On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.
In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.
In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.
Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.
What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixes it into theirs.
I don’t love self-checkout, it can be annoying when something doesn’t scan and I don’t have the ability to manually input the bar code like a normal cashier does. And sometimes there can be errors (“place the item into the bagging area” - when I already did), but I’m overall glad to have the option for self-checkout.
I feel this. It makes my blood boil. I wish I could flutter through life with such child like absent mindedness.
But yeah when you’re the other person in this scenario it’s irritating as hell :-D
- I never have to weigh anything except produce
- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint
- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store
- Usually the cashier will bag for me
I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.
My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines
In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.
If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.
I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.
Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.
There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?
There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.
There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.
Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.
I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.
I think it's worth reading the complete comment and you'll see where what you said fits my wider point.
I enjoy stealin', it's just as simple as that
Oh well, it's just a simple fact
When I want something, man, I don't wanna pay for it
Obviously it varies location by location.
Remove from basket, scan, put in bag. Remove from basket, scan, put in bag.
The scale is the entire bagging area, and it detects when things were removed or added without being scanned, as far as I know that's all it does here. No specific weights.
Objectively false. Some stores in some areas do that. Most don't.
At Walmart if I only have a few items (most of the time I go to Walmart) I'll just grab the scan gun and scan everything without taking anything out of my cart. I'll bag when I get to the car.
It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.
Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.
Buying something for under 5 euro bucks in a shop where middle school kids buy their lunches is almost guaranteed check. More than one in three times.
A different shop and a bigger amount — checks almost never
I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.
I live in the US and the only place I ever go to where they weigh the items you scanned is Costco. Everywhere else I go (my local Walmart, Target, two local grocery stores, CVS) the self checkout is mostly based on trust with one employee somewhat monitoring some machines. No random sampling.
The only issue I ever run into with the self checkouts is double scanning the product. You do need employee to void items.
Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.
It uses your rewards card to determine your “risk”, I think. Just a theory. But whenever I’ve gotten a new card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly at all.
One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way more often for a while.
Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.
And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.
And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.