this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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I'm pretty sure people were complaining about this when supermarkets replaced greengrocers. "What do you mean I can't just hand a list to the clerk and have him package up my groceries? They expect me to do free labor?" But we kept it around because the convenience was worth it.
The smaller evil corporations use them too.
I don't know where you're going, but at the grocery stores I go to (and the one I used to work at) the scanner is literally the same unit as on the checkout the human is operating because that way it's easier and cheaper to keep parts on hand to fix them.
HONESTLY this is like the ONLY JOKE people have about self-checkouts. You could joke about the thing always being out of bags, or having trouble when you're trying to buy alcohol, or flagging down an attendant when the thing doesn't have a barcode, and yet everyone chooses "unexpected item in the bagging area," which hasn't been a problem for people who actually know how to use the thing for a decade or more? Why is this the mindvirus that has infiltrated everyone and not, like, social equity?
I’m not making a joke.
It’s a terrible design and these should all be scrapped until they make ones that don’t suck.
I haven't had trouble with this or seen anyone who has in probably a decade. They already have made ones that don't suck. (As much, to be fair)
Now you’re just making shit up.
Very much not. I've shopped biweekly since around the beginning of the pandemic, and the trouble I have is when the overhead camera thinks I'm stealing, like, a fast food soft drink I have in my cart or something. I haven't heard "unexpected item in the bagging area" or anything like it for years, literally. And I only have to wait for a person in the case of the aforementioned camera debacles, or if I'm buying alcohol.
I hear it happen to a stranger almost every time at Lucky or Safeway.
Happens to me if I try to scan even half as fast as they do at the real checkout scanners.
See my comment here for my recent revelation. In short: the problem isn't with self checkouts, it's that the stores you're going to aren't maintaining them well.
To shoppers, that is a distinction without difference.
Except that the big companies can use that misconception to shuffle the rightful blame around so you don't focus it in the right place.