- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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What are they talking about, self checkouts are great. It makes the shopping experience more fair for those with fewer items
Having express self-checkoit is great. The Kroger near me went full-self-checkout. They have large kiosks that mimmic the traditional checkout belt kiosks, except the customer scans at the head of the belt and the items move into the bagging area.
If you have a full cart, you scan all the items, checkout, walk to the end of the belt, and bag all of your items. Takes twice as long as bagging while a cashier scans (for solo shoppers), and because of the automatic belt the next customer cannot start scanning until you finish bagging, or their items will join the pile of your items.
It effectively destroys all parallelism is the process (bagging while scanning, customers pre-loading their items with a divider while the prior customer is still being serviced), and with zero human operated checkouts running you get no choice
If you have a full cart, you scan all the items, checkout, walk to the end of the belt, and bag all of your items.
Okay? But there’s no cost savings on my end and I don’t have all the codes memorized, so it takes longer than if a dedicated employee handled it.
with zero human operated checkouts running you get no choice
The humans are still there, though. They’re hovering over your shoulder to make you did the job right and you’re not buying booze under-aged and you didn’t steal anything. All the business has done is off-load the manual labor onto the customer and slowed down the checkout process as a result.
They let me avoid human interaction if I choose, AND they’ve hurt these big retailers while showing them the value of giving people more shifts/hours?
Spectacular success if you ask me! It would be fun to have worked on this tech and then see it helping others by failing or being sabotaged, lol. That’s not a feeling you usually expect when you launch a product.
They let me avoid human interaction if I choose
Not even that, really. There’s always a cashier or two who needs to hover over my shoulder to check an eye or protect against shoplifting or help with a malfunctioning device. The change is in their role. Cashiers are no longer helpfully bagging your groceries, they’re just functioning as underpaid rent-a-cops.
It would be fun to have worked on this tech and then see it helping others by failing or being sabotaged, lol.
The original check-out lanes were already incredibly efficient. Self-checkout is comparatively clunky and time-consuming, which is why you’re encouraged to use lanes for more than 15 items.
I wouldn’t call it particularly helpful, even from a labor standpoint. Everyone is functionally more miserable than they were ten years ago. What we’ve got with this technology is a sunk cost that businesses are loathe to write off as a failure.
Oh no, did your attempt to cut labor costs and make shoppers do more of the labor that checkers used to do end up increasing shrink?
Oh no, how awful for you that you aren’t able to properly afford more *checks notes… Stock Buybacks.
This is how I imagine retailers complaining about this.
