Netherlands :)
Real US/Europe split here
No cashier packs your bag for you in Europe. Sometimes it’s a fun game trying to be faster packing than them scanning.
I didn’t know there were places that even asked that.
I don’t understand the hate for self checkout it’s faster and easier
My only issue is how loud and obnoxious the prompts/alerts are at some stores who have their volume cranked to max.
Nah like actually they trying to deafen us
European here. Our self-checkouts make no sounds and don’t have any of that unexpected item bs. The experience is great. If your experience is like what I’ve read here, I begin to understand why it’s disliked.
Also European here. They do. Certainly in the shops I’ve been in. Probably a country thing.
My local king soopers always allowed a super low volume setting if you clicked it, now there’s only two, yelling and screaming. People were probably setting that and the beep couldn’t be heard on the camera or something
It’s not faster, but it can be easier if you really don’t want to talk to people. Don’t kid yourself: someone who spends hours per day scanning barcodes knows where they are on each product and can do them faster than you.
I am faster on self-checkout than the people working the register 100%, except Aldi. If Aldi scanners had to bag, it would be a tie.
It literally is faster for me as I worked at Walmart for awhile but some the people they got in there now are slow af
It’s faster for me, slower for the other 799 people in line before me who have never stepped foot in a grocery store before today.
Obvious hyperbole but some days it doesn’t feel like much of an exaggeration.
It depends on the store. There are places where the self checkout lanes are dysfunctional and end up requiring waiting for a checkout worker (who are usually understaffed) to come and scan a code to fix it.
Not always though. But regardless if you agree there, they are slowly replacing humans with machines and that has negative implications for workers and for the economy
Instead, try saying “well, then they don’t pay you enough to scan everything now do they?”
Y…yes? They don’t? That’s not a very good comeback you got there.
Okay and what if I, believe it or not, actually already knew that they dont pay customers to scan things and wasn’t on Walmart side?
…because it’s a non-sequitur and makes no sense as a response.
I feel like most memos in Walmart break rooms are this kind of fodder for shitposting material
I agree with the boomers on this one. I’m not in the habit of providing free labor to a corporation I don’t even work for.
have fun waiting in line i guess? while i zip through the self checkout in a fraction of the time
also, do you live in jersey? if not, then you’re pumping your own gas, bless your heart
The lines are usually minimal (1 or 2 people) during the time of day I typically go shopping, and I drive an electric that is charged in my garage.
Then pay for delivery and get it right to your door…
I don’t think, nor did I say, they needed to do more. I’m also not particularly fond of small talk, so I dont typically chat with them. They’re paid to do a job, so why would I offer to do that job for free?
These people being forced to stand all day in the USA is pure insanity looking from the outside.
Yup. There’s no reason they couldn’t have a stool.
Do you also demand to have underpaid workers standing all day to bag your groceries?
If it was up to me, they wouldn’t be forced to stand all shift or be underpaid, but since I’m not in charge of shit I can’t change their company’s policies.
It’s easier to steal shit. So pay yourself with a nice cheap can of Pinot Gris.
Stealing is wrong.
If you see someone steal food, no you didn’t.
Boy, you’re not gonna be happy when you learn how food stores used to work. They’ve been offloading things labor used to do onto the customers for a century.
I actually prefer being able to choose my own produce and meats.
Edit: I definitely get suckered in by the impulse purchasing though.
Which makes it even worse
I agree! I was at a Walmart one time and some chick ran out right by us at a high speed. We had no idea what was going on but apparently she was stealing. The one worker said as they walked by us “you got all these people standing around doing nothing and they couldn’t stop her?” It was a smart ass comment. Did that employee really believe that I would risk my life for Walmart, of all places? I don’t work there, I’m not security, I’m not a police officer. Not my problem.
Recently had a support call with a woman who was complaining about our 2 factor authentication system because she could only access one web page at a time. When I asked her if she couldn’t just open a new tab, she said she was too old to learn how computers work and couldn’t do that. She went on to claim that there’s a lot of people at her level of ineptitude, and that we shouldn’t have implemented 2fa because “most people don’t have multiple monitors.”
It was so, so hard not to throw out an OK Boomer as they proudly lectured me on the depths of their ignorance.
Can be funny for trivial stuff, but in the medical field this type of stuff is pretty messed up in my opinion. Some medical places implement stuff like that just because they refuse to pay people to staff the phones in scheduling.
Also, if the old lady doesnt want MFA thats her choice.
Mandatory MFA isn’t a bad thing though.
If an old lady doesn’t want to remember a password, should she be able to enter just her email/identifier without any verification?
I just think they should be able to opt out. Its up to the patient what their security posture is. If they don’t want it, they shouldnt be forced to have it. Just have them sign away their rights to sue the hospital or something along those lines.
I’m open to hearing an argument why it should be forced to use MFA even if the patient doesnt want it. I know at least one hospital my company works with that has it optional for patients who want it.
I think most people are just unaware of the risk that is involved. Healthcare information is some of the most sensitive data on a person and should be protected at all cost.
Some older people in particular have as much of a self-preservation instinct on the internet as toddlers in real life. If protecting them takes away a tiny bit of agency from them then so be it because they cannot be trusted with such decisions. I believe any reasonable person would use MFA because trading off a tiny bit of convenience for a significant amount of security is always worth it.
