7 ms·

The trouble with supermarket self checkouts

17 points by spking 3y ago

jiofj 3y ago
I would use self checkouts if they offered me a discount on the price. But if they don't they're just asking me to work for free, and on top of that randomly accusing me of being a shoplifter, so I'm passing.
- rascul 3y ago
  If self checkouts didn't exist then prices would be higher to pay for more labor. You get the discount without realizing it. Theoretically, anyway.
aardshark 3y ago
Self checkouts like the author mentioned, which have the "unexpected item in bagging area" component, are awful. Plus the machines are usually laggy. When the machines are responsive and there's no irritating behaviours of the machine, then they're just fine, or even better than a cashier.
- devrand 3y ago
  I've never understood that check. Anyone attempting to steal something just wouldn't put an item they didn't scan in the bagging area. It's almost certainly always a false-positive, which is confirmed by most store employees just clearing the error without checking. And then there's the other check that if you do scan something, it needs to go in the bagging area. So if I go into a store and grab a single item, and just scan it and hold it, the machine will freak out that I didn't put it in the bagging area. If I don't put it there quick enough it'll lock up and need an employee to intervene. Ugh. In my experience, Target is the only store that has consistently implemented a good self-checkout experience.
  - Cerium 3y ago
    Home Depot is the only store that has a great self-checkout experience. They give you fast responsive terminals with wireless barcode scanners, just like the employees have. You can line up your goods in your cart and then checkout faster than with an employee helping.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      IKEA's is good too, for the same reasons.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Afaicr, HD began modernizing their self-checkout terminals ~4 years ago? I remember because it was rolling out and then pandemic happened. People also underappreciate the internal effort (and cost) required to ship new terminals in a national chain and the drag of running a heterogeneous operation during the transition period. It feels like 90% of UX issues could be solved with shipping over-engineered (from performance and robustness perspectives) hardware, at additional cost. Which seems like what HD did with the latest terminals.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    It is probably quite common for people to put items in the bag after failing to scan them by mistake. But I guess an "a new item check" which is not very weight sensitive would be enough to counter that. Self-checkout works best in Home Depot type of places in my experience. There are just so many items to keep track of in grocery stores.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      Combine the low frequency with which that must happen and the money they save by replacing a worker, and you'd think they could just write that off.
      - devrand 3y ago
        They probably are writing it off anyway. I've never had an employee actually check -- they always just scan their barcode and clear the error.
- arp242 3y ago
  It's not even just the "unexpected item in bagging area" factor, it's that there's often way to little staff around so you spend >5 minutes waiting on any issue, sometimes more than once ("unexpected item" and then later alcohol/age check). They have exactly the same machines in Ireland and New Zealand (just with a different colour scheme, depending on the store) and while they're still crap, they're significantly less frustrating to use than Tesco or Asda in the UK because there's usually enough staff. That's been my experience with it anyway.
codeulike 3y ago
I was playing "shops" with my four-year-old and he told me it was "self checkout" and went and did something else. True story.
bdangubic 3y ago
[flagged]
- rob74 3y ago
  Well, then I hope you don't get caught...
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    That's awfully nice of you. I hope he does get caught.
    - bdangubic 3y ago
      what exactly am I going to be “caught” for? my lack of proper training to use self-checkout lanes?
      - cinntaile 3y ago
        Does that argument really fly where you live? It doesn't here.
        bdangubic 3y ago
        exactly which law would I be breaking “where you live”? Chapter 9, Section 11.A - Does not know which code to enter for proper Bananas at self-checkout lane?
        cinntaile 3y ago
        You would simply be prosecuted for theft, it's not that complicated. "I didn't know how it works" obviously doesn't work and I doubt that would work where you live. But do let me know when you eventually find out.
        bdangubic 3y ago
rob74 3y ago
"Rather than speed things up, they make us miserable" - well, they weren't introduced to speed things up, they were introduced to allow the supermarket to save personnel and therefore money. I usually avoid them, because most of the time I either have some alcoholic beverage or some loose items (vegetables etc.) which would require waiting for assistance, and at that point the staffed checkout is faster.
incongruity 3y ago
The problem with most self checkouts is that the value prop for the stores seem obvious - lower wages - but the value for consumer is not obvious in most cases - because in most cases, it doesn’t exist. It’s not a better experience and it feels very much like I am now being asked to do more while still paying more.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Nonsense. The value proposition for consumers is that they don't have to wait in a massive queue.
  - incongruity 3y ago
    That’s far from a unique value prop for self-checkout lanes. It’s also a hard sell at stores that have or had ~8+ lanes but only two are open… sure, the self checkout is the only solution to long lines… that happens frequently here and in many cases, lines get equally long for self checkout.
