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Huh? Self checkouts are great! Rather than having 1 or 2 tills you can have many times that manned by the same number of people. If you don't have any alcohol y

Huh? Self checkouts are great! Rather than having 1 or 2 tills you can have many times that manned by the same number of people. If you don't have any alcohol you can use it without interacting with anyone at all and its much faster. That coupled with contactless payments make it super quick to buy just a few items. A "proper" checkout is still king for large shops but for people I know (late 20s), that is becoming less common for more frequent, smaller shopping trips. Edit: I should say this is for someone based in London.

CaptainZapp 7y ago
Let's just say that - and that goes especially for the UK [I'm looking at you: Boots!] - self checkout tills and me seem to be in a perpetual war. Herearound at least you scan your crap and pay. In the UK there's some shitty weight system, which I don't get and the system accuses me after every third item of being a thief and instructs me to call assistance (which cannot be found since, well, self checkout tills). Look, if you want me to do your work then, at the very minimum, trust me not to cheat or kindly fuck off! The worst experience I've ever had was in a Tesco in London were the completely rude security dude claimed that there's only self checkout. My friend wanted a pack of cigarettes. Good luck getting that from a self checkout till.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  My second-favorite self-checkout peeve is when I go to Target (+grocery) and want to buy two or three things for lunch, one of which is an apple--a Fuji apple, which I have memorized as produce #4131. The apple has to be weighed, so it goes on the scale. But the scanning lasers also go across the scale plate. If the scanning laser manages to read the little bar code on the produce sticker before I manually type in the number on it, the whole self-checkout station immediately panics and calls for a store employee to unlock it. Every. Time. This problem has existed for years. I now trigger it on purpose whenever I'm not in a rush. There's no excuse whatsoever for a self-checkout system to grind to a halt when reading a bar code that legitimately appears somewhere in the store.
bobbiechen 7y ago
>If you don't have any alcohol you can use it without interacting with anyone at all and its much faster. I agree that you can do it without interacting with anyone at all. But I question whether it's faster. For a class assignment on usability a while back, I observed self-checkout users and manned ("proper") checkout at a local grocery store and found that the absolute fastest of the self-checkout users were only just as fast (per item) as the average manned checkout user (among 24 users). A few factors increase the speed of manned transactions. First, cashiers are familiar with common produce numbers, avoiding the need to search for stickers or slowly look up the number of a particular item. Second, a cashier can begin bagging items as the user pays by credit card or pulls out cash, so some of the work is done in parallel. Third, sometimes manned checkouts have a person dedicated to bagging, which reduces the time even further (though all times recorded for this project are single cashiers without baggers). Self-checkouts definitely feel nicer for me (except when the anti-theft "place item in bagging area" nagging starts). But now, when I'm in a hurry, I'll make a beeline for a register with a cashier instead of the self-checkout.
- sgustard 7y ago
  To me, the main advantage is that (at my local store) they implement a "wait for the next available machine" protocol rather than "pick a cashier to queue up behind."
jharger 7y ago
That's kind of the key, right? If you're buying one or two items, the self-checkout is great! If you're buying a week or two worth of supplies, it's terrible. Here in the US, at least at the stores I shop at, each item requires that you scan it, wait for the machine to tell you to place the item in the bagging area, wait for it to register the weight, then you're allowed to move to the next item. If you accidentally wait too long, and the attendant just clears the wait state (which they do all to frequently just to get things to move along), then it won't let you put the item in the area, and instead you have to call the attendant over to clear the "unexpected item" state, which just makes things take so much longer. Then there's the times where some older person tries it out, gets really confused, and the attendant is spending all of their time with them, and everyone else gets held up by the quirks of the system.
- justincormack 7y ago
  It depends on the store design, Waitrose in the UK doesn't bother with the weighing thing, and you can scan as you go around the shop and just pay at the end. It is way more convenient.
  - jharger 7y ago
    One supermarket I went to tried that... but the user experience is so awful that no one wants to do it, so the scanners just sit at the entrance, lonely and unused.

CaptainZapp 7y ago

Let's just say that - and that goes especially for the UK [I'm looking at you: Boots!] - self checkout tills and me seem to be in a perpetual war. Herearound at least you scan your crap and pay. In the UK there's some shitty weight system, which I don't get and the system accuses me after every third item of being a thief and instructs me to call assistance (which cannot be found since, well, self checkout tills). Look, if you want me to do your work then, at the very minimum, trust me not to cheat or kindly fuck off! The worst experience I've ever had was in a Tesco in London were the completely rude security dude claimed that there's only self checkout. My friend wanted a pack of cigarettes. Good luck getting that from a self checkout till.

logfromblammo 7y ago
My second-favorite self-checkout peeve is when I go to Target (+grocery) and want to buy two or three things for lunch, one of which is an apple--a Fuji apple, which I have memorized as produce #4131. The apple has to be weighed, so it goes on the scale. But the scanning lasers also go across the scale plate. If the scanning laser manages to read the little bar code on the produce sticker before I manually type in the number on it, the whole self-checkout station immediately panics and calls for a store employee to unlock it. Every. Time. This problem has existed for years. I now trigger it on purpose whenever I'm not in a rush. There's no excuse whatsoever for a self-checkout system to grind to a halt when reading a bar code that legitimately appears somewhere in the store.

bobbiechen 7y ago

>If you don't have any alcohol you can use it without interacting with anyone at all and its much faster. I agree that you can do it without interacting with anyone at all. But I question whether it's faster. For a class assignment on usability a while back, I observed self-checkout users and manned ("proper") checkout at a local grocery store and found that the absolute fastest of the self-checkout users were only just as fast (per item) as the average manned checkout user (among 24 users). A few factors increase the speed of manned transactions. First, cashiers are familiar with common produce numbers, avoiding the need to search for stickers or slowly look up the number of a particular item. Second, a cashier can begin bagging items as the user pays by credit card or pulls out cash, so some of the work is done in parallel. Third, sometimes manned checkouts have a person dedicated to bagging, which reduces the time even further (though all times recorded for this project are single cashiers without baggers). Self-checkouts definitely feel nicer for me (except when the anti-theft "place item in bagging area" nagging starts). But now, when I'm in a hurry, I'll make a beeline for a register with a cashier instead of the self-checkout.

sgustard 7y ago
To me, the main advantage is that (at my local store) they implement a "wait for the next available machine" protocol rather than "pick a cashier to queue up behind."

jharger 7y ago

That's kind of the key, right? If you're buying one or two items, the self-checkout is great! If you're buying a week or two worth of supplies, it's terrible. Here in the US, at least at the stores I shop at, each item requires that you scan it, wait for the machine to tell you to place the item in the bagging area, wait for it to register the weight, then you're allowed to move to the next item. If you accidentally wait too long, and the attendant just clears the wait state (which they do all to frequently just to get things to move along), then it won't let you put the item in the area, and instead you have to call the attendant over to clear the "unexpected item" state, which just makes things take so much longer. Then there's the times where some older person tries it out, gets really confused, and the attendant is spending all of their time with them, and everyone else gets held up by the quirks of the system.

justincormack 7y ago
It depends on the store design, Waitrose in the UK doesn't bother with the weighing thing, and you can scan as you go around the shop and just pay at the end. It is way more convenient.
- jharger 7y ago
  One supermarket I went to tried that... but the user experience is so awful that no one wants to do it, so the scanners just sit at the entrance, lonely and unused.