I don't share the thinking behind that comedy bit at all. For me, self-service checkouts offer such added utility -- no tiresome social interaction with the cashier, no awkward moments when shopping in a country where you don't speak the language -- that it more than makes up for the burden of ringing up my purchases.

I'm glad you get personal utility from the new method, but the rant is coming from a place where people are forced to use self checkouts and would rather not - eg stores where they shut all but one staffed register, creating a huge line.

That's more of a problem.

In Europe the self-check outs are optional. They're also faster, because there isn't much of a queue and the people with carts all go to cashiers.

I don't feel oppressed when I use them because I appreciate the speed. If that advantage disappeared, I'd be less pleased.

I'm in the Mid-South around Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. They did exactly what parent described to push self-checkouts. Many people down here like a personal touch in their orders. Some percentage prefer to use self-checkouts to get out faster or not have to interact with people as much. The stores with self-checkout tried to cut staff forcing the majority of customers to use them to bypass the artificially-long lines. They tried to justify that with it was better or industry was just too competitive to afford cashiers (except at places that still had them). The recent push is to add even more with Walmart designing theirs to make people move through more like cattle.

The other thing with those down here is they have a weight-based security scale with high number of false positives. Combine that with 4-6 machines constantly having them to get some unhappy customers. Also, those at Walmart and Kroger often have coupons or other issues that require attendants. Sometimes customers will argue with them wanting things checked. This might take a lot of time. Now, we have 4-12 or something people all waiting on one person due to one person. Then, some get irritated about what order they're served in when the attendant gets back. Way worse experience than at a register with a few people in line.

I'm fine with self-checkouts or registers. I prefer to have options, though, like you said in your comment. I'm good at reading the situation to determine which will be faster. When they force me, I just go somewhere else to spite them unless they got me locked in with an exclusive item or deal(s) worth the time. The oligopolies let them do that here and there.

In terms of Walmart, my experience with one that is only self-checkout (2 staffed registers remain but are usually not open) is that:

* The computers are extremely fast (or at least don't feel sluggish like some at Kroger do)

* There is no "unexpected item in the bagging area" nor "please put the item in the bagging area" (They probably mark items that will often not be bagged)

* I can constantly add and remove items from the weighted scale and put them in the cart without any interruption

* Checkout with the many options is fast both for Walmart pay and traditional payments that don't use Walmart pay.

The system does "move people like cattle" but that's evidently all Walmart thinks their stores should be doing. From my points above, they're doing their best to make the system "work" for their customers and more importantly investors.

I know this isn't a good thing for other types of people - Walmart doing this will make other stores also attempt to implement this type of thing to stay competitive on prices and margins or at least "not lag behind in technology". This system will most likely be not meet the customer satisfaction levels Walmart can, so these competitors will either

A. Lose customers due to a frustrating experience [in relation to W]

B. Lose customers due to higher prices [in relation to W]

C. Lose customers due to the loss of the "personal touch" some people like when checking out

The only stores this won't happen at is probably Publix and more local offerings. Publix charges noticeably higher prices for almost everything compared to both Kroger and Walmart for me, but I see how they're still in business:

1. the extremely friendly staff

2. policy for baggers to offer taking customers' groceries out if it's not too busy

3. having dedicated baggers at all

Although I observe the demographic to be mostly boomers which are phasing out; Millenials and Zoomers (Gen Z) are already caught up in the desensitizing internet culture, desensitizing the checkout process won't have a big negative effect on them, especially since it's just iterating on the self-serve checkout machines that have been around for years already.

> In Europe the self-check outs are optional.

That varies. A current trend in the Netherlands is to remove all normal checkouts and replace them with nothing but self-scan checkouts in the train station 'to-go' formula (essentially convenience stores) of one of the largest retailers.

The same retailer (AH) is also pushing for self-scan checkouts in certain normal supermarkets (often mid-size ones) by reducing the number of normal checkouts to one or two, creating nigh permanent queues. Because self-scan checkouts don't accept cash, you are stuck using these if you do wish to pay with bills and coins (which is probably why the retailer does this; i.e., the war on cash).

At a train station, if you have a few minutes to spare to grab a coffee and some snacks, you can pretty accurately guess how long it will take with a human cashier and any potential queues.

With a self-scan checkout, the machine invariably has a bunch of failure modes that take an unguessable amount of time to correct — either by you following the instructions, or by an attendant overriding some error state.

I just go to the kiosks that do have human cashiers instead.

> In Europe the self-check outs are optional. They're also faster, because there isn't much of a queue and the people with carts all go to cashiers.

This is also my experience in the US.

No they are not. I was buying in my local Tesco in Hungary the other day and they've removed almost all human cashiers and on that day only self-checkouts were working so I had no choice. And as for speed - I had to call operator three times because of measuring error and after the checkout had to go to another operator to remove that beeper things from the T-shirts I bought. The process was definitely much slower than with cashier. I will not be buying there anytime soon.

The Marks & Spencer's at London Victoria has a couple of manned tills and about a dozen self-checkout tills. There's always three or four clerks in the self-checkout area yelling "next please" when a self-checkout till empties.

