In the local shop they often catch you for not scanning the paper bag.
But if you scan tomatoes as peppers or vice versa nobody bats an eye.
my goto line is also usually when asked to see a receipt (after i self check): “if you want receipt access go become a cashier” while i keep walking. nobody here in ct really cares.
I mean, I get the not wanting to scan your own items. But at Walmart we use the app and scan as we go, then scan the bar code at checkout and walk out. Super easy and faster than waiting in line.*
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
This is indeed 4011
Whoops! It seems that my finger has slipped and picked the cheapest variety of banana, out of the 11 varieties of bananas.
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
The complaining is an important part of the theatrics.
I used to work with a very wealthy man. He owned a very successful side business and had some very good customers. He would tell me about how he would exaggerate all of his complaints about how much money he’s going to lose when something or other happens. And I saw him do it to people at work. One of his major skills was playing the victim. I lost all hope of feeling bad for business owners once I realized that was a thing. Meanwhile, he has a huge house on the palisades outside of New York City and all his kids went to private schools from preschool to college.
When he left, he tried to give me his bill oRiley CD collection.
They’ve been experimenting with self-checkouts for decades. When I was a kid, I remember being in a store with my grandma, waiting in line to pay, and an employee kept trying to entice those in the line to come over and try the self-checkouts.
She asked my grandma a few times before my grandma, a proud union supporter, snapped “I want a person to ring me up. I’m trying to save you’re JOB, young lady!”
And the young woman stopped asking my grandma.
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
trying to save you are job
I’m a grammar proponent as well, but I’m not seeing the benefit of your comment. Do you think autocorrect errors are fun for anyone?
I know some people think that self-checkout is making the customer do the cashier work for free, but honestly, having experienced it both ways, I’d much rather do it myself. It’s not like I am doing anything else at the time, and shopping already involves something very similar, regardless.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves and pushed the cart around, then if some stores started making people push their carts around themselves, you’d hear the same complaints.
But I am already picking up each item, one by one, when I put them into the cart. To me, it’s really not that different to pick up the items one by one, scan them, and put them into the bag.
My local grocer did a scan as you go before COVID and it was so fantastic. Everything just got bagged as we went and all you had to do was scan the self checkout till and weigh your produce at the end. So nice.
DIY makes sure nobody puts the cans on top of the bread or bags raw meat in with the lettuce, too.
Back in the olden days baggers were properly trained, too. They had competitions and everything.
No idea. This just feels like an old person thing. Never met someone young who complains about self checkout as long as it’s working.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves
They basically did. They had a counter and you asked the shopkeeper at the counter to get stuff for you. So there were no trolleys being pushed around, but someone was still getting stuff for you. And you had to wait while they did it.
Nowadays I order my groceries online and go pick them up. There are two parts that take time: waiting for the guy to come out with everything after parking, and taking everything out of the crates they come in and putting them in the reusable bags in my car. Back when I cycled to the supermarket, I’d pause on the way and announce I was already there when I was 2 minutes away to cut down on the first time, too…
As an introverted person, I use self-checkout wherever I can. The less I have to talk to random people, the happier I am :)
I’m also strongly for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines, like it happened with washing machines. Let them do that work, and let people enjoy the creative ones.
You can only complain about being stolen from if you didn’t make record profits.
In my country, supermarkets typically make about 2-4% profit, and were marking 4-6% 10 years ago. So I guess they can complain…
How often does Winnie the Pooh stop by your place? Cuz it sounds to me like you live in Fantasyland.
See page 5. Tesco is generally the most profitable supermarket in my country.
So those are the facts here in Fantasyland, what have you got?
Read this document by tesco to know the absolute truth about tesco. As if all the creative accounting didn’t happen prior to that disclosure.
Do you know what an audit is?
Can you describe a plausible scenario in which Tesco lies about its profit margin to make it look smaller than it is, bearing in mind the people who matter to Tesco (its shareholders) want its profit margin to be as high as possible?
If you want to pretend that capitalism is all on the up and up and that the systems we used to keep it in check are not all rotting away at their cores while MBAs figure out new and creative ways to hide money in comp packages, stock buybacks, and other bullshit accounting tactics, that is your right. But I’m not hopping on board with you.
Yup, those are the rules.
Have you never met a MAGAt? They can (and WILL) complain about anything and everything, and completely shout down any evidence of their deceptiveness.
Not sure what that has to do with my comment though
Im pretty sure you were talking about them not having a legitimate cause for complaint, since they made record profits.
And then WhoIzDiz is saying they complain without a legitimate reason about lots of things.
