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I refuse. The prices are usually too high to warrant scanning my own groceries.
by Overtonwindow 10y ago
I refuse. The prices are usually too high to warrant scanning my own groceries.
- wutbrodo 10y agoWait, the machines charge you higher prices? Where do you live? I don't think I've ever heard of this.
- pjlegato 10y agoRather, you don't get a discount for using the self-checkout. The price you are paying has the cost of a human cashier built into it. If you use self-checkout, you're providing that service yourself for free, but the company still collects the premium they charge for human service.
- markdown 10y agoIn Australia you pay even more (via tax dollars) for using self-checkout: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-06/nsw-police-to-crackdown-on-shoplifting-at-self-service-checkouts/7908154 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-06/nsw-police-to-crackdow...
- ojm 10y agoMaybe the wage savings offset the shoplifting costs.
- wutbrodo 10y agoOh gotcha. I misunderstood his implication. > The price you are paying has the cost of a human cashier built into it. If you use self-checkout, you're providing that service yourself for free While true, this is kind of a bizarre way to look at it; you should only be using the service if you prefer it to human checkout, in which case the fact that their costs are lower is irrelevant. It basically just means that both you and the company are both benefiting. One may as well say "I always make sure to use the bathroom when I go to the grocery store. If I don't, the company still collects the premium they charge for providing a bathroom". And yet if you'd rather not go to the bathroom, the premium they charge has nothing to do with your decision making process.
- bacheson1293 10y agothe machines don't cost anything?
- pjlegato 10y agoThey do, but way less than a human employee (or else they wouldn't use the machines.)
- rhizome 10y agoI wonder if anybody has ever suggested offering discounts for using them. I imagine an across-the-board x% off is anathema to the business gestalt.
- ghaff 10y agoThe problem is that then people will use self-checkout even though they know that what they're buying is going to be time consuming, awkward, and require significant manual intervention in the self-checkout lane. This is especially true in home improvement stores where things like lumber really aren't designed to work with self-checkout at all.
- rhizome 10y agoSure, but that cost would be more than compensated by a reduction in checkers.
- ghaff 10y agoMy point is that giving a discount for self-checkout will tend to lead to an experience that is worse for the shopper and doesn't even necessarily result in reduced costs for the store because they'll now need more self-checkout helpers.