this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Look, saying “I don’t work here” to avoid using self-checkout completely misses the point. Technology has always evolved by shifting little tasks onto the user in exchange for speed and convenience. It’s not about “working for free,” it’s just self-service - like when grocery stores first let people grab stuff off shelves instead of asking a clerk behind a counter. At the time, some people probably whined about it too, but now nobody thinks twice because it’s way faster and gives you more control. Same thing with ATMs - you used to have to stand in line and talk to a bank teller just to get cash, now you punch a few buttons yourself. Are you ‘working for the bank’ when you use an ATM? No, you’re just getting your money faster without the hassle. Self-checkout is the same idea: a tiny bit of effort, way more convenience. Complaining about it like it’s some moral stand is honestly missing the bigger picture.
Except self checkout isn't faster. The professionals that check you out do this every day, they're way faster than me.
Not to mention 100% of the time I use self checkout, the machine doesn't realize I've put something in the bagging area and I need a staff member to sort out the broken machine, but because there's 1 staff member doing this for a dozen machines, they're constantly busy sorting out these broken machines so you often have to wait minutes for them to fix it.
Not sure about your lower-than-ideal scanning success rate machines, possibly a location issue. The machines i use work pretty much flawlessly and even if the process itself might be a little longer, the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier.
Cashiers are at minimum twice as fast as customers mainly because after doing it for a while they start knowing were the bar codes are in most products and don't have to look around for them, know which are the awkward things to scan and how to do it, and are so used to the layout and sequence of the screens that they just go through them naturally.
You simply can't be as fast at doing something you do once in a while, as somebody who spends hours every day doing it.
Also were I live the cashier doesn't do bagging, the customer does, so whilst in a self-service checkout you're doing both scanning and bagging, with a cashier they're doing the scanning and you're doing the bagging which also makes the whole thing much faster even if you're making sure things are bagged the way you want it (for example, having all cold things in the same bag) because you can focus on bagging.
As for the lines being non-existent in self-service, that's not quite so simple a judgement as it seems:
That said, self-checkout is faster for customers in stores with mixed systems (both self-checkout and cashiers) if you have only a few things to checkout.
I disagree with your assessment of lines unless the store is simply doing it wrong. I have 3 stores I use that are self checkout only, and the only times there are lines at all are "rush hours" such as when everyone is finishing work, and the lines used to be FAR worse at that time. It's a line of like 5 people waiting at most, not per checkout, in total. Before self serve it was a minimum of 5 per checkout, so like 20+ people waiting total.
The fact is they're able to fit 6 self checkouts in the space there used to be 2 manned checkouts, even if they're being fairly inefficient with space. So they get rid of 4 manned and have 12 self serve (real example of 2 of them did), and people can be 3x as slow with no extra build up.
From what I've seen (in two different countries, so it's probably not something specific about the way people are used to do something in a certain country), it mainly depends on the kind of store.
In supermarket type stores (were people, including families and old people, go buy a whole week worth of shopping) self-checkout makes things worse, especially if it's in a country were there's some kind of obligation to check somebody's age when selling alcoholic drinks (because the person who is overseeing a whole lot of self-checkouts has to come around and pass their card to confirm your age has been checked, so you generally have to wait for them, especially if they're helping somebody out).
Those tiny tills that replaced the big manned tills are hugely impractical for people buying lots of stuff and you loose the time saving in the long manned tills which comes from people moving their stuff from the shopping cart to the conveyor belt whilst the person in front of them is being served.
In IKEA stores, were most of what people buy are big packages, self-checkouts seem to slow things down a bit, or at best are neutral, possibly because the space per till is still the same so they're not really adding any more tills by replacing tills with cashiers with self-checkouts hence the loss of speed from having an amateur (the customer) do the checkout is not made up for there being more open tills.
Were I've seen it improve service speed and reduce queues is in small stores were people are just buying a handful of things. This also includes mini-market type stores in inner cities were people tend to go often during the week and buy just a few things like bread and milk.
