I used to feel the same way until I began focusing on my diet and purchased more produce. Self checkout is a nightmare for produce. They rarely have a bar code which leads to a mystical hunt through the usually horribly slow UI. Compare that to a person who has done it so many times they have the code memorized for your apples and they can just punch it in quickly and keep going. And don’t even get me started with how excruciatingly painful it is when suddenly all of the machines need assistance and the one attendant can’t be in 6 places at once.

This is a solved problem.

Our grocery store (Wegmans) has labelmaker scales in the produce department, and the four or five digit code right next to the produce items. You bag it, weigh it, and label it yourself.

Speeds up the human checkouts, too.

This sounds like an excellent solution and perhaps I should let someone know at my local Kroger. Maybe its just something I've overlooked while shopping. Either way, I have a young child now so we mostly just use ClickList.

My grocery store has smart scales that let you print a barcode for produce that you can scan at the self checkout line. At the scale you can just search for the product by name (e.g. “apples” will suggest “honey crisp apples”).

There are definitely still issues if you need assistance. The ratio of self checkout lines to attendants is 8/1 when the store is busy.

Searching for the product by name is the exact same UI/UX at the self checkout and it becomes an exercise in frustration IMHO. The typical staples quickly come up but for apples for example there's such variety that you're often paging through a page or two. Meanwhile, the human powered checkout the operator usually just knows the 4 digit code and away they go.

As someone who's worked at a grocery store - the 4-digit code is also printed on those little produce stickers, and will generally also be on the labels with the prices on the shelves. Use this to avoid searching by name!

If you use the codes for your most common items this gets quick, some stores even post a sheet with a list of common produce codes, with stuff like apples and bananas they're often labeled even.

Produce at self checkout takes max 5-10 seconds per item once you know what you are doing

That works until there's ~only self-checkouts, then it gets slow again.

There's a knack to using them, and unless you have a generous number of them (I know of only two local stores that do), you end up getting stuck while the single staff member assigned to the self-checkouts assists customers having issues.

Plus it's not unusual for a significant number of them to be out of order, not accepting credit cards, only accepting credit cards, or just being generally temperamental.

> That works until there's ~only self-checkouts, then it gets slow again.

I don't know about that - self checkouts are both more space-dense and require far less staff to support so each individual store could support way more customers.

Replacing human workers with robots should be considered a good thing, it's a problem with our system of economics, not with the companies increasing their level of automation.

That is true it saves time