edent 3y ago
Back in the past, you used to have to go to the front of the shop and give them a list of what you wanted. They'd return with your bags full of what you ordered. When the modern supermarket came along, there was uproar. People couldn't understand why they had to traipse the aisles! Isn't that what the staff were for? Why are customers having to do their job for them? Of course, the supermarket realised that having people make impulse purchases, see new goods, and choose their preferred ripeness of fruit, made a lot more money than they lost from upset customers not returning. Similarly, there's a modern calculation that a few customers fiddling the weight of their marrows is vastly offset by not having to recruit, train, employ, and manage till staff. And shoppers don't get stuck behind someone who wants a natter with cashier or who wants to pay in pre-decimal currency or wants to argue over an expired voucher. But, luckily, thanks to capitalism you have a choice. Go to a supermarket like Lidl if you want to avoid self-checkouts. Or use online shopping. Or send your kitchen maid to deal with those craven machines.
- draw_down 3y ago
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stronglikedan 3y ago
Strong old man screams at cloud vibes here. I love self checkout. And I'll gladly bid a friendly good day to any employee that would ask to see my bag after I've used one.
- deleted 3y ago
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neogodless 3y ago
We had a recent experience with one. We had 3 or 4 bags we brought. We pressed "use our bags", pressed 4, and starting setting them up in the weight-sensitive area. By the time I finished setting up the first bag, the screen had gone back to the initial state, and when I set a bag down, it began complaining. It took a couple minutes just to get bags set up. We also didn't have room in the weight area and had to put some bags on the non-weight area. Then we had quite a few issues with it complaining about moving or not moving things to the bagging area, several of which required waiting a minute for an employee to come over, type in their override code and clear the error. Then we selected the wrong fruit because it wasn't accepting the 4 digit code, but it was more expensive, so we once again had to wait for an employee to come fix the issue, as you can't undo any mistakes on your own. Overall the experience took 10-15 minutes (felt like eternity) and that compares to what would be 60-90 seconds with a cashier. Most of that time was waiting 30-60 seconds during each of the 4-5 times an error came up that we had no power to clear ourselves. Of course one of the takeaways here is... don't use self-checkout for more than about 5 items max. One bag. Any more and just **ing go to a human. The other is... these systems are shit and they are not designed to work with your customers, but rather to use your customers, regardless of the toll it takes on them.
- delecti 3y ago
  The self-checkout as an alternative to the express lane seems pretty obvious. They're fantastic for that, I vastly personally prefer them when I'm checking out few enough items. Also it seems pretty obvious that the system has a limited window for setting up your bags. Just set them all down at once so it registers the weight, and then faff around setting them up.
  - neogodless 3y ago
    > Just set them all down at once so it registers the weight, and then faff around setting them up. Surely. Except... there's only room for 2 bags. And it gives you about 5 seconds between hitting the button "using our bags" and getting them set out. Of course they fold up so you kind of have to smooth them out to get them stable on there. If you try to put bags on that area before telling it you have bags, it complains about the 2g of weight! If you lift them up to fix them so they are set up, it complains about removing weight!
jonahrd 3y ago
The author is handwavingly wondering aloud if shoplifting is responsible for the cost of living crisis, spurred on by new shittier checkout procedures. No, it's demonstrably not. I shop from a few small local grocery stores within walking distance that haven't changed their checkout systems in years, in a nice neighborhood in downtown. The prices had skyrocketed regardless.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  > shoplifting is responsible for the cost of living crisis To be fair on the author, they're speculating the complete opposite :)
llbeansandrice 3y ago
Colorado recently started charging for plastic bags (a good thing imo). However the self-checkouts at all of the stores I've been to simply cannot handle a reasonable workflow. I can't add my personal bags to the bagging area before I start scanning and tare the scale or anything. I either have to do the entire operation in two stages: scanning then bagging, or I have to have the lone employee come over and confirm that I'm not stealing stuff every third item. Not to mention that the bagging area is not designed for personal bag use really at all.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I don't know if supermarkets etc. have made the self-checkout scale less fussy (or maybe there isn't always one any longer?) but tossing a personal bag or two in the bagging area hasn't been a problem for me in ages. That said, checking out more than a modest quantity of mostly barcoded items is slow and tedious. The workflow is pretty much setup to fill up maybe a bag or two from a hand basket.
- turdprincess 3y ago
  It’s interesting how different the experience is between Whole Foods and the bigger brand Safeway style stores. At Whole Foods there is no scale in the bagging area and you are free to put whatever you want there. The process is smooth and works well. At the same time, it’s notorious for people stealing stuff - many folks I know across all income spectrums cheat the system in some way. The temptation to ring in organic produce as conventional and save a few dollars is pretty damn hard to resist myself.
