest reason why I shipped there (plus their produce section is the fucking worse, I'd rather go to Walmart for produce). But since self checkout got so popular during COVID each grocery chain has rolled out software that makes the process so slow and burdensome to prevent theft that for the first time in a decade I actively look for a person to do my groceries.
It really fucking sucks. And don't get me started on things like "we don't do plastic bags, even if you do self check, please pay 10 cents for each bag". I don't mind it, but if I'm doing self check I'm saving you money. Give me the bags for free, or eat the cost because groceries shit up like 30% in the last two years.
Fyi I understand what they're doing and a lot of the context around this, I just think my experience is now so much worse then it used to be. I feel like I'm paying more and getting a worse experience for it.
Anyways, /end rant I guess
I would agree with you in regards to app checkout. I would do all my shopping at Amazon Fresh stores if the prices weren't so bad and the money weren't going to Amazon. I would even consider shopping at Wal Mart if their "Scan and Go" feature in the app weren't locked to their stupid Walmart+ subscription, and this is the store with produce so bad they've got shelves full of pre-wilted lettuce.
Glad to hear it. I try to avoid self-checkout unless I have fewer than a literal handful of items. I'd rather help justify someone's job with my patronage.
This last line from the article made me chuckle though, emphasis mine:
"Sneak" is a strong word for walking into a store.
The self checkouts at our Costco are mind bogglingly bad. They don’t have detachable hand held scanners, making it hard to scan large items…..at Costco.
Also that sentence explains why they started requiring to see my membership card while in line for self checkout. Always thought it was bizarre since you have to scan it at the machine.
Odd, they have the handheld scanners at the Costcos around here. It's kind of iffy if you can use them or if it's supposed to be employees only but I was able to scan everything with it and pay pretty easily.
My Costco, which is only about 1yr old, has guns at the checkout, but they don't work without some kind of employee badge scan. If you walk up to a self-checkout with a cart full, they'll come by and ask if you need help."
Ours has the guns and we're able to use them freely. You just have to scan your card at the register before anything starts working.
Though that doesn't do anything to prevent non members from using them.
That said, we almost never make it out of Costco with less than a cart-full and it's easier for us to just get it done at a manned register.
It makes sense here, normally you aren't allowed into the main store area without a membership card. If you don't have a membership, you are directed towards the customer service counter where you can get one. However, with the self checkout lines, it is both very easy to get into the store proper by walking past that counter and through the self checkout area. Then you could grab whatever merchandise you want and check out at the self-checkout using someone else's card, since the machines have no way of knowing if the person scanning a card is its rightful owner.
Membership fees make up the bulk of Costco's narrow profit margins so it makes sense that they want to police this issue aggressively.
I'd rather go to an actual cashier than have to wait behind 5 people who take longer to scan 7 items, and there's always someone who is confused by the self checkouts, or having to wait for the 1 attendant covering 4-10 self-checkouts.
It's funny, my experience at my local little grocery store is the exact opposite. Come the dinner time rush and there's a big line for the cashier checkouts, but then the 4 self-checkouts usually have several free, so I wander past the line up to a self-checkout and can checkout faster than the line moves. Even when I'm buying beer and need the cashiers to swipe their card, still faster for me than waiting in line.
Conversely many stores near me have only one or two open regular lanes and have a large self checkout corral (usually with 30-50% of machines inoperable). My current store is pretty good about getting someone over to unlock your machine when it gets stuck but at the last store I frequented the staffing was so sparse that it was almost always faster to move to a different self checkout machine if it locked you out.
One time at the latter store I tried using the “I brought my own bags” option but apparently the bags were too heavy so it locked me out and called an attendant over to fix it. No one came, so I moved to another machine, tried again, locked out. Tried just putting my bags on without telling it, locked out, on to the next one. Finally I just did the whole checkout process without bagging anything, then bagged it all up after paying and left. I looked over as I was leaving and the three machines I locked up were still flashing yellow and waiting for someone to come fix them.
I don’t mind self checkout when it’s a machine that trusts you to do it right, like at Sam’s or HEB - even if you have to get your receipt checked on the way out. But machines that constantly think you’re trying to steal from them are so irritating to deal with, doubly so when staff wants to check your receipt as well. At that point please just pay someone to handle this properly.
