People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
No matter what line I pick at the supermarket, that’s the line that will have a technical issue, a grandma with 200 coupons, a guy who wants to scan 50 lottery tickets, and a price check that takes 10 minutes.
Also no matter what spot I pick in line, that’s the spot where people decide to pass through
Either that, or I have to wait for an employee myself for the stupidest reason, i.e. that I've brought a canvas bag that they have to verify I didn't steal.
Your supposed to weigh the bag first, at least in some stores.
Unexpected item in bagging area. Please remove unexpected item in bagging area. An associate has been alerted.
It’s irritating for sure. They’ve been around for long enough that 95% of shoppers should know how to use them.
I remember before these things came out. It would typically take forever to get through the line to have a cashier ring you up. There was always an old person in front of you that wanted to pay via check, which slowed the line down even more. How about the guy using his 2-way, on speaker, in front of you? That fucking chirp going on and on. What’s that? Someone wants to buy a lotto ticket, which means the cashier has to go to another counter to get the ticket and come back. Next, the soccer mom has 20 coupons she wants to use, half of which are expired or are for a different store. It was so much fun!
I much prefer the self checkouts. I can get through those within a few minutes. It sucks that those cashier jobs have mostly been eliminated. But that’s the price of progress I suppose. We’ve known that automation was coming for all of those types of jobs for years now.
Huh, never really experienced that myself. Excluding self checkout at fast food though.
Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don't use self-checkout despite it potentially saving a lot of time. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.
Super fun fact, the people who aren't idiots at the self checkout, are not notable and therefore are not noted. It's the morons who stand out.
Just like with driving. The guy in front is always too slow, and the guy behind is always going too fast. Because you don't notice when the inverse is true.
I avoid self checkout for different reasons.
I'm not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.
I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.
Further:
Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.
If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.
You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you're not being tracked b/c you used cash.
whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout
The store I go to most often has those rotating plastic bag holders at the end of the belts which makes it effectively impossible to put stuff into your own bags. And they have the fucking gall to put up signs asking you to bring your own bags! I do self-checkout there no matter how much shit I have in the cart.
My number one reason for avoiding self checkout is that I want people to have jobs.
If fewer and fewer people use the manned cashier lines, there will be fewer manned cashier lines.
If it's busy, and I'm just grabbing a few things, sure, I'll divert to the self checkout, but if there's nobody in line, or just a few people in line, I'll avoid self checkout. I'm not going to be the reason someone lost shifts.
number 2 works less well if you are off white
🎶 the land of the freeeeeeeee 🎶
🙄
Well then don't be a fucking moron. Sorry for being a dick towards those kind of people, but the voice prompts walk you through the entire process. All you gotta do is listen to them. I didn't have any issues when I first tried one 20 years ago. They're self-explanatory.
I mean at this point they've been around long enough that everyone should know how to use them by now, unless you recently moved from a country that doesn't have them. But again, the machines walk you through the process every time.
Mate, not the previous poster but I'm a senior software engineer with an EE degree and broad enough experience that I could design and implement myself a self-checkout from the ground up, both hardware and software, including UI and backend integration, and I still tend to avoid self-checkouts for those reasons and a lot more (many which I listed in another post here).
There are two very opposite ends of the curve for people who don't like self-checkouts: those who can't deal with the tech (who you deem "fucking morons") and those who have evaluated self-checkouts as a process and found it to overall be inferior to the existing process for their own usual use conditions or who look at it in a broader context and find it to have indirect social damage.
That you can only spot the "being a moron" as a reason to avoid self-checkouts is a pretty good indicator of your own intellectual limitations.
Fortunately, I'm the sort who goes, "Who the FUCK are you looking at?", when I catch people staring.
Yall live in retard land. Everyone here has everything checked out in their carts before they get to the registers unless they have like 5 items. Otherwise they are scooted to restarted land off to the side.
And so you blame the person whose thrown into having to use a self checkout with little to no instruction having to figure it out instead of the corpo execs who wanted to siphon a few local jobs into their new yachts?
If that person can't even read a screen or do a minimum of reasoning, yes.
Working with office and business types all day long in a highly technical field, I will say this: people don't even bother reading when it's literally their job to read, understand and act upon something.
