To be fair in this case, self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want. The popularity of curb-side pickup of your grocery order shows how nice that model used to be, but self-service is more scalable and cheaper. The same is true when it comes to paying. It’s nicer to have someone else ring you up than you have to learn to do it yourself.

I think a better comparison would be people complaining about frictionless checkout (where you just walk out like Amazon grocery stores) in the same way as shopping carts, which is actually a whole new and better experience but can feel so weird that people feel uncomfortable about it.

(disclaimer: I’ve never actually tried an Amazon Go store but I do avoid self-checkout whenever I have fruits/veggies to check out)

> self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want.

This makes some assumptions.

Off the top of my head:

1) The shopkeeper is always available to grab your purchases without a wait. 2) You already know exactly which products you want, and/or there aren't different versions of products to select between. 3) The shopkeeper is trustworthy enough to get you the actual products you want. 4) You aren't a person that the shopkeeper is going to discriminate against.

There are lots of good reasons to want to pick out your own groceries.

It works significantly better when there isn’t any real choice - you have creamy vs chunky peanut butter instead of forty different brands thereof.

Give me whole milk is easier and simpler than “give me this particular brand of whole milk”.

Which is great when your needs are the default needs.

When you have needs—or even just desires—that aren't The One Available Product, suddenly you're SOL. Sometimes with grievous health consequences.

I'll add:

• You're able to speak loud and clear.

• You can speak the same language as the shopkeeper.

Whenever I go get my own groceries, I can buy my lunches in advance for the next week as well if the expiration dates for my usual lunches are long enough. But whenever I've ordered my groceries delivered, I've had to assume that the expiration dates last for about a week.

There's definitely advantages to someone picking out your groceries for you, but also some drawbacks.

> To be fair in this case, self-service is objectively worse than having the shopkeeper grab everything you want.

even this depends on the type of shopper you are. if I'm buying a bunch of pasta, curbside pickup is great, and delivery is even better. but if I'm buying an ny strip, I want to see all the choices and pick the one that looks best. similar for fruits and vegetables, I don't trust the professional shopper to evaluate ripeness on my behalf. some things you just have to do yourself.

Self-checkout machines are simply bad though. All the hoops they make you jump through to prevent theft makes for a terrible experience. Having to put everything on the damn scale, even if it's the only thing you're buying, sucks, and even still it always yells at you, "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!". And there's always a dozen prompts you have to click through before you can pay.

Home Depot gets it right. They have a large table with a handheld wireless scanner, a receipt printer, a card payment terminal, and a touch screen that you don't need to interact with at all. All you have to do is start scanning and tap your card when you're done.

These days many supermarkets here have self-scan systems where you scan each item yourself with a handheld machine before putting it in your cart or bag, and at checkout you just put the scanner back, scan your store card and pay. Once in a while, a worker has to scan random items from your cart (I assume it's based on heuristics that try to determine whether you might have had a possibly suspicious behavior like cancelling items from the scanner often) but that's quite rare.

It's fast, there are no lines, it's less work for everyone.

Many of the 'self-checkout' machines are really bad at what they do. Put the items on a scale as you scan them, but don't put your own bag on the scale ... so you can bag the item after it's scanned, saving repeating that motion for each item ... or it will bitch at you. Repeatedly. (And the 'watchperson' comes over sounding accusatory.)

The store can damn well afford to pay someone to scan and bag the items, while I do the loyalty-card, payment-card cha-cha. The store isn't paying me to do all this shit.

Do you really find that to be a hurdle? The first time I used one, the scale warning surprised me. But it's trivial to avoid, and now self checkout feels super efficient to me

I'm tall, and the scales are nearly at floor level. And if I walk into a grocery store and buy a single bag of milk (which doesn't need another bag because it is a bag so why would I put it in the bagging area?), having to stoop down to put it on the scale is an inconvenience I'd rather avoid. Some stores let you select "no bag" every time and let you proceed to payment, but most don't. Being treated with so much suspicion is also not pleasant.

My solution is to avoid self-checkout at stores with crappy machines, or avoid those stores altogether. If Home Depot can do good self-checkout, why can't everyone else? That's the primary reason I frequent HD over Lowe's.

It can be a hurdle for people who aren't already familiar with the machines and their arcane rules. That quickly becomes a problem if the store doesn't have enough staff to dedicate an employee to the self-checkout area.

I've been seeing this more often in the past few months at understaffed low-cost retailers. When there's nobody around to override the machines, people get frustrated and move on to the next open machine without understanding what went wrong.

Five minutes later, the entire self-checkout area is offline, and the would-be customer sometimes feels sufficiently annoyed and neglected to walk off with their groceries.

> It can be a hurdle for people who aren't already familiar with the machines and their arcane rules.

Right, like I mentioned, it was a very weird first time experience. But my question was addressed to the parent commenter, who is clearly not a first-time user and is aware of how these systems work.