Can we give chairs to them as well, still don’t get why the US has this mentality of forcing people to stand all day when every where else I been to they have seats.
I think the chairs likely reduce your item scan speed. I am only guessing because I worked at Walmart as a cashier about 15 years ago so I never actually got to sit down, but the way the registers were designed, sitting down would reduce mobility and access to the conveyor belt and bagging area. From what I've seen they haven't redesigned them in a way that would optimize for sitting. You can rely on the conveyor belt to bring the items closer to you, but there's only a limited area you can grab from, and if you want to optimize how you bag items for customers then you need access to more of the items on the belt, which means you need to be able to reach further to get them.
Of course cashiers are there for their full shift no matter what so it's not them who are trying to maximize item scan speed, because they aren't going to go home any faster. I think stores are incentivized to do this because it means they can employ fewer people to get the same amount of items scanned through. This to me is probably the reason why they were so hard set against cashiers sitting.
And Walmart back then definitely tracked item scanning times, it was sort of part of performance reviews even. I think 400 items per hour or something like that was the mark we were supposed to hit, but I'm going back many years to remember that. There were tricks we had to do on the computer to put it into a non-time monitoring state, like if there were no customers or if we had to wait for a manager to come over or such, in order to prevent that from calculating into the time, otherwise 400 items per hour would be impossible to hit in some cases. I could be wrong on that time frame as well, I remember 400 specifically, but 400 per hour seems kind of low but in any case it was not a number you could reach by just going at your normal speed necessarily. I remember being below it when I first started out because it was a lot for me to get used to before I could get into the flow of things.
The German supermarket chains here are known as the fastest checkouts and they provide seats for their staff, as a counterpoint.
Yeah the cashiers at any supermarket in Germany absolutely disprove this, they're lightning fast to the point where it stressed me out when I first moved here. Even outside of Germany, Aldi in the US (Aldi Süd owns it for the Germans who care) lets the cashiers sit and I don't notice any perceivable difference in checkout time. I also more generally doubt that standing actually reduces your ability to reach for things on the checkout. If anything, the ability to have a height-adjustable chair would increase the reach for shorter folks, and in my experience reaching for particular items from farther down the conveyor belt generally did not particularly improve efficiency anyway -- the fastest and most efficient would be when you didn't have to reach for something but could just grab things and scan them rapid-fire without searching for them on the belt.
When I worked as a supermarket cashier for a brief time in the US, by far the biggest drain on my scanning times was needing to bag people's groceries for them when we were understaffed (which was almost always) and I thus didn't have another employee there as the bagger. But it's probably unlikely that Americans will give up that particular entitlement en masse anytime soon.
The bagging aspect makes the biggest difference when talking about scanning times and sitting. I can believe if you don't have to bag, that you can scan items as quickly while sitting and standing, but if you have to bag the items, I still strongly suspect that it would tank the item scanning speed if you are sitting, or would reduce the bagging experience when someone puts somewhat incompatible items together in the bag because those were the only items that were reachable on the conveyor belt from a seated position. To specify my thought more, I think scanning and bagging items while standing will be faster than scanning and bagging items while sitting. If you're only scanning then I doubt it makes much of a difference.
My understanding is that Aldi in the US does not have the cashiers bag the items (that they don't even have bags at all for that matter).
I disagree on your assessment selecting items from the conveyor belt would be relevant when it comes to speed of scanning while bagging, be it sitting or standing, from my experience as a grocery cashier in college. But I do think the ergonomics of actually doing the bagging might be impacted -- though having the cashier doing the bagging at all necessarily is much slower than having either the customer or another dedicated employee do the bagging for anything but very small purchases. I often had to leave my little cashier's nook and stand at the end where the bagger would stand to do the bagging after I'd finished scanning all the items. Most US grocery stores employ some number of dedicated baggers for this task at least for during peak hours (though understaffing is a problem as it is anywhere).
Aldi is the odd one out since its US stores operate more or less how their German ones do (despite their practices being atypical in the US but typical in Germany). Though US Aldi cashiers don't have the German levels of sheer speed -- I as a customer struggle to keep up bagging groceries with them.