I've also seen it work in a big surface hardware store, possibly because they still had 1 long cashier till for people who were checking out big items and replaced the other 5 cashier tills with about 10 self-checkouts and most people just bought a handful of small things which are fast to checkout in the self-checkouts.
perhaps it's because I've never been to a place with smaller than supermarket sized stores with normal food items (pork, beef, cheese, lettuce, bread), but self checkout seems to speed up the process because those buying only a few items use it.
With self checkout you do the bagging while scanning though.
Correct, which is why no matter how fast you are at the checkout part it's still going to be slower, especially if you're trying to bag things in any way other than "dump stuff into bag as fast as possible" - you can't both be scanning an item and putting an item on the bag at the same time unless you're just dropping it there without looking (which is a problem if anything you're buying is in a glass bottle or jar).
Yes, of course you can lol.
This is starting to sound more and more like a skill issue than anything else.
Either way, I don't mind if you choose the regular checkouts. It keeps the self checkout queue free for the rest of us 😀
Read what I wrote:
The only way you can just scan and put it in the bag in one movement is like cashiers do it - pass it in front of the scanner with the barcode facing it, them just let go of it, all as one movement.
If you're actually placing it in a specific position in a specific bag you have look at it, pick it up, pass it in front of the scanner, look at where you're going to place it and place it.
The last two steps are additional to what a cashier does around here (were they don't do bagging) hence the process is slower if a single person is doing all those steps rather than just the first 3, and that won't change no matter how elitez your unpaid cashier skillz are.
This is seriously basic stuff and the principle behind Industrial Assembly Lines.
But, hey, if you're happy doing it that way, good for you.
Sure but the queues eat but your 2 seconds of time savings.
You are also heavily exaggerating the amount of effort and time kt takes to place objects into a bag. Looking and deciding where to place objects and actually placing them aren't separate steps, it's one continuous motion. Normal people take the placement decisions while moving the object into the bag.
Bagging isn't exactly rocket science.
Or are you just absolutely incapable of multitasking? While eating do you look at the plate and ponder what piece to eat next and then you execute your grabbing maneuver. After you have done that do you think over the best way to move your fork over to your mouth and then you stop and open your mouth. After the month is open do you then move your food into your mouth…
No, of fucking course you don't. You just eat. I'm very sorry if that is the way you live but most people can make decisions on their next moves without interrupting their current move
Shopping isn't comparable to industrial assembly lines. If it were the human would be cut out completely and every object would pass through a 365 scanner or something instead.
Either way the most optimal way of shopping is what we often use in larger grocery stores in Sweden. Hand held scanners where you carry a scanner around the store and scan items before putting them in your bags and when you are don't you dock the scanner and pay, and you are done.
It boils down to how much you care about how things are sorted in your bags.
If you don't give a shit then all you have to spend time on in the bagging side of things is being careful placing in the bag products which are in glass containers (to avoid breaking them) and the rest you just drop in the bag. If you've essentially trained yourself to know the side of each product were the barcode is and the scanner is a front-and-bottom double scanner (same as cashiers) you'll be doing near cashier speeds at scanning, In that case and as you pointed out, there being more self-service tills means that if everybody was like you (i.e. don't care much about how their bags are organized, and like to optimize their own checkout speeds) then self-service tills would be faster.
Personally because I do a big weekly shopping and walk or cycle home from it, I actually have to have some organization in my shopping bags, and my bagging speed just about keeps up with the scanning speed of the cashier as long as I've ordered stuff properly in the conveyor belt that goes to the cashier.
As for multitasking, your example is like apples to oranges relative to mine - chewing is literally instinctive (requires no thinking and in fact if you try and think the steps of your chewing, it will be way slower), which is not at all comparable with my example were you have to look at things in different places (which you can't do at the same time because they're different places and you only have one set of eyes) and have to actually make a decision on the bagging side (i.e. "were shall I put this").
Also you seem to not know what an Assembly Line is - this stuff is totally independent of automation (it predates it, dating back to Henry Ford's time) and it's purely about dividing a complex process into multiple steps and have each person just do one step again and again. Since each individual only does one thing they become very effective at it, plus as they're working in parallel, the whole thing is much faster.
"Scanning & bagging" is naturally dividable because each it's own "attention + decision + movement" block.
