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The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending (gizmodo.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The mistake here is in assuming that it's either all or nothing; that self checkouts are either great, or some kind of disaster.

The reality is that they're great for some applications, but suck ass for others.

Here's the deal; if it's just me with a few items, yeah, the self-checkout is awesome, but if it's me and my wife and we have a shitload of groceries for the entire family, guess what? Self-checkout sucks ass and it's way easier to go through a regular checkout stand where there won't be a hundred little different ways for the system to get jammed up and require an employee intervention.

What part about this do people not understand?

I have to think that a lot of the hostility to regular checkout stands comes from relatively young Lemmy users who don't actually have to shop for families of their own.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can't even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There's no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we're putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs...

Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they're more fun to drive than a shopping cart.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In Sweden we have had a version of self checkout for 20 years in the largest stores, and here it seems to work fine.

Instead of having to scan everything at a station, each product is scanned with a handscanner when walking through the store, and put directly into shopping bags. Then only the payment and possibly a randomly occuring verification is left before leaving the store.

The random testing is usually just an employee scanning three to five items from your bags, and occurs like once every four months (as long as you're not actually stealing and caught).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The best thing is when you've been doing it for so long that the random checks happen, like, once a year. I actually don't think we've had one since before the pandemic.