Yeah there's different variations of how this setup works so maybe even still I'm not being specific enough, because this experience you are describing isn't anything like what happens in many of the major supermarket or grocery stores in my area.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Walmart_Store_Cash_Registers_-_flickr14248336115_f2ef6b5b1e_o.jpg
This has been a typical setup around here, not just at Walmart but at other stores as well, so you have to bag the items as you scan them because there's not much space to put the items anywhere else after being scanned. In order to bag the items appropriately, you need to scan them in a certain order. There is no going to the end and bagging all of them after scanning, because there's no room for that type of task. It's designed that each item is bagged after scanning.
So within arm's reach while sitting you would have access to fewer items on the conveyor belt, and you have to bag them in the order you scan them, then you have limited options of what you can bag items together with. Eventually you either have to slow down to shift items in the bag around, or you'd have to get out of the chair to reach other items on the conveyor belt, or wait for the customer to take under-filled bags off the carousel if there aren't compatible items to bag, all of which would slow down item scan speed. It might seem to be minimal slowdown in one individual transaction, but across multiple cashiers and multiple transactions per day, per week, per month, it would add up.
You are reinforcing my commitment not to shop at Walmart. Safeway always has sufficient room at the end of the conveyor belt for the groceries to wait for either the customer, the cashier or a bagger to bag them in optimum order for each bag. Trader Joes doesn't have a conveyor belt, but everything seems to work fine.
Do they look like standard register checkouts you see anywhere else? I'm not talking about in general, the details matter. I'd be curious of a name of a store to see if I can find pictures. It also matters if the cashiers are bagging the items themselves. I'm basing my assumption on having to grab the items off the conveyor, scan and bag them, while sitting. If all you have to do is can them, then I can see scanning speed not being significantly impacted, but if you have to bag them then it means you have to meet customer standards by bagging compatible items together and if those items aren't placed just right on the conveyor, they are out of your reach while sitting and limit the ability to bag those items together.
I forget that it's not unusual in the US for someone else to bag your goods. I remember wondering what on earth there were two people doing at each till when I visited a Trader Joe's and worrying that I was going to be demanded to tip someone who had bagged my stuff (and not how I like it, although I have to say that I'm not going to blame anyone else for not complying with my weirdly specific Bagging Rules). There was also a person in that shop looking after the queue, it was a very strange experience.
FWIW I haven't seen any cashier bagging stuff for over a decade, unless the customer, usually an older person, just let it all pile up while they scanned it. As soon as the customer makes the slightest motion to bagging their own stuff they just let it go.
Ah really? Ok, I'm really not in touch with cultural norms over there. Fwiw, my experience was just pre-pandemic in New York, so I don't know if that was a particularly localised experience or what. It makes sense though, it did seem like a pretty indulgent employer to have so many non-vital workers around, given that the trend these days seems to be understaff shops and then run their teams ragged.
I think this is definitely regional within the US, and it even varies on the individual level. When I worked for a grocery store in the US, I was expected to bag groceries as the cashier if there wasn't a second employee there to bag them. Some customers would start to bag their own groceries (and I would generally continue doing so to be helpful), but some would absolutely just stand there and wait for me while I slowly bagged groceries for them even though there were people behind them in line and they'd have been out the door quicker if they'd done some of the bagging. This was not over a decade ago, so I don't think norms have changed that much.
I don't know about regionality, but it varies quite a lot between stores. I'd say that here in Southern California, many - though not all - stores will bag for you. Some stores even have "bag boys" who exist specifically to pack bags for you, while some have the cashiers do it. Aldi has the cashiers dump everything in an empty shopping cart for you and a big table behind them where you can bag them yourself. Places like Winco and Food 4 Less have two conveyor belts at the end so that customers can go to the end of them to bag them. Generally speaking, places where you do your own bagging are less expensive than the places where it's done for you
Yeah when I worked at Kroger's in Ohio there were theoretically dedicated bag boys, but they were usually busy rounding up carts in the parking lot bc we were chronically understaffed.