Not really disagreeing with your point.
Unless you mean you disagree that most of the corporate grocery chins are run by Republicans.
I was sarcastically pointing out that having records profits doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to complain about theft.
Oh! I took it as a serious remark about whining about hungry people pilfering while engaging in wage theft, price gouging, and exploitation of food producers.
Apparently all that subtext isn’t obvious to everyone…
Making record profits doesn’t magically make it okay to steal from you. It’s perfectly valid to complain if someone does. This is pretty obvious stuff.
Who’s running these companies? Who are those companies’ major shareholders?
Again, not really responsive to my comment.
I don’t get why anybody complains about self checkout. I think we’ve had them for a decade in Poland. Everything works and is much faster than a normal checkout. At this point I’m actually avoiding the few stores that don’t have them yet.
You must not remember the time when enough cashiers actually were on hand. Used to be just as fast when all lanes had a cashier at them.
Having to scan them at the station, yeah cashiers would probably be faster, but where I live you get the scanning tool as you shop so I just scan and bag it as soon as I’ve taken something off the shelf. All I do at self-checkout is pay what I scanned, grab my already prepared bag and leave. Unless those cashiers are walking with me around the store there’s no chance they’ll be faster than how I go shopping.
Thats something i could get behind. The only place around me that i know of that does anything similar is Sams club and you have to use your own phone to do that.
Faster, because real cashiers have strategies like item x 6, and the authority/passcode to use them. And because they do it all day they have muscle memory working for them. We look at a head of lettuce and my brain says “romaine” or “frisee” but their brain says"5046" or whatever the right code is. Or rather it tells their fingers to type the code without interrupting the more important things they’re actually thinking.
That’s one way of looking at it, and I respect it, BUT also think that self-checkouts are a way of eliminating jobs: stores just want to have fewer employees and more benefit. I avoid self-checkout not for convenience, but because I don’t want to contribute to the destruction of jobs.
You’re absolutely right about that point.
I believe the goal should be to improve these worker’s conditions. Make checkout work as comfortable as possible, promote them taking turns and switching tasks so they don’t have to be doing just checkout for 8 hours.
Instead of removing the job, make it less annoying.
I remember when you stood in front of the counter and told the cashier what you needed and they had to bring You everything from the shelves one by one. Nothing ever was faster than self checkouts.
I’m pretty damn old but I don’t remember that personally. Just in movies. I do remember the glory days when every single register had a cashier, and a bagger, and that was much faster than self checkout. Especially as it is now, with a bunch of unstaffed registers and a line waiting for the self-service machines.
Most of the stores in my area pulled all but two lanes out to put more self checkout only to also close all but the boxed in sections on either end that were supposed to be 15 or less areas. At this point why don’t they just commit and have a single miserable worker at a single checkout right at the door? At least then they’d be honest about it.
Not where I live.
There are generally twice as many self checkouts as there were lines before, and they still have a few regular lanes in place with one or two available for those that want assistance.
Self checkout where I live is far faster than the old way.
Unless its Walmart, it will have 10 lanes and 3 of them are open. Same with the self checkout.
There was a time they all had cashiers. Not just during busy seasonal rushes either. Sometime in the late nineties this became no longer true.
I know this is a radical idea but I believe that if we can, via technological and logistical improvements, eliminate the need for people to sit (or dog forbid stand, like in the US) at a till for 8 hours per day doing the menial task of ringing up items, then we should do that. Even if it comes at the cost of people sometimes having to wait a couple of minutes in line.
Self checkout doesn’t eliminate that need though. It just pushes the labor onto the consumer. The job still needs doing. Now you are just the one doing it, for free.
BOOO!
Your idea is basically “make customers wait, not employees”
It’s not an actual improvement until they can eliminate human labor. Until then it’s just pushing work unto customers.
For a given number of cashiers on staff, having at least some self-checkouts makes everything move faster. If a self checkout takes twice as long while you’re actually at it but a single cashier can run six of them, that’s still three times as many customers handled by that cashier. Those numbers are made up, of course, but the point is that unless you’re hiring so many cashiers that there are never any queues, it’s not necessarily slower to have self-checkouts, it just shifts time from waiting in the queue to scanning items
In practice, stores just use it as an excuse to understaff.
That leads to some fraction of customers defending the corner cutting because it’s faster than the understaffing it caused.
Having worked as a supermarket cashier prior to self checkouts becoming a thing and in the early days of them getting established - early enough that some people genuinely demanded to see my manager because they wanted to be paid the 20 pence that they would have earned working as a cashier for the duration that it took them to scan their things - my experience is that they were staffing that low anyway. There were just longer queues.
