• LennartMeri@lemm.ee
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    18 hours ago

    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.

    • AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      14 hours ago

      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.

      • LennartMeri@lemm.ee
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        10 hours ago

        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.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 hours ago

          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:

          • First, I noticed that in stores where they introduced self-service checkout they invariably reduced the number of people manning the other checkouts in order to “induce” customers to use the self-checkout (because “the lines are usually nonexistent compared to a cashier”).
          • Second, once a store has fully transited to only self-checkout, you get lines at the self-checkout, mainly because as I pointed out above, customers are way slower at doing the checkout themselves than cashiers so even though there are more self-checkout tills that there were tills with cashiers before, people take longer to go through them, especially when they have lots of things to checkout, so effectively each self-checkout till has less capacity than a cashier till.

          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.

          • Robust Mirror@aussie.zone
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            4 hours ago

            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.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 hours ago

              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.

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            5 hours ago

            With self checkout you do the bagging while scanning though.

            • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 hours ago

              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).

    • alekwithak@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      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.

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        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.

      • Zombie@feddit.uk
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        17 hours ago

        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…

      • petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        13 hours ago

        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.

    • Smee
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      17 hours ago

      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.

        • phorq@lemmy.ml
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          15 hours ago

          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.