I'm all for them hiring more workers to staff the checkout lines, I'm sick of seeing (literally) 20 turned off checkout signs and one lit up on the other end of the store, right next to the self checkout.
Plus, if your workers can't bag properly, I'm going to choose self check so I can make sure my eggs aren't on the bottom.
One thing in the article I need to comment on is
Emphasis mine, apps? So, are they claiming that doordash people are jacking stuff along with my order or are they saying store specific apps for payment or... What? The Times article linked here is paywalled and I'd rather just read the actual study but don't have a chance right now.
From the Times article:
The study linked in that article is a dead link. So I just have to assume what they mean is a situation where people have pre-ordered their food with an app (or paid in-store through an app?) and this makes it easier for people to walk out without going through a cashier so they feel emboldened to steal.
I’ve never paid using these methods either, so I’m also not sure what’s going on here.
I assume they are referring to something along the lines of the app in the cnn article where you scan and bag your items as you shop. checkout app article
If this is meant for restaurants as well, I can believe it. Those shelves where your food is left to be picked up are an easy target. We've had two family-sized orders taken before we got there in the last few months.
I generally dislike self-checkout for more than a dozen or so things. The kiosks usually don't have enough space to bag a lot of stuff, but the staffed cashier stations have oodles of room and sometimes a bagger to load stuff right back into my cart.
The one aspect I do really enjoy about self-checkout is that in every single store those stations are always 1 line feeding 4 or more kiosks. Which prevents any one person from jamming up the line. With staffed checkouts, it's always a roll of the dice if the line you picked will move faster or slower than another equivalent length line because of various problems.
Trader Joe's does a really nice thing where everyone stands in one line and the next cashier signals the next customer.
I've seen the same model at Fry's Electronics and Barnes and Noble books. It really works well. It's also nice if you are the slow customer.
The TJs thing is very location dependant. For instance, I see it in major cities like New York, SF, and large metro Areas, but smaller cities and even places like Atlanta Metro don't have the feeder model...though I wish they did.
I'm not certain if it's an architectural issue where only stores designed for it can have it or not.
It's definitely location dependent. The location in Ann Arbor, MI could not possibly do this, just due to the amount of floor space they have and the way it's arranged. I generally avoid it on weekends, it's an absolute madhouse (a very polite madhouse, but a madhouse).
You won't see it there anymore, lol.
Microcenter does it too. Thankfully they're still kicking.
The last time I went to Trader Joes they all had individual lines. But it was kind of a weird experience because there were so many people in there and tons of checkout stands were open so it was still very quick.
I wish that every store did this, though, since it's supposed to be the fastest and most fair way to get people checked out. The last time I went through the manned checkout line at a Wal Mart, I spent half an hour waiting in line because the cashier was still in training and the supervisor she needed was running thin between everyone else who needed them.
It prevents the guilt and resentment when you are the one who needs more time. It really does work flexibly and smoothly.
RIP Fry's.
And Radio Shack : (
Agreed about the lines. The one-queue-to-multiple-outputs is simply more efficient.
Not to mention that it seems like most people don't account for that difference when picking a line? My husband and I have switched over to doing pickup orders instead of shopping in-store, but on the occasion that I do go in, all of the lines are pretty much even. There will be, say, three people waiting at each register -- and there will also be three people in line for the self-checkouts, even though that line leads to eight different registers on its own.
I think a lot of people just go for the shortest line instead of what will have the shortest time, which is invariably the self-checkouts.
With some of the layouts now and just the fact that there are more of them which means they've become more spread out, some are approaching similarity of the normal checkouts in my experience. There can still be a line filtering into multiple kiosks, but the layouts make it such that it might only be 2 kiosks instead of 4, but there's more kiosks just separated a bit more. Though there are some where it's the other way too, one line for even more kiosks, but the store was clearly designed to create this one line by placing shelving and what not to limit where you can approach rather than expecting customers to do it out of custom. When the layout is lacking, some customers can just cut the single line and go up behind someone that is obviously almost checked out, leaving it up to the customers that were waiting in the single line to play line monitor or just deal with people cutting, which then ends up with more people cutting until everyone forfeits the single line.
