I’ve worked in a supermarket for most of my adulthood. I can confirm that nobody likes the self checkouts. Least of all the staff. We’re supposed to be in eight places at once, monitoring for compliance, preventing shrinkage, helping with the exceptions. But the people using the checkouts haven’t been trained to, they’re customers, they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re going to compound it by making mistakes too.
When I started out, you had to be specifically till-trained to operate a checkout. Now they throw people on self checkout duty with no training and say “figure it out”. Customers hate it. We hate it. Store management had the bright idea of putting someone on “receipt checking” duty which went down about as well as you’d expect.
I said just put them on a till.
They laughed and said I “don’t get it”.
What is it?!
Tell that to my local Walmart. Every time I grocery shop there, there are lines down the aisle for the self-checkout. Meanwhile, I walk past the self-checkout and jump into a regular checkout line with maybe one person in front of me.
I remember when self-checkout first became a thing and people complained that it was corporations’ way of cutting jobs and understaffing stores to save a buck. People were very anti-self-checkout.
But force people to use it enough and they eventually adapt. Especially the younger generations who don’t want to deal with other people. They’ll willingly stand in line for half an hour if it means they don’t have to give a simple greeting to an employee at the register.
I will say, one of the positives I’ve seen to the self-checkout are all the people who use it as an excuse to hurt large corporations. Customers aren’t “stealing products,” they’re just not trained well enough to notice when a product doesn’t ring up correctly. I’m kind of sad to see that this practice of “undertrained customers” hasn’t hurt businesses enough that they’ve given up on the self-checkout yet.
Me personally, I just avoid them altogether. Why wait in long lines and go through the work of ringing myself up one item at a time when I can just dump my cart onto a conveyor belt and swipe a card? It only costs me a very brief “hello” to another human being to skip all that extra work, and it keeps more positions for employees available.