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Seems true in America. I rarely choose self checkout, for the reasons listed. However I spent 3 years in London and self checkout dominates. The Sainsburys by
by habosa 3y ago
Seems true in America. I rarely choose self checkout, for the reasons listed.
However I spent 3 years in London and self checkout dominates. The Sainsburys by my house had ~40 self checkout kiosks and only about 6 regular checkout lanes. I only used the checkout lane one time in multiple years (same at Waitrose and Tesco).
There are a few things that made it better:
1) Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code. Much easier to scan. And generally the tech seems to just work, it rarely complained that I had missed an item when I hadn’t.
2) Fewer item purchase restrictions. Even alcohol was allowed at self checkout but you did have to flag someone down for that.
3) People do smaller shopping trips. Each person at an urban market in London is likely buying a basket of goods, not a whole cart. That makes the entire process much more streamlined and space efficient.
- rootusrootus 3y ago> Seems true in America Not in my experience. I love self-checkout. > Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code Same with my local store in the US. Still a few things sold by weight, but the majority of stuff is barcoded. Even produce. > Even alcohol was allowed at self checkout Is that not true pretty much everywhere in the US as well? They have to check ID, yes, but that's a legal thing.
- rsynnott 3y ago> Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code. Much easier to scan Even where a lot of stuff is sold by weight, you can just have self-service scales that print a barcode around the shop; this seems to work fairly well (unless they're out of order; then it's a whole thing and you can only use the self-checkouts that have built in scales, grumble mutter).