Retailers appear to be facing a self-checkout reckoning

I always use self-checkout and vastly prefer it. My music, book, or podcast never has to stop, I can scan and bag faster than most employees, and the lines are normally short or non-existent. I regularly walk up to a self-checkout and process 10x items compared to the person next to me and I’m walking out while they are still working through their handful of items.<p>The only thing that I hate is how the person they do staff is normally MIA or not paying attention. Too often I get “assistance is on the way” which really means “you need to flag down someone”. For everything from “you skipped bagging too many items” (sorry I was buying 4 cases of water), to “you tripped the weight sensors too many times” (again, sorry I’m fast at this and your system is slow&#x2F;buggy), to “you are buying alcohol or meds that are restricted” (totally understand but pay attention and come over when that happens please).<p>But if I don’t hit one of the cases above (which I don’t in 80-90%+ of my trips) then it’s way better. Even having to wait 20-30 seconds for an assistant isn’t the end of the world and better than waiting in line.m and make small talk while an uninterested kid puts your bread under cans in a bag.<p>Whoever though self-checkout = no staff was a moron from the start _but_ it does mean fewer staff. You can have 1 employee supervising 4-6 stations and if they are halfway competent they can bounce between them checking IDs and the like.<p>Lastly I wish more self-checkout stations had the spinning bag carousels and more space to put stuff. That’s my only other gripe. Sometimes they have like 2-4 bags stations&#x2F;holders and I often need more than that.

It&#x27;s been a while now since I used a self-checkout, but my general philosophy is &quot;Sorry, $Employer pays <i>me</i> to fight with buggy, UI-from-hell computers at $Job. If you want me to fight with your self-checkout system, my rate is \$$Lots&#x2F;hour&quot;.<p>(Admittedly, there are quite a few stores where PoSh*t PoS systems, poor training, and poor staffing team up to make live-human checkout just as bad.)

Walking into Walmart now, if I see I&#x27;ve got to self checkout, it means I usually only get what I absolutely need.<p>For my shopping habits (shop til the cart is full), that means I purchase maybe only 5-10% of what I&#x27;d normally spend on such a trip. That&#x27;s an inefficient trip to me.<p>And I was one of those people who would wait for a worker to ring me up, no matter how long the line.<p>Now that you can&#x27;t even count on the tobacco&#x2F;alcohol lane to be open, they&#x27;ve successfully forced me to change my shopping habits.<p>Changing shopping habits is usually the holy grail of retail marketing, butin this case it can&#x27;t be the direction they want to encourage.<p>I know I&#x27;m not every shopper, but the more a person typically buys&#x2F;spends per trip, the more likely they are to see self-checkout as a hassle (more work&#x2F; takes longer), and more likely they are to eventually reduce their per-trip item count.

Much reddit discussion here in Oz about how shit they are. And, as theft levels rise how self checkout becomes enabling of intrusive social oversight by computer.<p>I try to avoid them, I think young kids need jobs and checkout jobs aren&#x27;t the worst thing in the world (Australia has a very strong minimum wage law)

These companies are just jealous of the stores that didn’t do self checkout. They see 20 traditional lanes in those stores and only 1 or 2 of them ever staffed at bargain-basement wages and say “that’s what we wanted all along! You mean customers will just wait in the line?!”

A real important sentence here is &quot;Industry estimates suggest inventory losses can rise by 31% to 60% — or more — depending on the number of self-checkout stations used in a store.&quot;

Time waiting in line for salesperson = productive phone time.<p>Time doing salesperson&#x27;s job = lost time.<p>No thanks, &quot;self&quot; checkout.

Anybody tried Decathlon checkout? Just throw in the items in the box at the bittom, it automatically adds the item to the bill.<p>No scanning no fiddling necessary.

Sam’s club has the app checkout, which I prefer to waiting in line at Sam’s. Just scan everything as you go using your own phone. Tap pay and bypass the line (or at least the checkout line).