I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.

Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.

> Surely they teach this to the cashiers.

Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.

You won't like what you see if you read restaurant inspection reports of people who are actively handling the food that's getting served to you.

I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.

They are automating quite a lot, since the wait times are much much lower. I choose the self-checkout counters >95% of the time.

Please explain to me which part they are automating.

A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.

I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.

Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.

The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.

So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.

By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.

They understaffed, and it sucked. Now you do all the work and are apparently happy about it. Go figure.

No they did not understaff. It is normal to wait if you want an unscheduled 1on1. It was always like that and it was always normal.

I tried pre-booking my checkout session, but the safeway never returned my calls.

Given that every store (and damn near every establishment for that matter) has been understaffed for the past 20-ish years, can you blame them?

Yeah, actually I can. Understaffed just means you’re not paying well enough.

Look what happened recently in new york. $30/hour to shovel snow got them a lineup out the door of people wanting to work.

Those companies made the choice to prioritize profit margins above staffing.

You're blaming the store, which I agree with. My question was whether you could blame the GP, or the consumer in general. They have little control over how much the staff of their grocery store is being paid.

Ah, yes i did misunderstand. No i don’t blame them, but i am confused about their preference because it doesn’t match my own.

People have different preferences. What's to be confused about that?

I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.

Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages. More staff can only mean higher prices. I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/profit-m...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/profit-...

> Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages.

And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.

> More staff can only mean higher prices.

When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.

> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.

It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.

> And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.

Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.

> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.

Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.

There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.

Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.

Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.

I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.

Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.

I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?

Many self-checkout stations are setup to be slower than a skilled cashier. So it can save time to have them do it.

Sure, but I deliberately choose my grocery store to increase the probability of having an actually skilled cashier. And I’ve never had a skilled bagger, including excellent cashiers. Doing it right is worth some of my time.

> Not just that, getting unpaid labor.

That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.