https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-costco-kroger-facing-self-checkout-reckoning-2023-10
Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.
Praxis
This just them whining. One person watching the door (that they had anyway) and one person assisting at a self checkout corral is still less employees than all the cashier’s I’ve seen them do away with.
yeah it’s wild to think about, but i don’t think i’ve been in a grocery store in years that had more checkout lanes open than closed. most of the time it’s no more than 2. i’m assuming that if they were still building new stores they’d just get rid of them altogether.
I’m one of those weirdos who prefers the self-checkout but they’re just not fucking practical when you got a cart full of stuff. These morons keep trying to implement a business plan that is one part having their cake and one part eating it to make the line go up for the quarter and it does not fucking work.
This is the biggest failure by far of self checkouts. PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN BAGGING AREA UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA PLEASE RING UP EVERYTHING THE BAGGING AREA PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN’T TRYING TO STEAL REPEAT FOREVER BECAUSE YOUR CART IS FULL OF 2 WEEKS OF GROCERIES FOR A FAMILY
It’s extra funny in my location too because a tax on plastic bags means most people bring their own bags, but if you put your own bag in the bagging area it yells at you because it thinks you’re trying to steal and won’t let you do anything. So mostly people just pile everything unceremoniously in a giant grocery heap in the “bagging” area and then spend another 5 minutes reloading their cart and bagging everything.
Self checkouts are great when you have a couple of small things but they’re absolutely the peak of inefficient bullshit for any regular sized grocery shop. They’re one of the reasons why grocery shopping for me went from “a task I enjoy” to “a task I talk about in therapy”. They have become anxiety zones.
PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN’T TRYING TO STEAL
Funny enough, this generates so many false positives that none of the workers I’ve seen even bother to check anymore. It’s just “Oh, the screen locked up again, I’d better get that”
One time I saw a customer stealing at the self checkout but I wasn’t in a mood to approach them, but I had to configure the machine next to them. Security guy came up to me a few hours later and congratulated me and said he saw me “combatting theft on the camera earlier.”
I never confronted the customer and they left with everything without paying, so I don’t even know what crack that security guy was smoking.
And the thing is they’re just fine if you’re at one of the rare stores where it’s not clearly geared to assume every customer is stealing every product, but then you go buying something in an area that’s lower income and suddenly it takes 20 minutes to buy 3 things because the system is too busy screaming at you to drink the verification can to let you scan anything.
Not even the machines. I worked at a grocery store that was in a predominately black and Hispanic neighborhood. Most of my managers were black as well, but I’m Asian lol. They would come up to tell me they think some random customer is stealing or might steal just because they’re checking out a family’s worth of food at the self checkout.
They tell me I should approach them and ask them for help just to keep an eye out and to check their receipt. I’ve been yelled at many times for singling out customers like that and the managers just say “good job bro”
The only store I’ve been to without a fussy self-checkout is a pretty large euro-style grocery chain in North America. Their attendants are usually also attending to a standard check-out, so they don’t even walk over. If you click the help button, they’ll just void the last item you scanned lol.
self-checkouts are wonderful bc anything that’s more than $10 is fucking free
i will never stop stealing
Damn straight
Wal Mart near me has no pressure plate/“Please move item to bagging area”, and a Home Depot nearby doesn’t even have those RFID security gates lmao
Wal Mart near me has no pressure plate
yup, same. well, actually one of them does, and it’s sensitive as a motherfucker. you’ll never guess what most of the people who shop there look like…
it feels gross but that’s why i near-exclusively stick to the stores in crackertown. “security” is usually just someone’s grandma waving hello and goodbye. just gotta be careful that the prices aren’t inflated to match the egos of the clientele or else you’ll end up spending more than you save. deeply envious of your HD btw, all the hardware stores here are locked down hard and it suuucks.
self-checkouts are wonderful bc anything that’s more than $10 is fucking free
what do you mean?
ah let me be clear: when shit is expensive, i steal it. not actually everything, of course, i’m not completely bereft of sense
but yeah if you’re careful and calm (and tbh white) and you make sure not to shop in impoverished neighborhoods (they have more security) you can get away with murder. i routinely steal about 60% of my groceries. my actual threshold/selection process is a little bit more nuanced but i don’t wanna get too deep into details
i do highly recommend it though, just pass shit over the scanner with a fingertip on the barcode. easy peasy, grocery bill goes down.
could mean several things, like big items too large for a bag, or things you can hide on the bottom rack of your cart. There’s a lot of simple ways to steal things.
big items too large for a bag
i actually would recommend never doing this. you should always buy the stuff that’s visible at a glance. having that shit on a receipt if you get stopped is like a get out of jail free card.
bottom rack of your cart
ditto this. everything i nab is bagged like any other item.
my employer implemented self-checkout for an employee/open to the public cafeteria. the prices are extremely reasonable for good quality food, so i am not trying to be a dick about it… but if the barcode fails to read 3 times, that means it’s free to me.
running an inside-out prison to keep people away from food and complaining that I have to pay for guards