Agreed about the standing for a while shift, that was likely one of the most grueling jobs, but making me do the job with zero benefits was not the correct solution. I do like the idea of grocery pickup, (delivery for those that can’t get to the store) that was a good improvement. My only gripe there is getting the worst produce available everytime. Making pickup viable only to prepackaged goods. I’m also a social individual and have grown many friendships with cashiers through the years. Some greeting me by name as i enter a shop. Thats a level of welcoming that no technology will ever achieve. If a robot greeted me by name as i walked in a store it would be extremely creepy and off-putting. I’d likely avoid that place at all cost.
The benefit is that you are no longer paying for someone else to do something you can do yourself without costing any time (because you’d just have to wait for them to do it). Would you like to go back to having everything behind the counter so that the shopkeeper would relieve you of the task of getting things off the shelves?
Yes. Yes i would. Thats my preferred shopping experience. Personal and social.
🤢
Better go to a fancy boutique then
The benefit is that you are no longer paying for someone else to do something you can do yourself
Oh, I’m still paying for it. Paying much more than I used to, actually.
Just now I have to pay for it and do it myself.
I would not because I like to be able to browse all the available options and read the labels. I’m also fussy about my produce selection. I’ll only use grocery delivery for produce as a last resort , like if I’m stuck at home sick.
People still need to earn money, though. You advocate for all cashiers to lose their job.
(I have been a cashier in an electronics store and loved the task, minus the customer relations.)
No, what I advocate for is a society where no one has to do labour. Very different.
How am I supposed to survive until we get there?
Where I live there is always a line for the self checkout. The self checkout machines are slower than the manned checkout machines, you can only pick up one item at a time, scan it, place it in the bagging area and pause for a second before touching anything else or else the whole system has a meltdown and then you need a person to come fix it. A checker at a normal scanner is at least 5x faster than even the best person at the self checkout. And as an added bonus, you also get a camera in your face and monitor showing the recording so you can see unflattering videos of yourself while working to appease the fussy machine. Also, the ergonomics are shit if you have more than a small basket of stuff.
I think they all deliberately manufactured consent for this bullshit by dramatically understaffing the regular checkouts for at least a year before installing the self checkouts. But that part may be a bit conspiratorial given the ultra slim margins on groceries.
I love self-checkout. The line moves much faster. But it is important to learn which machines work well and which ones are most glitchy. Kind of like learning which lane has The World’s Slowest Checkout Clerk.
If I only have a few things, its great, usually shorter line and scanning my own stuff isn’t a big deal.
When I have a cart full of stuff, I’d rather have the expert just churn through scanning all of that stuff. Especially if there’s someone packing it into a bag at the same time.
Then you choose that one.
No, when I see she’s working I definitely go to self-check.
I hate the ones at Kroger. If you scan stuff too fast, it freaks out and calls the employee over.
Like, I’m talking about going slower than an actual cashier.
I tried scanning one of those digital coupon things they print on paper and the employee was called over three times in that one transaction.
And if you ring up alcohol you can’t ring up anything else until you get cleared. Other chains I’ve been to let you keep scanning and you get cleared when they have time.
Then keep people around to do that job and you won’t have these problems you greedy fucking assholes.
Is this a metaphor for “AI”.
It is, in the way that it takes away jobs from people, but Lemmy seems to not realise the parallel.
Except being an artist is enjoyable, while being a cashier is very monotonous in a noisy environment. I’m strongly anti-genAI, but I’m all for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines.
And what am I supposed to do when the machine takes my cashier job?
One time, i scanned all of my items and had to wait for someone to check id because it included alcohol. After they unlocked the machine, I paid and left. Turned out that none of the scans registered after the first alcohol item, so i got a bunch of freebies. I’d normally give a shit, but this is how well they trained me and how well their system worked.
The process is perfectly designed to give you the results you got.
-Demming, or someone like himMany moons ago, I stopped by the art supply store with my stepmom to get some colored twine. We picked up 2 rolls, and were basically forced to do self checkout. I watched her scan each one, but only one actually registered. The price for a single roll was also more than double the cost if she had bought it on Amazon, so the total when checking out was within a reasonable ballpark. Once we got to the car, I pointed it out, and she apparently had no clue, but was annoyed enough not to go back and pay for the second.
So, um … just for curiosity’s sake, what store chain would that little glitch happen to occur in?
Because I, of course, want to be completely sure that I don’t make a similar error.
Safeway. No idea if that system still exist.
Zero training and a decent reason not to call any produce organic
