I die on this hill for a different reason: the store holds the customer responsible for scanning or incorrectly scanning your merchandise. There was an article of a store calling the cops to arrest someone who accidentally forgot to scan something on the bottom of their cart.

Self checkout is a way for companies not only to get rid of a job, but to shift shrink liability to the customer.

If you're going to make me scan my own merchandise, then the store should wave my liability if I get it wrong.

I used to bag groceries at a mom n pop store. I know the proper way to bag and it infuriates me to watch someone fuck up my stuff.

But they give such amazing discounts

My old grocery store implemented some new camera system to determine theft that falsely accused me of theft. That was cool.

Self checkout is a great place to sneak your 10 dollar parmesan in to the 2 dollar head of lettuce

This. If the attendant/clerk is telling me about the self checkout, I'm going to assume they don't want to deal with ringing me up, and I'll happily handle my own shit even if they are standing there on their phone not "working."

Now if a manager tells me to use the self checkout? Fuck that, absolutely, I don't work here. But I've got solidarity with the underpaid employees who'd rather not deal with me.

The time saved is my payment.

This point seems to get missed on all these "I don't work here" arguments. Yeah, I don't work here, so I'd like to be in and out quickly so I can spend my precious free time for things I actually like to do. If "time is money" anyway, then what's the difference? I'd rather scan my own things, skip the chitchat, and reclaim the personal time I would've spent waiting.

They have to do this because the average shopper has negative IQ. These machines need to be as simple to use as possible.

They done failed.

Policy depends on location, but for some places offering your receipt is 100% voluntary. I wouldn't deny showing my receipt at Costco (where it's been standard practice long before self-checkout came around and, though I don't have a copy of the agreement handy, I wouldn't be surprised if it were part of the agreement when you sign up for a club card.) But when I worked at a certain home improvement store, they hired outside security to check receipts. When one of the security guards was ignored by a customer and they asked him again, the customer complained. Subsequently, the security guard got fired. That's how I learned that the policy is "ask once, and let them go if they don't respond the first time." AKA security theater.

if i've learned anything from this thread it's that y'all have awful self-checkouts.

Added bonus of not having to talk to anybody.

But I also don't want the cashier to silently judge me for buying 4 pastries, an energy drink, a bag of lollies, and a bag of nuts.

In Poland I've only seen the in-store scanners in Kaufland so far, but I love it.

And I guess they really care about cost too, because if they wanted it as easy as possible, it would have a treadmill and a box with a 360° barcode scanner or something and the person could be spared from the whole bagging area thing.

But yeah, that simplification and accessibility ends up being what alienates me because of how significant it is. Hopefully there are enough of us that they'll keep some cashiers around.

Unfortunately a lot of stores in my area have either done away with traditional checkout in favor of self-checkout, or they only ever have 1 or 2 registers open. So either way, we get long lines. And they wonder why we buy so much online!

I thought that was a basic design principal since it's so widespread.

Y'know that grocery stores could simply staff enough checkout registers and then all this self-checkout time-savings goes away, right? The stores - following the airline model - created a problem for the consumer (long checkout lines due to understaffing) and then effectively sold the customer the solution (you do your own labor, but grocery prices stay the same).

We had those handheld scanner at the store I usually go, but they removed them as the theft rate was supposedly higher.

Can't have nice things..

I didnt realize places still did that, I haven't heard that annoying line in a few years.