I was asking how it remains a hurdle to someone who's already familiar with it, because this is very far from my own experience. I honestly don't even notice the scale requirement anymore, because placing things on the scale has become subconscious

Wal Mart gets it perfect with Wal Mart Pay too.

What is Wal-Mart Pay? In Canada Wal-Mart's self-checkouts are as bad as the rest. Actually, worse, because they force you to walk through this longaze before you can even get to the machines.

You scan a QR code to pay with your saved card. You can also use "Scan & Go" and scan all your items with your phone before you get to the checkout. The self checkouts here work great, no annoying weight sensor or anything and there's a detachable scanner.

("longaze" should be "long maze".)

I like talking to people in the checkout line. The lady who checked me out today grew up in the same tiny town my parents retired to, 7 hours from here. Just learned that today. Plus, the UX of self checkout systems generally sucks to the extent that it makes me angry when I use it, and I'd rather feel better at the end of a transaction than worse.

People like you are my worst nightmare :P. The last thing I want when shopping is interactions with random strangers. I'll even gladly take a slightly janky self-checkout experience if it eliminates interacting with a cashier.

The strange thing about self checkout at my nearest store is that the store is 24 hours, but they close self checkout at night, which is also when they have no staff, so the only way to use the store is to walk all over and drag the manager back to open a checkout.

well, if I am saving supermarket money on shopkeepers then supermarket also needs to expect I will also try to save some money on "mistakes" while using self checkout, two can play this game, especially considering how much money shopkeepers scammed me, because they always make "mistake" which is beneficial only to shop (OK, to be fair, not always, "only" in 95-98% cases, I can't even remember how many times they scammed me with wrong price(tag)s or wrong item (it's almost every other or every third purchase, so I check receipt every single time), but I remember very well once in a many years guy made mistake and charged me cheaper bread, that was like winning the lotto)

When Target was just starting to expand as Super Target in my area they somehow had the barcode for turkey ringing up as 25 cents total instead of per pound. I tried to explain to the cashier that it had to be wrong and they started to get mad at me, so I gave up and took my 25 cent turkey.

Some people will just resist any change and complain for the most petty reasons

My grandmother used to laugh about a famous person-on-the-street interview about Australia going metric: one woman complained, "why can't they just wait until all us old people die". It was her go-to comment about anyone complaining about change, and she found it funnier the older she got.

And sometimes change actually sucks.

And the common response to self checkout is that you are putting a checker out of work. Never mind the fact that most of the shelves are not stocked by store employees, but by distributors. A grocery store is basically a place where the store rents out shelf space to the highest bidder.

My response to self-checkout is that it only works properly 50% of the time, and the other half I have to stand around looking befuddled before an employee waddles over to clear the error. Cashiers are evidently better at checkout than I am, and their labor is free-to-me, so self-checkout just seems like a raw deal with no upsides.

I think you might just have a shitty grocery store... 50% is an absurd failure rate. I think the failure rate I've seen is closer to 1%, and I'm a pretty heavy self checkout user across pharmacies and grocery stores, in both sf and ny

I don't see why it has to be one way or the other. aside from whole foods JWO (which is great!), I have yet to see a single grocery store that lacks checkout lanes. if you like that service, you're in luck! it's available pretty much everywhere. but let's have self-checkout as an option too. nine times out of ten, I'll be walking out the door with my groceries while you're still waiting in line.

> Never mind the fact that most of the shelves are not stocked by store employees, but by distributors.

This is new to me. Do you just mean that the placement is decided by distributors? I'm pretty sure I have seen store employees putting stuff on the shelves from time to time at my local supermarket.

Distributors for the big food companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, etc) essentially rent and maintain a section of shelving and then keep it full and decide themselves on the distribution of products that appear. Smaller manufacturers sell their product wholesale to the stores who then stock them in the normal fashion.

The end caps of isles are sold to the highest bidder, typically by the week; if that bidder is coca-cola they manage that display as well, subject to the constraints of the store.

One of the innovations of Frys Electronics was to try to run their shops that way, as they started by selling serial cables and other computer supplies in their family's grocery chain. It only partially worked as the vendors weren't really equipped to do this, the way the food companies are.

I believe this only applies to a few sections—soda, chips, and magazines(?). Your produce and canned food aisles are stocked by the store employees, though the planograms for the shelving layout comes from corporate, sized for the store’s footprint. There may be some distributor input into those, such as cereal, but I’ve never seen those processes, only the resulting stock plan.

This also only applies to some stores - not all. You can often tell by the uniform the sticker is wearing.

Smaller stores and chains are often stocked by the store itself, even if Coke delivered the pallet.

This is correct. In many areas, alcohol is also stocked by distributors. But the rest of the grocery store is stocked by store employees.

No, vendors have a few shelves, it's not at all like you say. Source: have seen employees stocking the vast majority of shelves.