- ydnaclementine 3y ago
  Put the personal bag down before you start scanning items so the scale doesn't get surprised when you put your bag down without having scanned anything. If it gets fussy at you when scanning (unexpected item), pick up a side of the bag an inch or two or wiggle it a bit to get the scale to be happy again to continue your checkout.
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
radarsat1 3y ago
Albert Heijn in the Netherlands interestingly seems to have none of the mentioned problems. You swipe or scan your items and place them in your bags however you want. If you scan a beer bottle they let you keep going and someone watching sees that you are an adult just remotely ticks a box before you get to the checkout stage. There is no scale checking the weight of your bags, the only annoyance is that occasionally a worker comes over before you complete your transaction to randomly check what you put in your bags. Aoart from that it's all very fluid. On the other hand I have experienced all the mentioned problems in Canada at a Provigo in Quebec. So I think all this is really just a matter of implementation and actually caring about user experience. All if these issues are solvable, the store just has to decide it cares about these issues and not accept a suboar solution. One difference I'll note, of course a bit of a wild guess, is maybe one of culture. In North America people really don't want to be bothered by random checks, they feel it's a violation of their privacy or personal space. So everything, including security, has to be automated as much as possible. In Europe people are used to the idea of random checks maybe because it's part of the experience of taking public transport.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  > In North America people really don't want to be bothered by random checks Data point that Walmart does perform random checks of bag-to-receipt as people exit the store.
  - rascul 3y ago
    They're completely voluntary. You can just keep on walking.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Not-so-secret: that's true of any store employee I'm not aware of any brand that, by policy, encourages and trains its employees to physically intervene. And you cannot imagine some of the brazen shoplifting I saw on HD security camera footage. There's a massive chasm between what's socially acceptable from neighborhood to neighborhood.
hn8305823 3y ago
I actually prefer self checkout, especially when the UX is reasonably good (Target). I definitely subtract points for unavialable (Home Depot, Walmart) or non-functioning (Chipotle) tap to pay. But the worst self checkout experience by far is McDonalds. Why does it take ~100 taps on the screen to order three items? Whoever designed that UX should be working the cash register, not designing UX's. Edit: just successfully used tap to pay at Chipotle, so I guess they finally fixed that.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  Chipotle has bar-none the shittiest tech I've seen in retail. Their order web page is the only one that refuses to operate with ad-block turned on. Their app is a mess of broken functionality. And their error paths are uniformly obtuse. E.g. "Unable to accept payment, please pay for your order in store" actually meaning "We were unable to transmit your order to the store, so you should just go through and create a new order when you walk in." Seriously, fuck Chipotle's UX team. (I may also still be salty about their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla)
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla Is there such a thing as a cheese-free quesadilla? I thought a quesadilla was precisely a cheese sandwich, but made with tortillas instead of bread.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      > Is there such a thing as a cheese-free quesadilla? Such existential questions occupy my nightly ponderings and soul searching.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > I may also still be salty about their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla Wait, what? Did they just hand you a tortilla by itself...? Has this happened more than once? That's like ordering a hamburger and them giving you a bun...
willcipriano 3y ago
My trouble with supermarket self checkouts: We used to go to the store, pick out our items and a employee would ring them up and bag them. Then you had to bag them yourself. Now you have to ring them up as well. Hedonic quality adjustment failed to capture this (and other examples of) 'enshittification' taking place and thus underestimates inflation. During Covid consumers became accustomed to worse service and longer waits and business realized what they could get away with and now run skeleton crews. The lower quality of these offerings haven't been factored in to the official inflation statistics, on the other hand if the iPad gets a little faster they are quick to hedonic quality adjust inflation down.
ladon86 3y ago
I much prefer the handheld scanner method, in which you scan while you shop. This used to be more widespread in the UK before self checkout took over. I seem to remember it being launched in the late 2000s? Advantages: 1) Your scanning labor is spread out across your entire visit 2) No need to unload and bag everything at the end 3) You can see a running price total Is that last point the reason why supermarkets moved away from them? Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime?
- mikrl 3y ago
  >Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime? I’ve seen lots of technological progress in my day, but nothing towards making this process more efficient in-store. In a way, doing groceries is one of my few remaining financial uncertainties. Depending on meal plan and the status of my pantry it could be plus/minus $50 or $100
