6 ms·
Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?
by irl_zebra 9y ago
Why do you refuse to use the self checkout?
- zajd 9y agoI'm going to guess because of how symbolic it is regarding our society's relation to labor.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoPeople need those jobs so I want them to exist.
- michaelkeenan 9y agoThe 18th century version of this was not using an umbrella to preserve demand for coach drivers: "Over the years, Hanway and his umbrella fell victim to all sorts of abuse from Brits he passed on the sidewalk. The most pernicious abuse came from an unlikely source: coach drivers. In England at the time, hansom cabs (two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriages) and sedan chairs were the primary modes of transportation. Business boomed especially on rainy days, as both hansom cabs and sedan chairs came equipped with small canopies that kept passengers dry. When it rained, Londoners flocked to these coaches, so Hanway’s umbrella represented a threat to business. Fearing an interruption in their personal incomes, many hansom cab drivers and sedan chair carriers grew violent toward Hanway. According to the British history magazine Look and Learn, when they saw him walking by, they often “pelted him with rubbish.” On one occasion, a hansom cab driver even tried to run Hanway over with his coach. Hanway reacted by using his umbrella to “give the man a good thrashing.”" - https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-public-shaming-of-englands-first-umbrella-user https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-public-shaming-of-...
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoAnd if I lived back then I might have taken the coach instead of using an umbrella. I don't understand your point.
- dctoedt 9y agoCan't answer for GP, but I use human checkout to provide epsilon demand for cashiers who need the job. Efficiency isn't everything.
- meddlepal 9y agoI used to feel that way about bank tellers (having been a former bank teller a long time ago...) then I realized I was wasting 20 minutes in line for a simple deposit that the machine could do in under two minutes without a queue.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoDon't you feel a tinge of guilt when you walk in one day and now there's only two tellers instead of three? Maybe I'm just weird but I was at target yesterday and there were only three aisles open with lots of people going to self checkout. I said fuck it and waited in line for a person.
- maxerickson 9y agoDo you go down this rabbit hole? How do you pick between buying wheat and taking it to the miller (preserving his job) and buying flour from the grocer? Do you seek out gas stations that still pump gas for you? Do you worry that buying a fuel efficient vehicle or insulated building can have a negative impact on people working for energy producers?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago>Do you go down this rabbit hole? What requires me to go all the way down the rabbit hole? Everybody has moral beliefs that they don't follow to their extremist conclusions. I see people getting laid off or turnover being allowed to happen - I see that the replacement job for a cashier gig is sometimes even worse - I do my little part to make society a little less bad. I also don't feel that pure individualism is really the way to live so I do sacrifice a bit of a wait in line and hopefully it helps the girl that checked me out keep that gig for a little bit longer.
- dave5104 9y agoI don't use self checkout because I'm lazy, tbh. It's more work I need to do. Particularly at the grocery store I go to, I know which cashiers are good and efficient. If I have a coupon, or if I'm buying a clearance item, it's also not a big deal, but self checkout always seems to require a "help is on the way!"
- ryandrake 9y agoConvenience/efficiency more than anything. Most of the time, human checkout is faster than self-checkout. I can prepare my payment in parallel with the human operating the checkout hardware. I don't have to learn and navigate the touch screen menu system (even if it can be learned in a second, that's one second more than the zero I get with human checkout). Often, self checkout kiosks fail in ways that require a human to be summoned anyway.
- icebraining 9y agoPrepare your payment? What's there to prepare?
- ryandrake 9y agoPull out wallet, extract credit card, swipe or insert chip, wait, sign, put back card, put back wallet. All these things can be done in parallel while the cashier is also working. With self-checkout unless you are very good you can't do this while you are also scanning all your items.
- icebraining 9y agoAh, right, I forgot about that. Here you can't "swipe or insert chip, wait, sign, put back card, put back wallet" before everything is scanned, since you validate the total before inserting the PIN, so we can't save much time by avoiding self-checkout.
- odammit 9y agoBecause I drink a lot. Can’t buy booze in self checkout (in CA).
- criddell 9y agoI'm in Austin, TX and I can buy booze in self-checkout, as long as it isn't Sunday morning.
- rconti 9y agoDo they scan your ID? If not, I'm surprised someone hasn't come knocking about this...
- thinkythought 9y agoIn washington you have to wait, a long time, for a clerk to come over and check your id and unlock the checkout machine. it's obnoxious
- SamuelAdams 9y agoSadly, it's not that simple. Facial verification has come a long way, but it's not accurate enough. You need a person to verify the person's ID matches the face of the customer that is buying it - otherwise some teenager can swipe his Dad's ID and buy alcohol. Plus you need someone to verify the customer is not already drunk - selling to someone who is already visibily intoxicated is a great way to a lawsuit.
- lorenzhs 9y agoIt's obviously not the same thing as a self-checkout machine, but there are automated border control systems in some countries (e.g. Germany). Scan your biometric passport, step into the mantrap, look into the camera, welcome to Germany! If it's good enough to let people pass border control, it should be good enough to sell alcohol. The technology exists, I just wouldn't want to use it at a grocery store.
- 9y ago
- elchief 9y agoFor one, Wal*Mart doesn't provide cash-back at self checkout
- losteverything 9y agoYea it does...and people often forget to pick it up
- opensourcenews 9y agoPeople still use cash?
- wtetzner 9y agoI prefer self checkout in theory, but often the machine doesn't work properly, and you need a human to login and fix it anyway. The whole thing where it checks if something is in bagging area seems to be pretty buggy in most of the stores where I've used them.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoI'm not the one you're asking. But I work with computers all day. Even for an introvert, human contact is nice every once in a while. So I use the human cashier. S/he may be less efficient than self checkout, but the self checkout machine never smiles at me...
- majewsky 9y agoIt kind of saddens me that people have to point to human cashiers as a source of social interaction. Maybe you can find a place where you can be with people who accept that you want to be solitary at times. I attend my local hackerspace for that purpose.
- jzawodn 9y agoI refuse to use it because they don't provide a discount for doing so. What's my incentive?
- mrguyorama 9y agoI DID the cashier job at the store I go to, and am still fairly familiar with the software/hardware. If I could just step up to a normal register and run through my stuff, it would take seconds for me to check out, as it does to check out small orders when you have a cashier who somehow manages to care at $10/hour. Meanwhile, self checkouts are slow as hell, cumbersome, and double check everything you do, but still manage to not stop theft. Not to mention many purchases need a human in the loop anyway, and the amount of times other shoppers spend ten full minutes also fighting with the things, but without the understanding of the back end POS software, and you could easily replace a group of 4 self checkouts with the one person being paid to watch them anyway