That's their job now, see? Yelling "next please". That's just miserable and pathetic and I fully sympathise with the frustration at self-checkout proliferation (I guess I'm a bit of a neo-Luddite).

But that's not a justification for becoming a jerk oneself.

I'm frustrated with stores that only have self-checkouts also. I don't see how it justifies shoplifting, especially when it's supposed to be an exception to the normal ethics of shoplifting ("it's not OK to shoplift except at self-checkout").

I don't understand the momentous burden shouldered by others and their fleeting and superficial social interactions but I suppose that is due to my naivete. For me they are simply the lowest-stakes social interaction you can undertake and another chance to work on my ability to charm an audience.

You don't have to understand it in order to accept it.

So you admit openly to stealing, just to put it plainly. You chose to shop somewhere, you chose to use a self checkout, you knew there was an error, and proceeded to leave with things you didn’t pay for. No matter how you justify it to yourself, you’re a thief.

If you can justify that you can justify stealing from your employer (hey I’ve been under paid for a while, taking this unsecured device is like making up for a bit of my salary), etc.

I find the logic here really interesting. When you participate in a buy-one-get-one-free offer, you "leave with things you didn't pay for". So imagine these scenarios:

You go to a greengrocers. The lady at the checkout sees you basket of 27 grapefruit and can't be bothered to do the maths, says "let's call it 5 [relevant currency]". You know you have something in the region of 7 relevant currency, but she insists she won't take a button more.

You go to the supermarket. The tills are misconfigured, a 10[currency] box of chocolates is coming up as 0.1[currency] [1]. You're buying 5 of them. The cashier has no facility to charge you more - whatever the system says is a divine edict as far as the company is concerned.

You go to the supermarket. You're walking by the main doors with your trolley when a fire alarm goes off; smoke is billowing from the back of the store, sprinklers are activated. In the blind panic, you - and your trolley - are pushed outside. After half an hour, they announce that the store will not be reopening. You tell security that you have not paid for your shopping, they gruffly request that you take it home and make use of it rather than litter the car park with rapidly defrosting frozen items, as nobody is allowed back in the building.

In most of these cases, you could probably pay the correct amount by queueing at another till, at another time, date, at your own time and cost. For the benefit of someone who doesn't care enough about the profit margin to worry.

These are much closer than your employer-theft analogy - I don't think that the parent poster's moral standpoint is at all far away from any of the above. In fact, the only difference is that because it's a technical "glitch" with no humans involved, you clearly feel you're supposed to go the extra mile to rectify the seller's mistakes, caused by the seller failing to invest sufficiently in the system.

I certainly wouldn't judge someone making any of these calls, regardless whether I personally would go that extra thankless mile.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/money-sa...

I think the closest, albeit boring, analogy to the situation is you go through the traditional staffed register at a busy time. The tally comes out a little lower than you were expecting. Since it's not higher, you pay and get out of the way. In the parking lot, you look over your receipt and see that one item out of many didn't get scanned. Now you have the choice of either just accepting the benefit from the mistake, or spending your life waiting in line again simply to redo their job better than they did it themselves. IMO it's foolish to correct their mistake by harming yourself instead.

I've also corrected cashiers on the spot, especially for more significant errors. I once had a cashier ring up a manual 20% off coupon as 80% off ($20 vs $80 final price). Going through with that transaction could reasonably be called dishonest, despite it being perfectly legal.

So yes, 15 years ago I got a few items for free. I didn't act to get around their system - their system was just straight up broken, moving items to the have-paid-for-them area without counting them. I don't think it is a customer's job debug a store's system and manually move items back from the have-paid area. You're trying to push a paradigm wherein the store can shirk hiring even a single person to oversee their side of the transaction, yet make the customer responsible for applying diligence for both sides. Give me a break.

I guarantee you the store doesn't analyze their situation in such inflexible absolutist terms, because they could literally never do anything ("can't just put stuff on the shelves, someone might pocket something!!"). Rather they look at cost/benefit. The cost they incurred there was part of the development of the machines, which seemingly has paid off for them by now given that the machines are still around. That is how they chose to handle their half of the responsibility, end of story.

I myself only brought up the detail to make that point that even with the machine's obtuseness leading to missed items, the frustration of it grinding of my gears was still greater! Place the item here, place the item there. no, you did something wrong, go back. no, go back. okay now I am finally ready to take your money. bills first, sorted by serial number! And every time I have tried the machines in the following years, I find that same obtuseness. If you can't take the judgment of valuing my personal convenience over wasting my effort to get free stuff as an indication that I am not a thief, it only demonstrates how useless your paradigm is.

So get off your high horse. Maybe next you can write some grandstanding general comment about the countless other occurrences where something was wrong on a receipt but people didn't go back afterwards because the error was in their favor. Or I can even give you some fodder - I also defraud the stores by changing out my surveillance nym every few months. Meanwhile you can continue missing the forest for the trees and letting slide the emergent-complexity abuses caused by the wholly logical implications of absolutist morals and laws.

I bet you're one of those people that actually waits in a line to exit the store, so that the security guard can recheck your receipt and give you a gold star. How many are you up to now?