CaptainZapp 3y ago
At least the self checkout tills in Switzerland are not equipped with scales, which make the whole experience so much worse. Nevertheless, I prefer to use a real cashier if the queues are not too bad.
spaceywilly 3y ago
I haven't seen anyone mention what to me is the biggest issue with self-checkout, false accusations of theft. I recently went through the self-checkout line in my local grocery store and accidentally left one item behind. When I went back to the store to retrieve it, they accused me of trying to take the item without paying for it. They said the person monitoring the self-checkout lines saw me put it in the bagging area without scanning it first. I had to go back to my car and get the receipt, which clearly showed I had paid for the item, but needless to say it was unnerving being accused of theft. I always use the staffed checkout lanes now, self-checkout isn't worth the trouble.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Any idea what happened to the person who falsely accused you of theft? (Or the person who falsely claimed someone else had seen you?)
  - spaceywilly 3y ago
    Not really, I just took my stuff and got out of there. It seemed like maybe they were new and they had had some other issues before, but I was just happy to get the stuff I paid for.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Target? I know a guy works in their data center. Says the self-checkout weighing is disabled - single most common trouble area. Also those cameras and screens that show you standing there? That signal goes nowhere. Starts and ends at the station. Their LAN didn't have the bandwidth to support it, and not enough storage anywhere to record it. So it's just to make you feel conspicuous. Like 'placebo surveillance', it works, sort of.
zwieback 3y ago
At my supermarket the self checkout line is usually mostly young to very young shoppers with just a few items. When you watch them check out they have adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the particular machine and navigate it with few hiccups. I still prefer the in-person checkout most of the time but have also learned to avoid the usual pitfalls of the robot. Also, sometimes I'll arrive with a pocketful of change and feed that into the self-checkout, even though it takes a long time. I don't want to burden a checker with that.
throw7 3y ago
Well, anecdotally, I've noticed catching a person every few months just slipping right out. One guy did it right in front of me after he saw the opportunity when the employee had to help out another customer's machine. smh. self-checkouts and procedures can definitely be improved, but I'm relatively happy they're available because it is a fast way (not always though) to get in and out of the grocery store for me.
gniv 3y ago
Here in France the larger Carrefour stores have another system in addition to the usual self-checkouts. You can grab a scanner at the entrance and scan each item as you take it from the shelf. At the checkout they check a few random items and you pay. It's fast when you buy a lot of items. You do have to get used to scanning stuff yourself, which takes some practice.
- nicholasbraker 3y ago
  This is exactly the system in use in The Netherlands..
crazygringo 3y ago
Funny, self-checkout has made my experience much better when shopping at Whole Foods. It's true that the checkout itself takes 2-3x as long. But that's more than offset by the fact that instead of waiting in line for 10 minutes, there simply is no line anymore. So it's sped up my grocery store visits by at least 5 minutes. (It may help that they don't use a weight sensor, so there are never any frustrating errors like the author describes.)
- rascul 3y ago
  All that, plus I can bag things properly, and I don't have to talk to people. And it seems lately that much of the times I do go to an employee operated checkout, the employee doesn't really go any faster than I do anyway.
- stevesunderland 3y ago
  Another perk is that I can pay using my Amazon/Prime QR code at the self-checkout — for some reason you can't do that at the regular checkout. I also really enjoy bagging my own groceries... (crazy right?) and also end up with fewer broken eggs when I get home.
wwwidofkoivno 3y ago
[flagged]
doctor_radium 3y ago
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cmm 3y ago
The instance of enshittification under discussion is lucrative for the (big) retailers in at least two ways: first (obvious), they get to hire less people and in this way increase their margins, since they never promised to pass any savings to the consumer in the first place and also something something supply chain something something inflation; second (slightly less obvious), it is nudging the less impulsive consumers to have their (bi-)weekly groceries delivered so they don't have to go to the store physically at all. Where I live (a dense urban area), supermarkets are getting fewer and either smaller or with the delivery logictics space gradually cannibalizing the in-person shopping space. I can only conclude that sufficiently scaled-up home delivery of groceries is more lucrative for retailers than traditional in-store shopping, probably due to some combination of smaller variety / more standartization, delivery fees etc.
coffeedan 3y ago
On the east coast, Stop & Shop has the best self-checkout experience I've seen. You get a bar code scanner when you enter the store and scan and bag as you walk around. At checkout, you scan the reader, keep everything you already bagged in the cart, and pay. Checkout takes all of 30 seconds. Bonus: you immediately know what each item costs from the display on the scanner.
- deleted 3y ago
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dave333 3y ago
Speaking as an entitled boomer raised by and with the ethos of a mother who went through food rationing in WWII this article is a lot of hot air about nothing important.