I avoid self checkout whenever I can because I'd that rather people in my community have jobs. I've worked as a cashier for pay in the past and I see no reason to do the same job for free as a customer.
There was a lot of talk about retraining cashiers for other, better jobs when these machines were first installed. Like most corporate promises, it seems to have largely been a cover for cutting staff and retaining more profit. The last decade has left me much more human-focused, less inclined to believe the corporate line about these kinds of things.
In many parts of the world cashiers have a nice ergonomic chair to sit in. It seems punitive that we don't do that here in the states.
Not letting your worker sit down so that the customer definitely knows they're not a lazybones is such a weird idea. Where I am, they all sit down, but they're no slower or worse at the job for it, obviously. Making someone stand just because you can is just petty cruelty, it seems.
This is my own personal take on it, so feel free to disagree... When I see a person sitting down for their job, it usually means they work at a computer or something. Or to put it another way, using the computer is part of the job.
Now, if we shift over to cashiers... Well, it may be digital, but it's no computer. So in that case, they're not doing a job, they're relaxing when sitting down. If they're relaxing, it means they're not ready to serve a customer... So why are they relaxing in a work area?
Oh, and the kicker to all this that I expect I'm going to be given a lot of crap for? If you're in a job where you are unable to meet the physical requirements for the job for any reason... You shouldn't be doing that job in the first place.
Here's the thing though...you let a cashier sit, and magically like 40% more of the country is better able to do that job. (Arbitrary percentage).
Do we require people on factory lines using soldering irons to stand? No, because that's a dumb requirement that needlessly restricts your ability to hire people.
I certainly couldn't cashier: I have back troubles and standing in one place for more than an hour or so really aggravates it, but doing work where I walk or move less so. Giving a simple stool so that for work that is 99.9% in the arms gives a rest of back and legs would enable me to do that job with no difficulty.
You'd have a more legitimate case of "not being able to physically do the job" if the requirement was "dragging another human out of a burning building" not "stand there because someone might think you're lazy if you sit."
Here's an experiment. Tape off a 2ftx3ft box in your kitchen, along a countertop. Put your groceries on one side. Stand in the box. Now move your groceries back and forth for 2 hours. Don't leave the box, no phone. You can put on Mariah Carrey's All I want for Christmas on loop for entertainment. Take a pee break then do it for another 2 hours. Eat a lunch in 30 minutes, do for another 2 hours, then another pee break. Then do 2 more hours.
Then report back and tell me that we shouldn't let people who do that for 20+ hours a week have a stool.
This kind of thinking is completely alien to me. I'm used to cashiers sitting down all my life here (they can stand if they want to), and they are definitely not relaxing, they are simply doing their job while sitting down. And depending on where I'm shopping, they're extremely fast while doing it.
Nothing is relaxing about that. Cashiers just have an easier time when they can sit, and obviously less pain. To me it's just cruel to demand that they have to stand.
I see where you're coming from, I really do, but it's so arbitrary. But the fact that humans are not good at standing in place for long periods of time is an objective reality. So I'd prioritise the person's wellbeing over customers' subjective "I like this/that". Having said that, I guess this is where the market speaks, and if customers express a preference for standing cashiers, that will have an effect. I would try and exercise my power as a customer and avoid such places, we're all free to do so.
I also understand your point, and agree with standing in one place is a Bad Idea. Also, for what it's worth, my time is the customer service business was with fast food... which does bias me. After all, in fast food you actually ARE moving around a lot, and so a stool or chair becomes a hindrance more than anything else.
Then it ultimately comes down to "The customer is God in retail", seeing as how they vote with their wallet/choose where to spend their money, and if they spend more money at a place where people are standing rather than sitting... well, maybe that says a lot.
Side note- actually reading the article, it appears the main complaint is theft. And there was a study conducted that when you have someone watching you, you're much less likely to try to do something shady than if it's only self-checkout with no one around (or as the Other Site would try to phrase it... if you see someone taking something illegally from one of the Big Box stores... no you didn't)
I've heard people talking about the "employee discount" at self checkouts, which tickled me, if I'm honest. I can completely believe that theft is a real issue.
