Then offer a discount for self checkout.
Real US/Europe split here
No cashier packs your bag for you in Europe. Sometimes it’s a fun game trying to be faster packing than them scanning.
I used to love using the self-checkout. But then it became a trend among the corporate overlords here to get all paranoid about people stealing food, so now they have the weight system calibrated too strict. Now if you breath on the items in the bag it locks you out and someone has to come unlock the system to continue scanning. So it’s not really worth the hassle, and seems kinda pointless since an employee has to unlock the system after every few items.
I hate self checkout. I work all day to then check out my shit and bag my own groceries? And pay 2x for the same food and less service than 5 years ago?
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- I don’t work here. Stop trying to get me to do the job for free, either pay a cashier to check me out or fuck off.
- There’s an epidemic of these machines not working and then the shopper getting charged with shoplifting over it, Wal-Mart is the worst at doing this.
I actually prefer self checkout. Idk. I get it though.
Management can fuck right the hell off. Self checkout is taking jobs away from people and getting us to work for free.
I mean, both are right. Clients shouldn’t have to do the cashier job.
But clients should stop going there to send a message instead of harassing the minimum salary employee.
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I’d rather “work” than wait behind people with 100+ items. I can be out the door in 2 minutes.
even faster if u skip some items from being scanned
Based
Why bother going through the checkout at all, the fastest way out is straight through the door. Unrelated, the weather is changing so I’m thinking of buying a really big coat, and I’ll want pockets for my keys and other essentials.
Shoppin’ with Hoffman
I don’t know where you live but here theft is a crime and very antisocial and despicable.
Someone has to pay for the thieves and prices rise because they have to compensate for theft. Even if prices in reality do not need to compensate, because margin is already big enough, it gives retail a free card to jack prices, which, in essence, is yet again against consumers.
I don’t know where YOU live but Walmart is one of the biggest thieves in the USA. People working there still have to collect government assistance because they pay too little to live on.
Never understood that argument. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Self checkout makes that happen.
Not wanting to do free work for a company (they don’t even give you a discount if you use self-service) is being a boomer?
That’s the first time I’ve seen the word “boomer” on the opposite side of the word “sucker”.
Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!
Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!
That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.
In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.
Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.
In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.
So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.
Maybe you can go the warehouse and pick it up from the boxes, drive down to the farm to het the produce or, even better, grow your own food ALL THE WHILE STILL PAYING FULL VALUE TO THE SUPERMARKET.
“People used to have even more done for them and now they don’t and pay the same” is not the powerful argument for us having even less done for us that you think it is.
Exactly! Back in my day, people used to fill up my gas for me and carry my things up to my hotel room. Young people are getting lazy and entitled! Corporations need to make them work harder. Makes it hard to humiliate the poors if they make ME do the work.
Tbh back then the pay was more fairly in line with cost of living for some of the jobs. however, it has been a good 20 or so year since it was more fair. Nowadays, it is absolutely scary the cost of living. it’s down right criminal.
Okay boomer
The Boomers are right sometimes, like about keeping email.
Yeah, this response is a rare boomer W.
I have 20k emails in my inbox
I will only clean it when I get complaints
You’re either the kind of person who reads their emails in real time and freaks if that little blue number ever reads “2” or you’re the kind of person who selects their entire inbox and marks it as read twice a decade.
My wife is the former. I am the latter. I get too much junk. I go through my inbox a few times a day, read what looks important, and ignore the rest. I have 2,174 unread emails in my inbox and a folder called “auto junk” with 5,116 in it.
Unsubscribe and/or block is a good friend
Is there a way to delete all emails from a single address at once in Gmail? That would help a lot for me.
Yes, filter by sender, select all, delete
Pro tip: the checkbox at the top of the column only selects the first page worth (100 messages). You have to click that and then also click the “select all N messages?” link that appears.
But I keep the emails and leave them unread…
Me too lol
I like keeping the unread count low, but I get so many junk notification emails at work I’ve given up on checking.
See if your email provider lets you whitelist addresses. Every known sender goes to inbox, all the rest to trash. Great for keeping things tidy and helping to sniff out fake emails from eboy.
keeping emai
Please explain
As opposed to switching to proprietary messaging services.
I’ve never understood the people who seem to not get that some people actually don’t mind scanning their stuff and putting it in bags, and insist that that’s the line between what the customer does and the employee. They also used to carry your groceries to the car for you, and you can also get them to pick everything up, bag it and bring it to your car or house. It’s not like the checkout process is the special part that can’t change.
Yeah, they want to save money by having fewer people get more customers checked out faster. I don’t really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.
I don’t have a problem with self-check. I use it most the time because I usually have < 10 items.
I DO have a problem with only self-check lanes being open or only ONE regular clerk check lane open. both of which happen at walfart.
I know this because I used to work there and policy was to hire floor associates that can run a register so the store won’t need to pay for cashiers just standing around.
so the store won’t need to pay for cashiers just standing around.
Aren’t walmart employees also required to stand all day? Kinda insane to me that they’re not allowed to just sit down
can’t say for every store, but we were told “it makes us look lazy and disinterested in being friendly or helpful to our customers”.
typical boomer bullshit.
they did let the little. old lady greeters use a chair, although that’s likely because of ADA compliance requirements they had to follow and not because they grew a heart.
