>It was horrendously slow. And every single individual item had to have its own price sticker - which often fell off, holding everyone up. One of my first jobs

>It was horrendously slow. And every single individual item had to have its own price sticker - which often fell off, holding everyone up. One of my first jobs was at a store where we manually keyed the prices (and produce code numbers). We often got comments from customers surprised that we were quicker than the stores that used scanners. Missing stickers for unusual products could of course cause a slowdown (same as a product that won't scan). But for most things, you typed them in so many times per day that you could just glance over the pile of things as they were being unloaded onto the checkout counter and by the time the customer had put everything on the counter, your hand had already keyed all the prices/codes in by muscle memory. Things that were sold by weight had to be weighed, but otherwise it was quick. It took longer to wait for the response from the credit card processor than it did to enter prices for a whole cart full of groceries. That gave us time to bag the groceries. When someone paid cash, there was no need to wait for the credit card (or wait for someone to fill out a check), so that's when we had to call one of the clerks over to bag.