And yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.

At Costco, they forced me to empty out my very fat cart and scan each item individually. That's when I realized the value of cashiers.

It feels like “virtual stuck behind a bus”, then doing the company a favor for the experience.

The only time, for me, this is true, is when it's empty and I have very few items. If there's a line, I'd rather wait for the cashier. Self-checkout seems to get clogged up with people waiting for the supervising human the busier it is, so to have a human or two (one ringing one bagging) when I've got a cart and there's a line, is advantageous.

I'm also pretty anti-social and actually prefer the robotic banter of quickly checking out with a person to the anxious nightmare of just trying to buy something real quick and now waiting because the machine hates life more than me.

Oh and many of the folks doing the bagging at some of the stores are disabled, and I dunno - I hope we're taking care of people in those jobs.

For ninety nine out of a hundred scenarios, I've never had to wait for a supervising human at all. Maybe it's where I shop, but generally speaking, I've almost never had a problem with people needing to see my checked out items.

It's a marginal improvement perhaps, but nothing to write home about. And for other things (e.g. booking travel) the self-service experience can be worse.

Not sure about that, I prefer to know all aspects of booking travel that I would not trust to another agent, human or otherwise. Therefore, I believe your statement applies to some people and not others.

And often you are still supervised by sometimes rude security guards who demand the receipts. So you have the worst of all worlds: You pay the supermarket, do the work and are treated like dirt.

On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right.

Instead of a guard there's a scanner by the exit gate where you scan your ticket. In my case just a small stub since the actual ticket is sent digitally.

I think it works so smoothly, much better than before this system was introduced. My recent experience buying groceries in Belgium was very similar.

Here in sweden it is not "the norm" by any definition of "norm". Also it's incredibly slower and not "one blip away".

And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave.

It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.

It works pretty well in the UK. The nice thing is, I can pack my bags as I shop, so I don't feel stressed when I get to the checkout.

I use this method of shopping whenever available.

In sweden you have to unpack and re-pack at the checkout. And if you have a backpack you can't place stuff inside it. No. You have to unpack, place everything on a scale and then place everything in your backpack again.

And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it.

And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a number of other useless questions.

That's just self checkout. Some places, like Ica, have self scanning which works so much better. You just scan the bar code as you pick things up - which is just in one motion as you put things in your bag. No need to unpack as you pay.

Yes you do need to be a member to use the system, but that's a very small price to pay for the convenience and speed of avoiding all lines and stress of the regular checkout.

Yeah there's like 15 places in sweden which have this, and it's "the norm"?

Sweden is a big country so I could definitely be wrong about how things look across it. However, in the greater Gothenburg area every Ica I've visited has it - that includes everything from big ones in the city and shopping malls to small ones in the suburbs 30km outside the city (where I live).

In the greater Göteborg area, no Coop, Willys, Lidl, has this. And some ICA have it. Casually, the one closer to your home, it seems.

Going from "a supermarket near my home" to "every single supermarket in sweden" is kinda of a big leap.

Try ICA in Olskroken or Godhemsgatan for example…

I Most supermarkets have self checkout, but even that isn't omnipresent (and it's usually slower).

British supermarkets mostly require the use of their app to self-scan. You need to either use your phone or use your app to start the scanner. Once you have done that it works OK. A bit error prone.

The other problem is that, like self checkout, it often requires human intervention (buying alcohol or high value items, for examples) still requires human intervention. This can require a long wait at the end. I once got so sick of waiting that I left my shopping and walked away and went somewhere else.

>That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough.

That's exactly why she asks an LLM to do it for her. A program like this would be <1k LOC, well within even the current LLM one-shot-working-app domain.