Totally Company’s fault. 😂
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.
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.
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…
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.
You can only complain about being stolen from if you didn’t make record profits.
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
Who’s running these companies? Who are those companies’ major shareholders?
Again, not really responsive to my comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Yes. Yes i would. Thats my preferred shopping experience. Personal and social.
🤢
Better go to a fancy boutique then
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.
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.
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.
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?
Zero training and a decent reason not to call any produce organic
It is 1866. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 1940. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 2026. You get the picture.1920s - Corporation Genius idea: “self service groceries” - put the product out so people have to fetch the items themselves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
2000s - Corporate Genius idea: “self service checkout” - People scan their own products that they went and got from the shelves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
Solution? Tax the employees more to pay for police to protect our record profits!
“Record profits” in nominal currency will be made year after year. Profit margins (on supermarkets in my country) remains low, and is lower than it was 10 years ago.
And according to Hollywood accounting not a single movie has ever made a profit…
I would be surprised if supermarket’s profit margins are actually as low as they all claim.
They are “low” but it’s on purpose. When you make 19.5 billion in profit that’s the number that needs to be spread around. 3% sounds like Walmart might go under with one bad move. 19.5 billion in profit after they paid taxes in 2025 is a powerful company with plenty of profit.
People don’t really understand how these companies profit from their scale. They expect the regular person to be empathetic over 3% profit while hiding 20 billion dollars year over year.
Not true, Hollywood can shift profits from one film to another, but not hide them in such a way that no-one of them break even. You could have checked what the major studios are making (it was about $6bn net in 2025).
This is what audits are for, and in any functioning country (indeed even a half-functioning one like the US) the internal revenue department makes it very difficult to hide profits at a large scale. There’s an easy way to sniff check this claim: if it were possible to hide profits so thoroughly, why does any company at all pay any corporation tax at all?
What Hollywood does is shuffle its real costs around so that films which would have to pay the largest royalties appear to make no money. They can also shuffle some things around so that subsidiaries operating in high tax countries appear to make a loss. Supermarkets selling physical goods in physical shops can’t do this.
There’s also no reason to think that companies have got better at hiding profits over the last few years, even if you think their profits are wrong.
I recognize the impact inflation has on the term, but it varies from store to store and country to country whether it outpaces inflation. Walmart, which this meme is about and a load bearing parasite on the US, maintains growth slightly above inflation. This doesn’t indemnify everyone, or really anyone in particular. It’s pointing out that money is going somewhere in this current era of force-fed infinite growth, but seemingly not to the people who need it most.
To phrase my comment another way, the wealth gap is widening and businesses will do anything but address it, instead complaining about their own impropriety as if it were your fault.
This meme is about self service checkouts which are ubiquitous in my country.
Walmart had an operating profit margin of 4.2% in their last statement, and a net profit margin of 3%.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for widening wealth inequality, profit margins under 5% are not where you’ll find it. Check the facts instead of going on pure vibes - company accounts are public and subject to audit (on pain of huge punishments if wrong - they got Al Capone on tax fraud remember)
Are the companies in your country currently complaining about theft in massive PR campaigns? Because Walmart is.
And Walmart’s outpaced inflation. Not all of our companies have, but some certainly. Your argument is like asserting that a car couldn’t have run out of gas because it has 90 km/l.
And of course I’m going to blame a company that underpays and abuses its employees as severely as Walmart, while siphoning half of its personnel budget from local taxes.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
https://wallstreetnumbers.com/stocks/wmt/operating-expenses
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/revenue
Walmart’s gross profit rate was 24.1% of net sales in fiscal 2025, and operating income was $29.348 billion, or 4.4% of net sales.
So for every $100 Walmart keeps $4.40 after paying everything including corporate staff but before taxes.
For Walmart, the “3%” is basically net profit margin for fiscal 2025, Walmart reported $680.985 billion in total revenue and $19.436 billion in net income attributable to Walmart, which is about 2.85%.
3% sounds like nothing but 19.5 billion in profit definitely is but nothing.
Wording it like this is a struggling company is a really…special way to go about this.
I’m getting my numbers from here: https://stock.walmart.com/financial-information/income-statement I believe the difference in figures is between US and Worldwide, and aren’t different enough to affect the conclusion.