Most of these patients have already received emails from multiple healthcare organizations that their data was breached though.
The way medical data is stolen isnt through individual accounts usually unless you are famous or a politician.
MFA doesn’t really help much in the case of a tech illiterate person though, since TOTP codes can be phished just like username and password can. A scammer that calls them will just ask for the code in addition to the username and password.
My employer uses Yubikeys with FIDO2/WebAuthn for two factor auth, but that’s probably too complex for a non technical person to figure out (even if it’s basically just “press the button when it tells you to”).
Well, TOTP prevents at least these attack vectors, even for tech-illiterate people:
- Unnoticed data base leaks being used to gain full access to people’s accounts
- Credential stuffing (using another service’s leaked credentials to gain access)
With TOTP there must be at least some contact between the “hacker” and the victim.
There is a time when every person realizes that things have changed so much around them that they no longer understand how it works. It creeps up on you slowly, but in the Information age, that is accelerated. Every person here will experience some form of that at some point in their lives.
My father was 75 when his finances had deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to afford a personal secretary.
He had me explain the things he had to do, and he wrote them down on paper, step by step. He was pretty quickly able to do all the things he needed to do on his desktop.
Never got fast typing down, so I got him dictation software. Anyway, I’m pretty convinced as long as your determined, you can stay hip to new technology in a way that at least allows you to work with it.
The difference is you. You enabled him and helped accommodate his needs. Without you, how’s he going to cope? Also you’re a good child.
That’s entirely your choice, it’s not a requirement of life. You can continue learning new information, there’s nothing that forces you to give into ignorance. I’d also say there’s a pretty big difference between “I’m not a very tech savvy person” and “I am completely helpless and choose to make it other people’s problem.”
It’s a balance in many ways. There’s some aspect of refusing to do things due to not wanting to learn things. But sometimes people don’t want to adopt technologies simply because they’re unwilling to accept some very glaring downsides. For example, if you demand 2FA, you are demanding that your customers essentially consent to have an ankle monitor and remote audio monitor on their person at all times. Smart phones track your location 24/7, and they seem to track what is spoken around them as well. They are absolutely a huge invasion of privacy, and it’s remarkable we ever let them become as indispensable as we have. They’re basically just ankle monitors we all voluntarily put on each morning. I can absolutely see people just refusing to have a smartphone for the privacy implications alone.
I also have some red lines on technology. I refuse to use tiktok because of its privacy and psychological manipulation issues. And I’ve moved away from most social media, even if that cuts me off from some very useful communications and conversations in my family and community. I also refuse to buy any appliance with a wifi connection. I try to avoid any device that requires an app to use. If your widget requires an app but your competitor’s doesn’t, I’m buying from your competitor. If your widget requires an app and your widget is just something that would be nice to have, but not life-changing, I’m not going to buy your widget at all.
It’s a very dangerous thing to simply decry anyone who rejects a technology as ignorant or not tech-savvy. Often people reject particular technologies for damn good reasons. If we just accept the newest thing with zero thought simply for the fact that it is new, we are actually the ignorant ones. Something being newer does not automatically make it better. And often newer things are inferior to old things, like the case of a lot of privacy-violating appliances and companies filling everything with DRM and trying to turn it into a subscription. I don’t want basic household items to require an app to use, as it is guaranteed that the security on that system will be crap, and that the product will stop working after a few years after the company stops supporting the app.
If I’m buying a physical thing, I want it to be completely stand-alone and require zero continued feedback from its manufacturer in order to continue to function. You can tell me til you’re blue in the face about how spying on me helps improve the customer experience, but I’m still going to tell you to take your privacy-violating, app-dependent widget and shove it up your app-loving ass.
I like hanging out in parking lots at Walmarts and to scam boomers coming back with a load of groceries
The self checkout is a perfectly viable option, so long as Walmart can find the strength inside themselves to open 3-6 manned tills on a Sunday for folks with large carts or children. Nothing is more demoralizing than getting up to the checkouts after a huge shop and finding there isn’t a single till open whatsoever. Throw in a four-year-old who wants to help scan every item and you’re ready to burn the store down by the time you leave.
I wouldn’t mind if either the cost savings by the grocery store would be transparently passed on to the customer and not greedily put in own pockets OR the checkout process is like " walk through a gate, everything is self scanned due to RFID tags and you can pay immediately at a machine"
I’ve recently visited a grocery store in Hamburg, where you just put all your items on the self checkout counter, it detects all the prices and quantities in an instant (yes, including fruits and vegetables that require weighted!) you pay, you go. So great ! The only truly practical implementation of a self checkout, in my opinion. I’ve seen this in other types of store before (clothing) but never for groceries.
Never understood that argument. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Self checkout makes that happen.
I love self checkout. From my decades of cash register experience I can tell you, your soul begins to leave your body standing still for hours doing the same repetitive mindless task. It is not a job most want nor honestly should do. I really can’t fathom the folks who prefer waiting in line for one bored af human to do a task they could easily do themselves. A good company would find other things for their employees to do or (this would never happen) pay them more per hour to work fewer hours totaling the same weekly check. I feel only the elderly, overburdened, and incapable should use a cashier. If you got 2 available, working hands and can twist at the waist - get to scanning!!
I’ll be honest, going with the people that get paid to do it is way faster for bigger buys
Management can fuck right the hell off. Self checkout is taking jobs away from people and getting us to work for free.