I find that to be a rather misanthropic perspective in this case. The whole point of the Americans with Disabilities Act is that we shouldn't discriminate against people who do not have the typical body or have medical issues. And the reason why it's so important is that literally everyone who doesn't die prematurely will have a disibility as they age. A person in their 60s might have a back issue which prevents them from standing for long points of time, but are otherwise able-bodied; why would you want to prevent them from working that job? This is especially prudent because there's absolutely nothing about that job that would actually require them to be standing up the whole time.
Having quick checkouts at grocery stores are nice. But personally speaking, if I'm going to be dealing with human beings I would much prefer that they be happy and sociable than rushed and miserable. One of the nice perks of being a regular at a store is getting to know the people who work there.
To play devil's advocate here, when I worked as a cashier I vastly preferred working on the self-checkouts because it was less work for the same hourly pay as working the normal register. You could easily run 4 self checkouts and still do less work than running one normal register (though our employer often made us run 8 at a time which did keep you on your toes). Neither job had a chair.
"Reversal" here seems to mean it's peaked and they'll be using it somewhat less, because the downsides became more apparent. Whether they take it out entirely depends on the location.
Awesome!
If I have a cart of any reasonable size, I can get through a staffed checkout line 3x faster than self checkout. Plop my crap on the conveyer, let them deal with the scanning, and I bag it all to my own preference. When a thing doesn't scan right I don't have to wait for 1 overworked person to deal with 5 other people before getting to me.
I doubt they'll fully eliminate self-checkout, it's too useful when just grabbing a handful of items, but maybe more than 1-3 registers will be open again.
That has been exactly my complaint about self checkout since it's inception. I don't get a discount for scanning, I don't get a discount for bringing my own bags, so WHY should I use self checkout? I have to wait and find a teller if I buy booze, which also slows me down.
I don't understand how the stores have conned us all into free labor. Have some self checkout stations for those who like it, but I DON'T WORK HERE.
nobody's mentioned this yet, but I strongly prefer self checkout because I can compare prices I see on the screen with what I expected to pay.
I hate going home to find that the cashier rung up my produce wrong, or didn't honour a discount coupon, or more common: that the store did not take down its sale signs past the special rate time, or that the sale only applies to varieties A, C and D, and not variety B of the same type. In some stores, if the price on the shelf isn't the same as at the checkout, you get the lower price etc, but some stores (eg Giant Tiger) will treat you like a criminal and hold all your stuff, hold up the line, Voice Of God for another staff to slower meander to the shelf, and then come back and tell you you're wrong or whatever. They did that to me three times in as many months, and I haven't been back since. (once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action, I like to joke)
let me scan the thing, let me be slow, let me check the price is correct, without holding anyone else up.
I tried one of those Amazon grab and go things at LaGuardia this year and it was amazing. You literally just card in, grab stuff off the shelves and put it in a bag and leave (you can get an email receipt if you use a kiosk in the store). It just worked and I wish more places had that tech, feels like it solves both the shrink and inconvenience problem of self checkout...
I also tried Amazon's palm reading tech at Whole Foods and it felt like a total gimmick when it takes nearly just as long to do apple pay (and doesnt accept all cards yet).
That is kind of cool, but it's also a bit dystopian to get tracked in real life like you do online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcimRZF8g3Y
I love using the self check out at Aldi. I can bag my own groceries and put the meat on the bottom of the bag so if it leaks it doesn't get on my other food. Chips, bread and eggs on top. I can avoid the cashiers that think it's a race and smash the shit out of my fruit and vegetables.
Those sound like terrible cashiers/baggers
I think Aldi and Lidl put a lot of effort into optimising checkout speed, for sure over things like not crushing someone's bananas. It's why they put huge barcodes on several sides of a product, so the cashier doesn't have to waste time spinning it around to find the bit to scan. They also tend to have a little area just after the tills for you to actually pack the stuff you just bought because you're not intended to keep up with them, you're supposed to just take your stuff away in the same trolley and then pack it into your shopping bags to take home. It's a whole thing for these brands, I gather.
