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Why not use these people as cashiers? I wonder if this endless line thing is something typical in the US. I've been to many European countries and other than b
by iagooar 9y ago
Why not use these people as cashiers?
I wonder if this endless line thing is something typical in the US. I've been to many European countries and other than before Christmas, you never feel like staying in line is something to even think of, because the longest you usually wait is maybe 5 minutes.
In Switzerland, now that in many shops you get to scan the cart yourself (after shopping or during it) there is just no congestion at all, even on a busy Saturday.
How is it in your countries?
- dawhizkid 9y agoTo be fair this is mostly just a crazy nyc thing. I’ve never been to a Trader Joe’s elsewhere like the Trader Joe’s in NYC. They must be the top grossing stores by far. It’s always packed.
- sundaeofshock 9y agoThe Trader Joe’s at Fifth & Market is almost always packed. The line for the cashier ends up running through the aisles and it can take 15 minutes to see one of the 16 cashiers on duty. This, in a small-format store with no dedicated parking.
- paulie_a 9y agoSelf scan lines tend to be filled with people incapable of the basic mechanics of using the technology. I prefer to use them. But if I see five people in the self scan line and ten in the normal line...I go for the longer line and am out the door in less time
- jjoonathan 9y agoSometimes it's the machines. Walmart, I'm looking at you and your recent "upgrade" to what feels like an Electron app running in a VM on a raspberry pi. Button presses take whole seconds to register and loading a different page (e.g. payment or product code entry) takes tens of seconds. It's demoralizing.
- paulie_a 9y agoInteresting.. Previously Walmart was the best for scanners in my opinion. It was instant had a clear notification the item was scanned without beeping. It's off topic but I am annoyed that every device has to beep at me constantly
- Corrado 9y agoI haven't been to Walmart in quite a while but their UX used to be horrible. They had buttons with white lettering and the button background used to cycle between light blue and white. Half the time you couldn't read what the button was for and the other half of the time it was difficult to make out.
- seangrant 9y agoSeattle area here. All my life I remember waiting in lines 10-20 minutes if you go to a store on a busy day (fri/sat/sun). It's just simple math sometimes where there's so many people with $400+ carts trying to check out and cashiers can only scan so fast. Everyone with medium or small sized carts have to wait in this. I've seen great strides in recent years to advance self checkout technology and its user flow. Walmart is my favorite example of this, my local one having almost half of the area devoted to self checkout. It seems to have been successful for them so far. I don't see anyone having a hard time operate them and perhaps more surprising, it's filled me with the idea that I can pop in and out of a big store on a busy day to just buy 1 item.
- chrisseaton 9y ago> It's just simple math sometimes where there's so many people with $400+ carts trying to check out and cashiers can only scan so fast. Everyone with medium or small sized carts have to wait in this. Why don't the customers scan the items themselves as they put them into their carts while at the shelves, rather than waiting until they get to the checkout? That's what we do where I live in the UK.
- Armisael16 9y agoSome stores support this; most don’t.
- lykr0n 9y agoStop n Shop in the NYC Tri-State area has this, but they are the only store that I've seen that does. I'd assume it has a technical barrier to implementation, and large-ish up front cost.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoIn my experience, Walmart has the worst self checkout software however: poorly designed and laggy as heck. QFC/Safeway are much better, even Target (which is pretty bad itself) is better.
- 9y ago
- mft_ 9y agoIt's (obviously) a function of store design, staffing, and demand. FWIW, in Basel (Switzerland) there are often large queues at the weekends/late evenings in the (only) two supermarkets which are open, despite self-checkouts. They are relatively small stores near the station, and serve very high demand driven by Switzerland's opening-time restrictions.
- galago 9y agoTrader Joes has a lot of urban stores. For example the one at Copley Square in Boston is in a basement across the street from a Tesla showroom. Its always busy, but there's no room to expand--even add an extra register. The farther you get out of the city center the wider the isles get.