But yeah, I agree that those systems you mentioned were people just scan things with a portable scanner as they pick them up from the shelves are much faster than manual cashiers because the scanning happens during shopping (there are also other systems were stuff is scanned all at once without having to taking out from the bag, thanks to RFID tags on the products, which are also much faster).
The problem is that the vast majority of self-checkout systems I've seen out there in two different countries are crappy little checkout tills with only room for a single bag, having a non-standardized UI (so, different in different stores) and a shit scanner (either a handheld one or a single-side scanner).
Rather than redoing the whole process to use the possibilities associated with the customer registering themselves the products they buy (as your example "scan the items when you pick them up from the shelves" does), the vast majority of self-checkout "solutions" out there just make the customer do the checkout in the same way as the cashier did, only with inferior tools than the cashier had (less space, less comfort, worse scanners) - so all they do is replace a professional with a free (for the store) amateur rather than make the whole process more convenient.
These "checkout just like a cashier but in a crappy station" self-checkout systems are just about ok for somebody familiar with computers who just wants to check out a handful of products, but are problematic when the store has, for example old people doing self-checkout of their weekly shopping.
In the real world not everybody is like you and when there are no cashier checkouts available, these self-checkouts which are really just inferior versions of cashier tills tend to end up with old people, computer illiterate people, people who need to pack their bags in a certain way and people with lots of shopping gumming up the system because they're way slower than cashiers, at which point you lost the speed gains from having more self-checkouts than you had cashiers and the self-checkout tills end up with queues just like the cashier tills used to have. If you have mixed systems, then people who would be much slower if doing self-checkout will go to the cashiers and the rest can go to the self-checkouts, but the ratio of one to the other needs to be properly balanced (and I've seen several cases of it not properly balanced)
I prefer to go to the bank and withdraw cash, now that my bank is ATM only I want lower card fees or something. The bank saves money on this deal at my expense.
Same thing with self checkout at the groceries stores, they save a lot of money while I do the work. I could only accept it if I got like a 5-10% discount.
Why would you want to wait in line and only be able to access your money during 9-5 M-F
I don't want to pay the same amount of money for less product or service. Also, I think it's nice that a secondary effect is a sort of solidarity with those who lose their jobs to a machine.
Machines still cost money to purchase and operate lol. So fucking entitled.
Why do everyone - from factories to grocery - stores want to automate if not to save money through laying off people?
I'm entitled enough to take my business elsewhere.
If the bank can pay for a teller and not charge you extra, an unmanned machine which is at most a high upfront cost with low service fees should be even easier for the bank.
That'd be a great point if self-checkout was anywhere near as convenient as an ATM. But it's not, it's literally the same machine a cashier uses, bolted onto a card reader. There's no added convenience unless you're buying literally only one item. It's not innovation, it's outsourcing labor to the customer so the company can cut jobs and boost profits. You're doing 100% of the work they used to pay Someone for.
You are completely wrong about this. The cashier UI is less friendly and has lots of functions. Many are designed to be used with a keyboard or with small touch targets.
The user UI can basically do nothing but add items and pay. It is drastically simplified with few larger buttons and a greater degree of thought put into UI as you don't get to train every user to use your UI.
and the self checkout ui is worse because of the lack of keyboard
Yes because people who are using your system with the entirely wrong height to type anything absolutely need to be able to hit F3 instead of clicking pay. The whole shtick is having almost no functions. Add item, lookup items, pay
Ah, but you're forgetting the emotional labor of forcing your lips to say "hi" while awkwardly shifting your eyes away from the cashier because after 20 years of life in your lonely, desolate suburban wasteland with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no people to see, you've grown unimaginably socially anxious and you've completely forgotten how to talk to anyone.
Frankly, I think you're just a luddite, or something. You.. hate.. barcode scanners, just admit it.
Bad design, no effort for user ease. I wouldn't use that.
Not to mention the constant paranoia and assumption that you're stealing from them whilst saving them an immense amount of labour costs. Cameras watching your every move and "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA".
Makes for such an enjoyable shopping experience...
People steal a LOT. It's impossible to catch the folks who steal without watching everyone. You are being watched whilst you shop too.
Sounds like a you problem.