Yes, the whole shopping experience is different with Aldi at least, I'm not familiar with Lidl. I'm ok with putting up with the quarter for a shopping cart, or all of the products still in shipping boxes and any other side effects of them cutting costs, but I dislike my food being a used and the self checkout was a nice solution to that even though it wasn't their reason for implementing it. As for people losing their jobs because of self checkouts, I'd never like to see people lose their jobs, but at some point we are paying people to do a monotonous job that can be accomplished better/more efficiently with technology. This trend is going to continue unless things go horribly wrong in our society. We just need to find new things for people to do, or reduce every ones hours and pay a similar wage, not sure how that gets accomplished though.... And now I'm rambling....
I feel like self-checkout was just a cover for continued enshittification of the store experience. I love self-checkout for a few items, but anything more complex and the use case falls apart. And God forbid you need help with anything or encounter an edge case like an item that won’t scan properly; in my experience I’m lucky to get the attention of anyone at all and even then it’s a crapshoot if they know how to fix the issue in a timely manner. It doesn’t happen often, but in general I’d rather have stores with more staff overall because it incentivizes them to be more helpful and available than stores with lots of self-checkouts.
I also agree with the poster above that mentioned trying to be more human-focused with their behaviors. I’d rather support someone’s job than get bad service and still pay the same amount.
We have a grocery store down the road that put in self checkout machines about 12 years ago, then took them out 7 years ago. Then it put them back in 4 years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.
The real winners are the contractors making all those changes.
This is great news, albeit for the wrong reasons.
I spent a chunk of my adult life before self-checkout became a thing. I felt bad about all of those people losing their jobs. My later father, then elderly, not giving a fuck wouldn't use them. When a store employee pointed out to him that he could use a self check out, he said LOUDLY "No. I want people to have jobs".
I wonder why this has taken so long to turn around. Greedflation and price gouging driving poorer people to steal?
"Won't somebody think of the jobs" would be a lot more convincing if the jobs in question weren't absolutely terrible jobs that people only take because they have no other option. Get rid of those jobs and we're one step closer to changing society to not have a shit jobs tier at all. Which is not ideal for the people who need to be scanning stuff in order to make rent or put food on the table, I'll admit.
That's not super helpful without appropriate societal restructuring so that those jobs aren't needed. Right now getting rid of those jobs just means more money going from the poor to the rich.
Sure. But I don't see any evidence that we're going to start restructuring society just because that would be a nice thing to do. The rich are absolutely going to keep stealing everything until they are made to stop, and I strongly suspect things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Status quos don't get changed by keeping things the same.
I've been a cashier. Among the jobs you can get without a college degree ( I've had a number of them ) it isn't bad work. Before self checkouts came the compensations and benefits weren't bad either.
If every job someone considers a shit job goes away, society will be forced to use universal basic income at the mercies of the 1% paying for it. Not necessarily an improved world.
I've worked retail in various roles and out of all the low end jobs I've had it's the one I would be least likely to go back to. But each to their own.
Oh no! Wait no that's exactly what I want to happen. I'm fairly sure that would be a significantly improved world.
The problem is that the 1 percent would likely prefer a world that resembles Victorian London or mid 20th century Calcutta. They won't adopt universal basic income without a serious fight. They want survival to be a reward they can dole out to people who are useful to them
It isn't what I want to happen.
As a non-expert I can see a lot of obvious problems, problems that people promoting it just ignore.
Supermarket cashier jobs are good jobs for unskilled people, or at least they were. It is a good thing ( maybe for bad reasons ) that at least some of those jobs are coming back.
I was poorer when self checkout first started hitting the States.
It was a 70% off sale on produce, everyday, from day 0. They didn't have scales on the drop area at first. Was even better when in-store scanning was a thing...employee would scan three random barcodes in your cart to check, but the barcode didn't snitch that I had $5 of broccoli and not $2.
I think it went unnoticed for a long time because of this. Produce always has large spoilage rates, so even hefty theft is masked a bit and manifests as less waste over time.
Odd. Australia is still going full steam ahead. It's typical for a supermarket to have 1 to 0 staffed checkouts and just 50 self serve machines. Personally I'm all for it. So much faster to go through the self checkout rather than having to line up behind a bunch of people for staffed checkouts like you used to have to do.