17 points by spking 3y ago

I would use self checkouts if they offered me a discount on the price. But if they don't they're just asking me to work for free, and on top of that randomly accusing me of being a shoplifter, so I'm passing.

rascul 3y ago
If self checkouts didn't exist then prices would be higher to pay for more labor. You get the discount without realizing it. Theoretically, anyway.

aardshark 3y ago

Self checkouts like the author mentioned, which have the "unexpected item in bagging area" component, are awful. Plus the machines are usually laggy. When the machines are responsive and there's no irritating behaviours of the machine, then they're just fine, or even better than a cashier.

devrand 3y ago
I've never understood that check. Anyone attempting to steal something just wouldn't put an item they didn't scan in the bagging area. It's almost certainly always a false-positive, which is confirmed by most store employees just clearing the error without checking. And then there's the other check that if you do scan something, it needs to go in the bagging area. So if I go into a store and grab a single item, and just scan it and hold it, the machine will freak out that I didn't put it in the bagging area. If I don't put it there quick enough it'll lock up and need an employee to intervene. Ugh. In my experience, Target is the only store that has consistently implemented a good self-checkout experience.
- Cerium 3y ago
  Home Depot is the only store that has a great self-checkout experience. They give you fast responsive terminals with wireless barcode scanners, just like the employees have. You can line up your goods in your cart and then checkout faster than with an employee helping.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    IKEA's is good too, for the same reasons.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Afaicr, HD began modernizing their self-checkout terminals ~4 years ago? I remember because it was rolling out and then pandemic happened. People also underappreciate the internal effort (and cost) required to ship new terminals in a national chain and the drag of running a heterogeneous operation during the transition period. It feels like 90% of UX issues could be solved with shipping over-engineered (from performance and robustness perspectives) hardware, at additional cost. Which seems like what HD did with the latest terminals.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  It is probably quite common for people to put items in the bag after failing to scan them by mistake. But I guess an "a new item check" which is not very weight sensitive would be enough to counter that. Self-checkout works best in Home Depot type of places in my experience. There are just so many items to keep track of in grocery stores.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Combine the low frequency with which that must happen and the money they save by replacing a worker, and you'd think they could just write that off.
    - devrand 3y ago
      They probably are writing it off anyway. I've never had an employee actually check -- they always just scan their barcode and clear the error.
arp242 3y ago
It's not even just the "unexpected item in bagging area" factor, it's that there's often way to little staff around so you spend >5 minutes waiting on any issue, sometimes more than once ("unexpected item" and then later alcohol/age check). They have exactly the same machines in Ireland and New Zealand (just with a different colour scheme, depending on the store) and while they're still crap, they're significantly less frustrating to use than Tesco or Asda in the UK because there's usually enough staff. That's been my experience with it anyway.

codeulike 3y ago

I was playing "shops" with my four-year-old and he told me it was "self checkout" and went and did something else. True story.

bdangubic 3y ago

[flagged]

rob74 3y ago
Well, then I hope you don't get caught...
- cinntaile 3y ago
  That's awfully nice of you. I hope he does get caught.
  - bdangubic 3y ago
    what exactly am I going to be “caught” for? my lack of proper training to use self-checkout lanes?
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      Does that argument really fly where you live? It doesn't here.
      - bdangubic 3y ago
        exactly which law would I be breaking “where you live”? Chapter 9, Section 11.A - Does not know which code to enter for proper Bananas at self-checkout lane?
        cinntaile 3y ago
        You would simply be prosecuted for theft, it's not that complicated. "I didn't know how it works" obviously doesn't work and I doubt that would work where you live. But do let me know when you eventually find out.
        bdangubic 3y ago

rob74 3y ago

"Rather than speed things up, they make us miserable" - well, they weren't introduced to speed things up, they were introduced to allow the supermarket to save personnel and therefore money. I usually avoid them, because most of the time I either have some alcoholic beverage or some loose items (vegetables etc.) which would require waiting for assistance, and at that point the staffed checkout is faster.

incongruity 3y ago

The problem with most self checkouts is that the value prop for the stores seem obvious - lower wages - but the value for consumer is not obvious in most cases - because in most cases, it doesn’t exist. It’s not a better experience and it feels very much like I am now being asked to do more while still paying more.