I’m not “wording it like” Walmart is struggling; I’m saying that Walmart (and the grocery sector in general) works on razor-thin margins, and trying to ignore that fact by talking about “record profits” is misleading and either stupid or dishonest. I’d encourage you to re-read my comment and try to decide which words made you interpret it that way - I think you’ll find that they aren’t there, that I was just reporting facts in neutral language, and you’ve made that interpretation because I’m going against the narrative.
What a low profit margin means is that if an average shopper buying a $100 basket of goods decides to swipe a $2 chocolate bar, their profits are nearly halved. Problems that seem small have large effects to a company operating like this.
The narrative Lemmy commenters tend to believe is that the cost of groceries went up in the 2020s due to corporate greed and lay the blame for their current struggles at the foot of retailers like Walmart. The actual facts don’t bear that out. They then mock complaints about theft from shops attributed to self-service checkouts as price-gouging fat cats whining that their cost-saving measure isn’t saving them costs, ignoring that, with profit margins relatively steady/down since before the pandemic, those cost savings are being passed on to them, the consumer.
I can tell you that Dillons (subdivision of Kroger) is on genuinely razor thin margins, and they at least pay half way decent for the area im in
Then it sounds like I wasn’t referring to Dillons. Do they even have self checkout?
Yes, most have two separate checkouts on both sides. And also this weird self checkout/belt lane thing. Was just trying to add to the conversation, geez.
Gotta be careful giving dissenting opinions in the black and white world of the internet.
I have no idea what the belt lane thing is and I’m interested. My self checkouts are just the scanner thing, and then you put the items on the scale. The inclusion of a belt is intriguing.
So, its a self checkout screen, then you place your scanned items on a belt that carries it to a bagging area. I think the idea is for the self checkout attendant to then bag the items for you
I didn’t mean any offense, but I exclusively found dillons in low population cities, which made me question whether they’d have any need for a self checkout.
Even the little corner shop in my town of a couple thousand people has one now. There’s no way that a second full checkout would fit in the space, nor is hiring another staff member to work it likely to be realistic, so it’s a straight upgrade in capacity
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.
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?
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
I predicted this would happen when our manager brought these in.
It’s not that it makes shoplifting easier. It just makes it easier to pass it off as an honest mistake if caught. Sure enough shrinkage went through the roof and their solution was to one way the doors, a divider between them so you are forced to walk through the cash registers on the other side of the store to get out. I’m glad I don’t work there anymore.
I am not paid, i dont do the work.
Also, if the cashier makes a mistake, it is their peoblem. If you make it, they call you thief. Fuck them, i aint no cashier.
I’m gonna be so real, I prefer self-checkout whenever possible. The “employee discount” is just an occasional bonus
Yeah, so I hit the grocery store two or three. Times during the week, usually getting stuff for dinner that night, fresh veggies, meat, that sorta thing. It makes sense with how my mornings lay out, and I prefer small trips. I’m at a point where I have this shit down by rote. Yes, there’s some hiccups, like watermelon needing an employee because people use watermelon to steal apparently, but I kind of program in to the whole operation.
Larger orders, I’ll hit an employee so I can bag while they scan.
At the end of the day, it’s always about efficiency, and so it’s generally best for me to self checkout.
I prefer it if I have like 8 items or less.
Anything more and I cant be bothered. Especially if it’s groceries and there are codes to enter instead of barcodes to scan and weights to take.
I don’t.
Every single thing involves me getting the attention of the 1 guy who is responsible for minding like 10 of them.
- item won’t scan …
- you have alcohol
- you have a thing with a discount sticker on it
- item has 2 upcs on it for some reason and the first one scans and is like twice the cost of the thing
- I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
Wow yeah I bought a six pack of Coke or something and the scanner picked up the UPC on the cardboard carrier AND one bottle, like fuck off you’re charging me an extra bottle! Took a while for the attendant to stroll over and lackadaisically fix it at his leisure.
Self check-outs at a fast food place (or boba tea etc.) are great because you can ensure that everything is correct and to your liking before making payment.
But they’re absolutely atrocious for any transaction where you’ve already picked out a half-dozen items or more.
Not to mention it takes twice as long because you’re unloading an entire trolley onto a space that holds maybe 4 items, you’re scanning, and you’re bagging. There’s no area to actually work and put all your shit, this doesn’t even include the 4-12 times you need the person to come fix the broken machine, but that 1 person is busy fixing 4 other people’s broken machines.
Something that would take you and a professional working together 5 minutes ends up taking 10+ minutes
If you have more than like three things get the hell out of the self-checkout lane. I’m so sick of being behind a person getting fifteen different kinds of produce that all need to be entered manually while I wait with my single gallon of milk.
