Sounds like the issue in your area is lack of competition. I live near a lot of grocery stores (coincidentally can walk to two of them in under five minutes and I don’t live in a walkable city) and it would be hard for me to give that up.

I also live near a lot of grocery stores, all different chains, and what the OP describes is the reality at all of them. I always choose a human cashier when available because it's almost always faster.

Honestly, I think the issue may be more due to labor shortage than penny-pinching.

Isn't labor shortage a factor of penny-pinching? I'm pretty confident that if said cashiers were being offered double the rate that they are currently being offered that there would be no labor shortage problem.

A variant of the self-checkout is what's called self-scanning in Switzerland. Instead of checking out you scan the stuff you want to buy with a scanner you can pick up at the entry. The checkout is just paying.

Same in Sweden, the only stores with a queue are those that only have self-scanning at the point of checkout.

It's so easy to just have 20 self checkout lanes and then this problem doesn't happen. Why is walmart the only one doing it?

I think it's worth noting that Walmart's self-checkout is incredibly more robust than many competitors. What I've seen of Safeway, each item has like a 5% chance of needing an employee to clear an error state, which usually means a two minute wait per error.

The Lidl near me in London has a similar issue. There are 14 self-checkout stations, but they're mostly broken all the time (and the store is only about two years old, it's not like they're ancient technology). The most I've ever seen functional at once is 9. One day it was down to only 5 working at all and those were having some issue with NFC payments (if you had an actual card, it was fine, but everyone wants to use Apple pay on their phone now) and they only had one cashier working.

The other anti-pattern is multiple lines to human cashiers. A single line is faster and fairer. What slows it down is assholes on their phones not being ready when they are next.

> Where I live in the US, the only grocery store near me has four self-checkout machines and only one other cashier on duty.

I'm not sure why that is, but it isn't the fault of the self-checkout machines. They are smaller than normal checkouts, and they could have 20 of them and still need only one cashier on duty.

Where I live, when they replace normal checkouts with their conveyor belts, lolly stands and backing areas, they typically get 2 self service ones per normal one replaced.