I'm not even going to touch the minimum of reasoning thing.
In the Netherlands , 18% of the population can’t properly read (functioneel analfabeet).
Yeah I didn’t believe that either first time I read that.
Your translation of functionally illiterate is so adorable. I'm stealing it.
that's why one line for multiple checkouts is better
Is it not the standard? Every store with self-checkout I've been to has a single line for all machines. I've even seen some stores with a single line for regular checkout.
Some places it's unclear, like Lowe's home improvement stores. Most people there sort of gravitate to a one-line-for-all-kiosks arrangement but there's often one douchebag who think everybody else is standing there for no reason and cuts in.
OMG this.
Person in front checking out:
BEEP
Lays item on the scale, but is leaning on the scale.
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
Picks item up
Please put item on the scale
puts item on the scale but has their hand on the scale still
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
HELP IS ON THE WAY
(help was not on the way)
Them: These things NEVER WORK!!!!
30 seconds later the POS resets and lets them try again.
me: Stop touching the scale, just leave you item there and back off
it works
They scan the next item and place it on the scale and leave their hand on the scale.
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
Every single item, they never learned. I eventually went to stand in the single manned line that had 15 people in it.
I was doing self-checkout the other day and I kept getting the "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA" alert every time I put something in my bag. I was getting enraged until I realized that for some random reason I wasn't scanning anything before putting it in the bag. I have no idea what happened to my brain there.
I learned after a software update my local store now glitched if you put down a bag before you start scanning, it won’t let you proceed past the first item bagging without override. So now I wait and put the bag down with the first item so it won’t notice the specific bag weight and won’t force the person to help.
My local store has the "OWN BAG" button but it gives you like two and a half seconds to get the bags down before it sounds an alert and the attendant has to come over. Since my bags are always buried under the shit I've put in the cart, it's an impossible task.
Not only the self checkout. I usually end up behind someone who's new to the concept of exchanging goods for legal tender and needs an introduction to it.
This is of course after they have told the story about why they're in the store, starting with the new testament and moving on from there...
I spend a lot of time thinking about how it's not my place to judge these people, but I think very few of them would manage to sit the right way on the toilet without outside assistance.
I always notice people are super cocky about this kind of thing. Yet self-checkouts are so fucking terrible it basically everyone runs into problems at them eventually. So just tempting fate from everyone in this thread really.
Whoever designed these machines had never used checkouts, touchscreens, or money before.
Early Wal-Mart models were the touchiest, naggiest goddamn things, like whoever invented PRESS X TO NOT DIE got fired from Capcom and went straight into commercial UX. You will bend over two times for every item, you may not swipe the same item twice for duplicates, and that half-ounce blister-pack better register on the bag-side scale or else the idiot alarm will go off anyway. As it will if you spend more than two seconds figuring out a screen that just jabbed your ears with a shrill beep to demand instant responses to a modal choice for no discernible reason.
Recently CVS had one that's ATM-shaped, with an itty-bitty platform for your stuff. The cash slot is at knee height. The lower half of the machine is angled toward the ground. You can't fucking see it, while it's still demanding immediate responses to modal options, like you're playing a game and have no sane reason to look away from the screen. Hi! Press button to begin. Are you buying something today? Press button to buy. Do you speak English? Press button for English. Will you be scanning things? Press button to scan. Okay, begin scanning things. Press button to scan something else. Press button to not scan something else. Press button to check out. Press button to pay your bill. Press button for how you'll be paying your bill. Press button to activate the cash siphon conveniently located upside-down and backwards two feet off the floor, for use with popular brands of shin-mounted wallets, because the cocaine-chewing lizard person who designed this object has never seen a goddamn vending machine.
It was fine ten years ago! For like a decade, you got a shelf with a scanner in the middle, like a goddamn checkout counter, and you did the thing you've watched register-jockeys do since you got to sit in the cart. They didn't model human customers as idiot robots who'll instinctively stare at a screen and blindly follow instructions as quickly as possible. They acted like you had expectations, and were perhaps engaged in some manual activity involving a cart, a scanner, and three dozen disparate objects.