Supermarkets in my area have had separate basket and trolley self-checkout areas for a good while. Basket ones are what you describe, trolley ones have enough space for a trolley on one side and about three or four times as much packing area on the other
Wait, you guys have to unload everything at the register and scan it there?! No wonder you hate that shit. In Sweden we have a portable scanner that we bring with us through the store, and you can remove stuff yourself. Removes most of the hassle. There might still be items that need checking or an ID check, but the former usually doesn’t take long, and the latter they can do remotely if you look way above the required age. Saves a shit ton of time, since there’s very often a queue at the regular registers.
https://theshelbyreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Cardenas-Self-Checkout.jpg
They look like this and if you can something and don’t put it on the platform to the left it it complains. Sometimes it decides the weight doesn’t add up for some reason and then you “UNEXPECTED ITEMS IN THE BAGGING AREA” … Often once it has decided this it requires… You guessed it, me getting the attention of the clerk who is busy trying to keep 10 - 15 other kiosks moving and each kiosk is doing the same bullshit to everyone.
I have absolutely never had that experience, it’s always the opposite. I’m in, I’m out. The good thing is, if you don’t like self-check you can go through the clerk line and vice versa.
There is a severe lack of space if you’re getting a lot of items and no good way to remove full bags without the thing yelling at you.
I used to scan and bag groceries in high school and the scanners on the self checkout slow me down significantly as well. Constantly flagging items as not bagged if I scan the next item too fast (even when bagged) or for not scanning items if I dare have something in my right hand while bagging with my left.
And yeah, I’ll avoid the one line with a human where they’re 4 deep with 50 items each wanting to pay with checks still.
Stores vary. In mine there’s ample bagging space and the self-check limit is 15 items anyway.
Advantage: when somebody is taking so long it seems like they’re figuring out their taxes, you’re not stuck behind them because the one line goes to multiple stations. At least where I shop.
I have seen only one implementation of this that I like so far, in Decathlon. You dump your shopping basket in the machine’s basket, you don’t even have to know what is in there and the machine automatically picks everything up by their nfc tags. It has never failed for me and you don’t need to search for any tags or barcodes. You pay, you can pick up all yours stuff and dump it in your bag and you are ready to go.
The polar opposite experience is the one you describe and for those shops I avoid the machines if I can.
I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
You can avoid this by just ringing up all produce as bananas.
Carrots are cheaper.
If you can find them sold by weight. Most stores in my area sell them in big, pre-weighed bags.
What is the cheapest tomato? That’s the tomato you ring up. Oops, silly old me, making a mistake anyone could make.
I actually would like to do that but I live in Canada and in February there cheapest tomato choosing is hard.
Red tomato might be a green house tomato and cost more than you might think.
This combined with the shit interface that truncates the names and is slow as hell makes it annoying.
In my experience (L.A.) the tomatoes each have stickers on them, with either a scan code or a number code. But you’re right the whole thing is a PITA
So, ten dollars?
My experience is from Norwegian shops, so it might differ from the standards in elsewhere.
- item won’t scan: very rarely an issue. We can put in the bar code numbers manually if needed.
- you have alcohol: a nearby staff will take a quick glimpse at me and will approve the age from their unit. Only people close to the age limit will have to wait for the staff.
- discount stickers in shops here have the updated price on a barcode on that sticker.
- I don’t understand the “2 upcs”-issue.
- accidental scans can be corrected by the user without staff involvement.
Having lived in both the US and Denmark, I’d say the listed problems are much more prevalent in the US. The ID check being a pain, the double bar code, discounts not being applied.
It’s just a better experience here than the US lol I’m guessing it’s similar in Norway
Wild guess, you’re American? Because every story I hear about self checkouts in the US is this. Meanwhile in actual first world countries where they are modern systems you very rarely have any of these issues. Even my experiences in Croatia and Spain from 20 years ago had solved most of this (and please, I’m not dissing them. I’m a Swede and my experience is just that Scandinavia is on the forefront of stuff like this.) I haven’t had to grab the attention of a worker for so many years, and from what I see with other shoppers it’s the same for them. The workers seem bored if anything because they so rarely have to help someone even with one person minding twenty of them at the larger stores.
“Hi sir, would you like to step over here and use the self-checkout?”
“No thanks - I don’t work here.”
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.