IshKebab 3y ago
Nonsense. The value proposition for consumers is that they don't have to wait in a massive queue.
- incongruity 3y ago
  That’s far from a unique value prop for self-checkout lanes. It’s also a hard sell at stores that have or had ~8+ lanes but only two are open… sure, the self checkout is the only solution to long lines… that happens frequently here and in many cases, lines get equally long for self checkout.

edent 3y ago

Back in the past, you used to have to go to the front of the shop and give them a list of what you wanted. They'd return with your bags full of what you ordered. When the modern supermarket came along, there was uproar. People couldn't understand why they had to traipse the aisles! Isn't that what the staff were for? Why are customers having to do their job for them? Of course, the supermarket realised that having people make impulse purchases, see new goods, and choose their preferred ripeness of fruit, made a lot more money than they lost from upset customers not returning. Similarly, there's a modern calculation that a few customers fiddling the weight of their marrows is vastly offset by not having to recruit, train, employ, and manage till staff. And shoppers don't get stuck behind someone who wants a natter with cashier or who wants to pay in pre-decimal currency or wants to argue over an expired voucher. But, luckily, thanks to capitalism you have a choice. Go to a supermarket like Lidl if you want to avoid self-checkouts. Or use online shopping. Or send your kitchen maid to deal with those craven machines.

draw_down 3y ago
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stronglikedan 3y ago

Strong old man screams at cloud vibes here. I love self checkout. And I'll gladly bid a friendly good day to any employee that would ask to see my bag after I've used one.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

neogodless 3y ago

We had a recent experience with one. We had 3 or 4 bags we brought. We pressed "use our bags", pressed 4, and starting setting them up in the weight-sensitive area. By the time I finished setting up the first bag, the screen had gone back to the initial state, and when I set a bag down, it began complaining. It took a couple minutes just to get bags set up. We also didn't have room in the weight area and had to put some bags on the non-weight area. Then we had quite a few issues with it complaining about moving or not moving things to the bagging area, several of which required waiting a minute for an employee to come over, type in their override code and clear the error. Then we selected the wrong fruit because it wasn't accepting the 4 digit code, but it was more expensive, so we once again had to wait for an employee to come fix the issue, as you can't undo any mistakes on your own. Overall the experience took 10-15 minutes (felt like eternity) and that compares to what would be 60-90 seconds with a cashier. Most of that time was waiting 30-60 seconds during each of the 4-5 times an error came up that we had no power to clear ourselves. Of course one of the takeaways here is... don't use self-checkout for more than about 5 items max. One bag. Any more and just **ing go to a human. The other is... these systems are shit and they are not designed to work with your customers, but rather to use your customers, regardless of the toll it takes on them.

delecti 3y ago
The self-checkout as an alternative to the express lane seems pretty obvious. They're fantastic for that, I vastly personally prefer them when I'm checking out few enough items. Also it seems pretty obvious that the system has a limited window for setting up your bags. Just set them all down at once so it registers the weight, and then faff around setting them up.
- neogodless 3y ago
  > Just set them all down at once so it registers the weight, and then faff around setting them up. Surely. Except... there's only room for 2 bags. And it gives you about 5 seconds between hitting the button "using our bags" and getting them set out. Of course they fold up so you kind of have to smooth them out to get them stable on there. If you try to put bags on that area before telling it you have bags, it complains about the 2g of weight! If you lift them up to fix them so they are set up, it complains about removing weight!

jonahrd 3y ago

The author is handwavingly wondering aloud if shoplifting is responsible for the cost of living crisis, spurred on by new shittier checkout procedures. No, it's demonstrably not. I shop from a few small local grocery stores within walking distance that haven't changed their checkout systems in years, in a nice neighborhood in downtown. The prices had skyrocketed regardless.

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
> shoplifting is responsible for the cost of living crisis To be fair on the author, they're speculating the complete opposite :)

llbeansandrice 3y ago

Colorado recently started charging for plastic bags (a good thing imo). However the self-checkouts at all of the stores I've been to simply cannot handle a reasonable workflow. I can't add my personal bags to the bagging area before I start scanning and tare the scale or anything. I either have to do the entire operation in two stages: scanning then bagging, or I have to have the lone employee come over and confirm that I'm not stealing stuff every third item. Not to mention that the bagging area is not designed for personal bag use really at all.

