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I love self-checkout, it's always the fastest line at the grocery store by a huge margin. I've counted a number of times while standing in line, and the bank o

I love self-checkout, it's always the fastest line at the grocery store by a huge margin. I've counted a number of times while standing in line, and the bank of 4 self-checkout kiosks can usually clear 6 customers with no limit on the number of items in the same time the adjacent 15-item-or-less cashier can help one. The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada but we get a lot of American tourists, and they always go to the self-checkout and then get confused about something and tie up a terminal for 5 minutes and then start loudly complaining about how terrible self checkouts are. There's some strange mentality among Americans where they know they hate self-checkout, they know they will fail to use them, but they still insist on skipping over all the staffed checkouts and using the self-checkout anyways.

Zarath 9y ago
How could this possibly be true? Is nobody buying produce? How do you weigh your produce and find the proper product ID? More quickly than someone who does it for hours a day, every day?
- notatoad 9y ago
  You put the produce on the barcode scanner/scale, you type in the first three letters on the on-screen keyboard, and you tap the matching picture. Or else you read the 4-digit code on the sticker and type it in. Or else you pick from the pictures of the 16 most popular produce items displayed on the screen. 10 seconds, max. And you don't have to be faster than the cashier to be faster, you just have to be faster than 1/4 as fast as a cashier before one bank of self-checkouts is faster than the cashier.
dmix 9y ago
> The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada This must be the case[1], I keep hearing self-checkout lines being slow but they are always the quickest way out of any store in almost every self-checkout store I've been to in southern Ontario. [1] maybe a combination of the design of the local systems and the experience of the users, the penetration is quite large in the downtown city I live in, so people tend to be very quick

Zarath 9y ago

How could this possibly be true? Is nobody buying produce? How do you weigh your produce and find the proper product ID? More quickly than someone who does it for hours a day, every day?

notatoad 9y ago
You put the produce on the barcode scanner/scale, you type in the first three letters on the on-screen keyboard, and you tap the matching picture. Or else you read the 4-digit code on the sticker and type it in. Or else you pick from the pictures of the 16 most popular produce items displayed on the screen. 10 seconds, max. And you don't have to be faster than the cashier to be faster, you just have to be faster than 1/4 as fast as a cashier before one bank of self-checkouts is faster than the cashier.

dmix 9y ago

> The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada This must be the case[1], I keep hearing self-checkout lines being slow but they are always the quickest way out of any store in almost every self-checkout store I've been to in southern Ontario. [1] maybe a combination of the design of the local systems and the experience of the users, the penetration is quite large in the downtown city I live in, so people tend to be very quick