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.

Oh yeah, instead I'll get in the line behind Mildred who is paying by check and has to have a 20 minute conversation with the checker because her kids never call anymore. Then after that the employee can slowly scan my items and pack them with cold stuff across all bags and fragile stuff under heavy stuff.

Having worked cashier in a past life, I'll gladly let the employees do better work than dealing with having to scan my shit and do a bad job packing for me.

So you're the slow motherfucker in front of me in self checkout...

A hill I'm willing to die on: every time I end up in Walmart, something has gone horribly wrong with my life, and I want to leave as quickly as possible while interacting with as few people as possible. I love self checkout.

I honestly don't hate the self checkout, I hate it when they do it poorly.

Oversensitive scales, improperly weighted products, stuff without barcodes, tiny little bagging areas that can only hold two bags. No belt for unloading groceries. Please remove the item from the bagging area, help is on the way. (Help is never on the way)

The grocery store where I used to live had a bunch of regular lanes, You threw your crap on the belt, Scan it over the sensors and send it down to the collection area where you could bag it. It was honestly pleasant.

I went to Target in the evening once, had an entire cart full of groceries. I push it up front there's no cashier's open only the self checkout. I look at the person manning the self-check out and say

Why aren't there are there any registers open?

Sorry just the self checkout.

This is going to be like 8 bags.

Yeah, sorry.

I shrug leave the cart there and start walking out the door.

No, wait: The cashier goes and opens the closest register to the self checkouts

Yeah I'm not actually talking about the "Please place the item in bagging area" part, I'm talking about the second or two after I place it before the system registers the weight and re-activates the scanner.

Sometimes I've seen this disabled, on certain tills at certain supermarkets, and I can scan breezily. Not sure if the weight check feature was disabled completely or what.

Amusing that you think the employees scanning shit aren't also the ones bagging it.

But to answer your question, I'm faster because I have an incentive to get shit scanned and bagged, vs just riding the till for 8 hours.

Until you get stuck between Ethel (who is trying to fill out a paper check and make small talk because she's lonely) and Bob (who has no sense of personal space and smells like he doesn't know how to wipe).

Non-self-checkout sucks.

here they don't talk, don't weigh, don't time out, and can be cleared remotely when you buy age-restricted stuff and don't look like a twink. my only gripe is that some of them won't allow you to delete duplicate scans without help.

following the airline model

? Are you talking about, like, baggage prices?

Iirc, airline margins are super thin, and their customers are extremely price sensitive. In order to stay competitive, airlines need to be able to sell their customers on the lowest possible flight price, while still not losing money on every single flight. The solution is to charge the customer more directly for the scarce resources they use on a flight. Extra weight on the plane means more fuel used to reach the destination. Charging for each checked bag rewards people for travelling light, while giving everyone a free bag punishes the light traveller with higher fares. Sure, the byzantine fee structure in the booking process is annoying - but at the end of the day, flights are now extremely cheap historically speaking, and a pay-for-what-you-use model makes sense.

Of course, the actual solution is to have a better system of busses and trains. And the airline industry is always lobbying against that. But I'm not sure what the comparable action in the grocery industry would be.

Oh gotcha

Same answer though, none of them by me do that anymore, I guess they all disabled the scale here. I can just rapid fire scan and out the door.

Because I care about leaving, so I do everything I can to be faster. In economics, this is known as the principle-agent problem. At my local walmart, it is known as "I'm not a septuagenarian who's been hitting a vape pen for the last 5 hours."

That's a lot of words to say while not breaking stride. I just hand them my reciept and thank them for taking my garbage.

I mean, it's security theatre what actually does save the store money. Hence why walmart had greeters all those years ago. They found people were less likely to shoplift if they just knew that someone was watching them.

ha fair point!

I never understand the press they get. As someone that doesn't want to have a chat with a stranger about everything I buy, self-checkouts are amazing. I don't consider it extra work. OP should look at the history of supermarkets. We didn't use to pick items off the shelves either.

"Don't you hate it when you walk into a grocer and they expect you to pick out the items yourself? I don't work here, I just want to say "1 pound of ham and 2 loafs of bread" at the clerk, pay and pick them up. I've been to this new Piggley Wiggly, can't find anything, spent like an hour to find beans. Imagine if I was paid for that time, I would have made 15¢!"

OP in 1925, probably.