ghaff 3y ago
I don't know if supermarkets etc. have made the self-checkout scale less fussy (or maybe there isn't always one any longer?) but tossing a personal bag or two in the bagging area hasn't been a problem for me in ages. That said, checking out more than a modest quantity of mostly barcoded items is slow and tedious. The workflow is pretty much setup to fill up maybe a bag or two from a hand basket.
turdprincess 3y ago
It’s interesting how different the experience is between Whole Foods and the bigger brand Safeway style stores. At Whole Foods there is no scale in the bagging area and you are free to put whatever you want there. The process is smooth and works well. At the same time, it’s notorious for people stealing stuff - many folks I know across all income spectrums cheat the system in some way. The temptation to ring in organic produce as conventional and save a few dollars is pretty damn hard to resist myself.
ydnaclementine 3y ago
Put the personal bag down before you start scanning items so the scale doesn't get surprised when you put your bag down without having scanned anything. If it gets fussy at you when scanning (unexpected item), pick up a side of the bag an inch or two or wiggle it a bit to get the scale to be happy again to continue your checkout.
- llbeansandrice 3y ago

radarsat1 3y ago

Albert Heijn in the Netherlands interestingly seems to have none of the mentioned problems. You swipe or scan your items and place them in your bags however you want. If you scan a beer bottle they let you keep going and someone watching sees that you are an adult just remotely ticks a box before you get to the checkout stage. There is no scale checking the weight of your bags, the only annoyance is that occasionally a worker comes over before you complete your transaction to randomly check what you put in your bags. Aoart from that it's all very fluid. On the other hand I have experienced all the mentioned problems in Canada at a Provigo in Quebec. So I think all this is really just a matter of implementation and actually caring about user experience. All if these issues are solvable, the store just has to decide it cares about these issues and not accept a suboar solution. One difference I'll note, of course a bit of a wild guess, is maybe one of culture. In North America people really don't want to be bothered by random checks, they feel it's a violation of their privacy or personal space. So everything, including security, has to be automated as much as possible. In Europe people are used to the idea of random checks maybe because it's part of the experience of taking public transport.

ethbr1 3y ago
> In North America people really don't want to be bothered by random checks Data point that Walmart does perform random checks of bag-to-receipt as people exit the store.
- rascul 3y ago
  They're completely voluntary. You can just keep on walking.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Not-so-secret: that's true of any store employee I'm not aware of any brand that, by policy, encourages and trains its employees to physically intervene. And you cannot imagine some of the brazen shoplifting I saw on HD security camera footage. There's a massive chasm between what's socially acceptable from neighborhood to neighborhood.

hn8305823 3y ago

I actually prefer self checkout, especially when the UX is reasonably good (Target). I definitely subtract points for unavialable (Home Depot, Walmart) or non-functioning (Chipotle) tap to pay. But the worst self checkout experience by far is McDonalds. Why does it take ~100 taps on the screen to order three items? Whoever designed that UX should be working the cash register, not designing UX's. Edit: just successfully used tap to pay at Chipotle, so I guess they finally fixed that.

ethbr1 3y ago
Chipotle has bar-none the shittiest tech I've seen in retail. Their order web page is the only one that refuses to operate with ad-block turned on. Their app is a mess of broken functionality. And their error paths are uniformly obtuse. E.g. "Unable to accept payment, please pay for your order in store" actually meaning "We were unable to transmit your order to the store, so you should just go through and create a new order when you walk in." Seriously, fuck Chipotle's UX team. (I may also still be salty about their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla)
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla Is there such a thing as a cheese-free quesadilla? I thought a quesadilla was precisely a cheese sandwich, but made with tortillas instead of bread.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    > Is there such a thing as a cheese-free quesadilla? Such existential questions occupy my nightly ponderings and soul searching.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > I may also still be salty about their inability to remember to put cheese in a cheese quesadilla Wait, what? Did they just hand you a tortilla by itself...? Has this happened more than once? That's like ordering a hamburger and them giving you a bun...

willcipriano 3y ago

My trouble with supermarket self checkouts: We used to go to the store, pick out our items and a employee would ring them up and bag them. Then you had to bag them yourself. Now you have to ring them up as well. Hedonic quality adjustment failed to capture this (and other examples of) 'enshittification' taking place and thus underestimates inflation. During Covid consumers became accustomed to worse service and longer waits and business realized what they could get away with and now run skeleton crews. The lower quality of these offerings haven't been factored in to the official inflation statistics, on the other hand if the iPad gets a little faster they are quick to hedonic quality adjust inflation down.

ladon86 3y ago

I much prefer the handheld scanner method, in which you scan while you shop. This used to be more widespread in the UK before self checkout took over. I seem to remember it being launched in the late 2000s? Advantages: 1) Your scanning labor is spread out across your entire visit 2) No need to unload and bag everything at the end 3) You can see a running price total Is that last point the reason why supermarkets moved away from them? Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime?

mikrl 3y ago
>Because they don’t want you to budget in realtime? I’ve seen lots of technological progress in my day, but nothing towards making this process more efficient in-store. In a way, doing groceries is one of my few remaining financial uncertainties. Depending on meal plan and the status of my pantry it could be plus/minus $50 or $100

CaptainZapp 3y ago

At least the self checkout tills in Switzerland are not equipped with scales, which make the whole experience so much worse. Nevertheless, I prefer to use a real cashier if the queues are not too bad.

spaceywilly 3y ago

I haven't seen anyone mention what to me is the biggest issue with self-checkout, false accusations of theft. I recently went through the self-checkout line in my local grocery store and accidentally left one item behind. When I went back to the store to retrieve it, they accused me of trying to take the item without paying for it. They said the person monitoring the self-checkout lines saw me put it in the bagging area without scanning it first. I had to go back to my car and get the receipt, which clearly showed I had paid for the item, but needless to say it was unnerving being accused of theft. I always use the staffed checkout lanes now, self-checkout isn't worth the trouble.

