Technology

It's fine if you have a few things and no one else is using them. These days, you go to the supermarket and you either wait in a long line for people to check out the stuff themselves or you wait on a long line for someone to do it for you. All they did was eliminate jobs.

Frankly this is one of the most disheartening editorials I’ve ever read on Gizmodo. “Cumbersome?” “Confusing?” “Error-prone?” “Terminator?” “Frustrations?” “Wasted time?” Just say you don’t understand how to use them and have no intention to learn. Weird flex for a tech journalist.

Also:

they actually increase labor costs thanks to employees who get taken away from their other duties

Big retailers would love to give hard working people’s jobs to robots, and in many cases they already have.

How on Earth did an editor allow an article containing both of those sentences, only two paragraphs apart, to be published?

I agree. Boomers hate them though.

Depends on the store. Some of them are terrible. Tiny areas to checkout an entire grocery car sucks. Especially when it weighs as you go, then hits the weight limit and apparently just starts ignoring the requirement.

I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can't even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There's no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we're putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs...

Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they're more fun to drive than a shopping cart.

I think the problem is that there aren't enough checkout lanes for either to be practical anymore in a supermarket with a cart full of items. But I agree, it's not an either/or thing.

I agree that it's got to be how young Lemmy skews. No one who has ever bought alcohol at a self-checkout has said, "This is so quick and convenient!"

Self checkout should have those mobile scanners that you can use to check items out while you're still shopping. We have them here and it is a godsend for larger purchases. You scan the items, put them in your bags and at the self checkout, you can just register your card and pay.

For me there are two things that makes me reject all self checkout. Most importantly, it is taking people's jobs and making me do the labour for no discount, companies only offer them because it pads their profits. Second, the user experience is almost universally terrible. I don't want to take the risk just to get pissed off.

Who would have guessed that when you let the clients check themselves out they are going to miss scanning some items? It's not like they are trained or paid to be employees and of course their motivation is to scan less not more.

That's essentially how I also feel.

The best thing is when you've been doing it for so long that the random checks happen, like, once a year. I actually don't think we've had one since before the pandemic.

We have that at a grocery store in my area, though you use an app on your phone to scan with the camera and the "random testing" seems to happen pretty much every time. If I had one of their scanners instead of their laggy app, I'd be much happier. (Though I guess modern handscanners are Android devices with a laser, so maybe not that much better...)

From your comment I assume you are American, since I heard that people pack your bags at your stores. In Germany and probably most of Europe a typical checkout process works differently and probably solves the problem.

1. You put your stuff on a large transport band, emptying your cart (probably have those as well)
2. When you're up you move your cart at the large area after the cashier
3. The cashier registers everything and pushes it to you into that big area
4. You put everything in your bags while they are working
5. Cashier finishes, you make your payment
6. You pack the last 3 items that are remaining

Some stores also introduced a simple "switch" that makes the products of the person after you slide into a seperate area, to save time .

They expect me to do free labor

I'm pretty sure people were complaining about this when supermarkets replaced greengrocers. "What do you mean I can't just hand a list to the clerk and have him package up my groceries? They expect me to do free labor?" But we kept it around because the convenience was worth it.

for a huge evil corporation,

The smaller evil corporations use them too.

but give me a scanner far worse than they give their paid employees,

I don't know where you're going, but at the grocery stores I go to (and the one I used to work at) the scanner is literally the same unit as on the checkout the human is operating because that way it's easier and cheaper to keep parts on hand to fix them.

which scolds me every 10 seconds for not having enough space to put things.

HONESTLY this is like the ONLY JOKE people have about self-checkouts. You could joke about the thing always being out of bags, or having trouble when you're trying to buy alcohol, or flagging down an attendant when the thing doesn't have a barcode, and yet everyone chooses "unexpected item in the bagging area," which hasn't been a problem for people who actually know how to use the thing for a decade or more? Why is this the mindvirus that has infiltrated everyone and not, like, social equity?

Wait...ok, so I haven't really shopped anywhere but Meijer or (to a lesser extent) Kroger for about a decade. Is this why I haven't seen the problems with things like "unexpected item" and such? That could make a lot of sense. It's been driving me crazy seeing stories like this when the worst experience I have with self checkout is when the camera thinks I'm stealing something because I have, like, a Wendy's cup.

The article also isn't very good, and may as well be an editorial.

I use self-checkout as my primary, including for produce, when shopping for a family of six. It's always faster, even though I'm doing all the work.