That’s true for pretty much all corporate retail in the US.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Walmart cashier without a line. Doesn’t matter how many cashier lanes and self checkouts are open. Find it hard to belief they are ever able to just stand around.
that’s exactly the point. WM mgmt sees that as a win. every employee has a queue depth they can complete in x time, be it customers they help or tasks they complete.
if you can’t complete the minimum queue depth according to WM you’re pulled up for a performance eval and eventually fired.
Mgmt doesn’t want to hire more people because “home office” provides a bonus to mgmt to keep operation costs low. at “performing” stores this can be as much to go out and buy a new car.
so the next time you’re waiting in line for an hour at WM ask to speak to the store mgr directly, or better yet ask for the contact details of the district mgr. enough complaints and that store is marked as “non-performant” and the store (and mgrs) will be pulled up for a performance eval.
But in the end won’t it be the cashiers who will suffer/be blamed, instead of management hiring another one to help carry the load? I mean, even if you ask to speak to the manager, and wait for them, and say, “obviously you’ve understaffed this shift, so you need to open a register yourself and start ringing people up, you can start with me,” they are just going to blame the poor cashier who got stuck with Grandma’s coupons and check-writing or whatever. Or if they are decent, they’re already working a register, and it’s someone higher up who refuses to hire more staff, despite having a “ghost job offer” that sits out there to look like they’re hiring.
I love self checkout. Conversation with strangers is difficult, slow and often not fun. Separating that aspect from checking out is the best customer service a lot of stores offer.
Some stores near me are removing or disabling self checkout. Apparently this better serves the customer. Can’t quite see how taking away options improves things, but …
It doesn’t, it’s because people shoplift at self checkout all the time and the big retailers can’t figure out how to stop it. Almost every shop in my town forces you to do self checkout, they don’t even have cashiers most of the time. Last time I was at my local walmart they had like 6 self checkouts and 4 cashiers just standing there staring at everyone trying to find shoplifters. They still can’t find them though lol.
Which is bizarre, because shrinkage due to theft at all major retail chains is at historic lows, but they keep complaining that they can’t make any money due to rampant shoplifting. Then you look at their profits for each fiscal year and wonder what their deal is if losses due to shoplifting have never been lower and profits have never been higher?
It’s an easy scapegoat to justify closing low performing stores. It essentially shifts the blame onto the community, rather than the greedy suits.
Well, this can’t possibly be the case. The giant corporations who assuredly only have my best interests in mind tell me it’s what I want, not what they want.
I dare say that the shoplifters aren’t even bothering going through the self checkout as a pretense.
I respect your preference, and for some people it could even be considered a “reasonable accommodation.”
But I prefer to have the person who does this all day whip through the scanning and bagging while I pay up. It may not be rocket surgery, but good cashiers have an efficiency of eye/brain/hand motion that I can’t match. Especially when there’s multiples of the same item, their machine trusts them to do it the efficient way rather than scanning and weighing each item. Or having the produce codes at their fingertips without stopping to read them. And since all machines have little quirks, it’s helpful to know exactly where to apply “percussive maintenance.”
I am comfortable speaking with strangers, so I always thank them and wish them a good day. And I don’t stand for entitled assholes giving them shit, either.
Having both options is best and should be part of ADA compliance.
That’s fair.
Yea the issue is the employer doing it to make more profit instead of spreading the more profit they make to the workers. There is nothing wrong with self check out. There is something wrong with people being paid shit when the company is sending dividends to stockholders instead.
Have you ever rang a TV through as bulk onions?
I fucking love self check out!
They have some new AI thing watching the cameras that will make that a lot harder. Like, it wouldn’t let me scan the same item twice instead of scanning both identical items.
This is why i refuse to use self check out. If they wont trust me to do the job my way i wont do it for free.
For me it’s the damn scale under the bag, and how long the kiosk takes to register the weight of the last scanned item. Then the system “unlocks” and lets me scan another item. This system slows me down to the speed of the worst clerk in the store.
I haven’t had one actually do that in years. I think they all disabled that feature around here because it was so shitty.
The check out is the part where the actual sales transaction occurs. It really is materially different from those other services you mentioned.
Also,
I don’t really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.
That was true until they realized they could enshittify by closing all the regular check-outs and force everyone into it. Now it’s just as slow as full-service used to be.
check out is the part where the actual sales transaction occurs. It really is materially different
Like a vending machine? Or the gas station? Or the grocery pickup, where I pay online?
What makes a human being present for me giving my money to a machine different if it’s a grocery store as opposed to one of those?Sorry your experience sucks. Stores near me regularly have both open and the self checkout is invariably significantly faster. It’s not like I just didn’t notice that something I do several times a week actually sucks.
That’s not the actual animosity towards things like self checkout, most of the time. It’s a distaste for a large corporation to replace jobs with automation. Sure, it’s a menial job, but it was still an ability for someone to have a job if they needed one.
Labor shortages go up and down with time and what a lot of younger people don’t really understand was that sometimes the country would go years with it being hard to find any job. Even a bad one. The last 15 years have been pretty easy to find work, so a lot of the younger people can’t really know what it was like when you could go a long time just trying to find a job.