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Any idea what happened to the person who falsely accused you of theft? (Or the person who falsely claimed someone else had seen you?)
- spaceywilly 3y ago
  Not really, I just took my stuff and got out of there. It seemed like maybe they were new and they had had some other issues before, but I was just happy to get the stuff I paid for.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Target? I know a guy works in their data center. Says the self-checkout weighing is disabled - single most common trouble area. Also those cameras and screens that show you standing there? That signal goes nowhere. Starts and ends at the station. Their LAN didn't have the bandwidth to support it, and not enough storage anywhere to record it. So it's just to make you feel conspicuous. Like 'placebo surveillance', it works, sort of.

zwieback 3y ago

At my supermarket the self checkout line is usually mostly young to very young shoppers with just a few items. When you watch them check out they have adapted to the idiosyncrasies of the particular machine and navigate it with few hiccups. I still prefer the in-person checkout most of the time but have also learned to avoid the usual pitfalls of the robot. Also, sometimes I'll arrive with a pocketful of change and feed that into the self-checkout, even though it takes a long time. I don't want to burden a checker with that.

throw7 3y ago

Well, anecdotally, I've noticed catching a person every few months just slipping right out. One guy did it right in front of me after he saw the opportunity when the employee had to help out another customer's machine. smh. self-checkouts and procedures can definitely be improved, but I'm relatively happy they're available because it is a fast way (not always though) to get in and out of the grocery store for me.

gniv 3y ago

Here in France the larger Carrefour stores have another system in addition to the usual self-checkouts. You can grab a scanner at the entrance and scan each item as you take it from the shelf. At the checkout they check a few random items and you pay. It's fast when you buy a lot of items. You do have to get used to scanning stuff yourself, which takes some practice.

nicholasbraker 3y ago
This is exactly the system in use in The Netherlands..

crazygringo 3y ago

Funny, self-checkout has made my experience much better when shopping at Whole Foods. It's true that the checkout itself takes 2-3x as long. But that's more than offset by the fact that instead of waiting in line for 10 minutes, there simply is no line anymore. So it's sped up my grocery store visits by at least 5 minutes. (It may help that they don't use a weight sensor, so there are never any frustrating errors like the author describes.)

rascul 3y ago
All that, plus I can bag things properly, and I don't have to talk to people. And it seems lately that much of the times I do go to an employee operated checkout, the employee doesn't really go any faster than I do anyway.
stevesunderland 3y ago
Another perk is that I can pay using my Amazon/Prime QR code at the self-checkout — for some reason you can't do that at the regular checkout. I also really enjoy bagging my own groceries... (crazy right?) and also end up with fewer broken eggs when I get home.

wwwidofkoivno 3y ago

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doctor_radium 3y ago

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cmm 3y ago

The instance of enshittification under discussion is lucrative for the (big) retailers in at least two ways: first (obvious), they get to hire less people and in this way increase their margins, since they never promised to pass any savings to the consumer in the first place and also something something supply chain something something inflation; second (slightly less obvious), it is nudging the less impulsive consumers to have their (bi-)weekly groceries delivered so they don't have to go to the store physically at all. Where I live (a dense urban area), supermarkets are getting fewer and either smaller or with the delivery logictics space gradually cannibalizing the in-person shopping space. I can only conclude that sufficiently scaled-up home delivery of groceries is more lucrative for retailers than traditional in-store shopping, probably due to some combination of smaller variety / more standartization, delivery fees etc.

coffeedan 3y ago

On the east coast, Stop & Shop has the best self-checkout experience I've seen. You get a bar code scanner when you enter the store and scan and bag as you walk around. At checkout, you scan the reader, keep everything you already bagged in the cart, and pay. Checkout takes all of 30 seconds. Bonus: you immediately know what each item costs from the display on the scanner.

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dave333 3y ago

Speaking as an entitled boomer raised by and with the ethos of a mother who went through food rationing in WWII this article is a lot of hot air about nothing important.