I was checking out some groceries today, and the person next to me was clearly doing something the machine didn’t like.
“Please scan the item before putting it in the bagging area”.
Over and over again. I started thinking about what an entirely bogus thing “self-checkout” is. It seems to have exactly zero benefits to the consumer. No bagger, no help if you’re missing a price sticker, not even ample room to put your groceries while you scan. You’re left with exactly one square foot of space to do this job.
Is it making groceries cheaper? After all now they don’t have to staff as many cashiers now. Nope! Groceries are higher than they’ve ever been! All that delicious margin gets sent straight to our benefactors at the Kroger corporation. Where would we be without them!
Not to mention the thing is calling you a thief every five seconds. The ones by me even film you and if they feel you’re swiping something, it will show a slow motion video of you in the act and it tells you to correct your mistake.
So it’s work that I have to do. That nobody is getting paid for. And that is taking videos of your face and your behaviors. And it’s constantly announcing that you’re a bread thief to everyone in the store.
And for what? To increase unemployment of course! It’s one of those things I can’t believe collective society has taken sitting down. It’s one of the most egregious examples of pure corporate greed at the expense of the consumer experience, all the while cutting swaths of entry level jobs.
I prefer self-checkout. I’m fast and I don’t really like small talk.
What really sucks is that modern self-checkout requires so much babysitting and cashier assistance, because they assume everyone is a criminal. The supermarket has become the panopticon.
The grocery store closest to me now has cameras on each self checkout register that are labeled as AI theft protection. In practice what that means is if you hover an item over the bagging area, even for a second, before scanning it it stops you and then plays the video of you “stealing” until the bored teenager making minimum wage comes over and just presses “continue” because they don’t give a shit and the line for the registers is like 10 people long.
It’s that long because despite having like 20 registers designed to be staffed by actual people they rarely open more than one because they fired most employees years ago. So now self checkout is basically the only option, even for people buying a months worth of groceries for a family of 8
I hate the future
Yep, exactly my experience at basically all the grocery stores near me.
Self-checkout used to be quick and easy, now it’s just an exercise in patience and being treated like a crook.
I prefer self checkout because I am a terrible cashier and keep forgetting to scan things or the wrong things. Did you know that a kilo of carrots is very cheap? And that you can put anything you want on the self scale to print a matching barcode?
I’m autistic so I really like self checkout but they’ve definitely gotten shittier over time. Many of the problems with them are really just the store itself being shitty and not self checkout.
I’m autistic and I hate most self checkouts. The video of me doing things and the bright blinking “we’re recording” light push me into sensory overload, especially after I’ve spent spoons on a big shopping trip.
Some are fine. I like them a decade ago before they had so many screens and blinking lights.
You sound like someone who complains about pumping your own gas.
I prefer self-checkout, a lot faster. Especially when you can scan your products with your phone while shopping.
My local grocer is part of a small chain (3 locations, all in the same county). I know the owner by name, he’s a regular at my restaurant. They don’t have any self checkouts, just an express checkout and then 5 normal ones. It works out great. They’ve also got a State Store inside (where I live, only the State government is allowed to sell bottled spirits), which is a huge bonus. I went there yesterday since my vodka stash was running dry, and I needed to stock up on trash stickers for Spring cleaning. I picked up some cheese and buns while I was there. Had a chat with the butcher, small talk with the cashier, helped an old lady load her groceries into her car. It was a genuinely enjoyable, and very human, experience.
Contrast with the Walmart supercenter. They have 50 self checkouts, and just one manned register, which is only really used to buy age restricted products like cigarettes. I don’t physically go there anymore because the checkout experience is damn near torture. It feels sterile, more like a warehouse than a grocery store. If I need something from Wally World, I get it delivered to my door, usually in an hour or less.
I get what I can from a grocery store chain in my area. They have three stores in the same county as well but they’re part of an overall larger family of different named chains of a conglomerate if I remember right. They have no self checkout, and though the findings there are less than say Wal-Mart I’m not shopping at a big box store where the profits all leave the local area into some rich family’s pocket.
shop at aldi. the prices are better, a lot of the food is better, and you don’t give your money to kroger.
we switched to aldi and our grocery bill went down by 1/3 immediately. kroger sucks.
My Aldi has self checkouts.
Same here.
And my first use of self-checkout ever was at a Lidl, which is basically the same category as an Aldi.
I like self checkouts but I’m not in the US so ours aren’t garbage.
The only stupid thing I’ve seen is a certain hardware store where the self checkouts are closed 90% of the time, and there are only two normal checkouts, so you often have to wait in a huge line while the self checkouts just sit there, chained off and doing nothing. It’s ridiculous.
I like the ones where you scan the item while putting it into your cart much more. I can sort everything into my reusable bags right away. No needless shifting from the shelf to the cart to the cashier to the bag to the cart into the better bags in my car.
Only easier thing is when we order online and they put everything into sturdy baskets you can borrow instead of bags.
the Kroger corporation
There was your mistake. Kroger is a nightmare from dystopian hell.
It used to be a friendly place but no, that wasn’t enough money for them.
When talking about unemployment, I think people focus on wrong aspect. Replacing people with machines is good, that’s why we make them. The problem is with how our society functions. Rather than less work for same pay, we get unemployment as a problem.
As for machines, I hate their weight checking. Sometimes it just needs me picking up the item and slamming it onto the bagging area. In the past, some of them used to show weight difference from expected weight, so I would be able to figure out what to shuffle around.
There’s also issues with permissions. For example, removing items or completely exiting shopping requires employee permission. What for?
Also, recently 2 shops decided to change the UI. In the past, you could type in number of items if you had multiple, especially useful for pastry. The new UI requires repeatedly pressing +/- buttons. Really nice when you have 15 of something.
Lastly, scanner cooldown. They seem to have a large cooldown. I just want to quickly scan the items, but no, gotta wait 2 seconds between each item.The only places where it’s a bliss are supermarkets with systems like scan&shop. You take a portable scanner and scan everything as you put it into a cart, then just pay at the end in a few seconds.
One of my pet peeves has been stores blocking off half the self checkout except when there’s high volume of customers. I didn’t need to be waiting in line. You have perfectly fine self checkouts there, but no, I have to wait, and possibly walk to the other side of the store for no good reason.
Dude makes my blood boil, there’s a store I go to very often near my house that ALWAYS has 4 of the 8 self checkout lames closed, and the one or two cashiers they have staffed also use the self-checkout stations, so it’s completely fucked and idiotic. Sometimes there will be a huge line and still they never open the other 4
Yes, also these are the times when the people self checking in front of you are all the people in town who haveliterally never seen a barcode before in their life, so they spend 5 mimutes puzzling over each item.
Like shit man, shoce all your shit across at once, the checkout will get it. Moce move move.
All the criticisms of self checkout are valid. Can’t argue against them.
However I’ve been kind of a fan since they first came out. Simply because I don’t have to make smalltalk with a cashier.
I have to to deal with customers all day at work. Shopping is a chore I want to be over with without having to further drain my limited extroversion tank.
Used to be that way, now you have to awkwardly interact with someone who is explicitly checking to make sure you didn’t steal something.
Also cashiers stopped making small talk a while ago and started looking dead in the eyes when the major supermarket chains exploited them out of basic humanity.
2026 is brutal
Before self checkout I always sought out the dead eyed teenage cashier who looked like they didn’t want to be there. No small talk. Fantastic.
The worst are the grown woman cahiers who want to chat about every item you are buying.
Personally I love using the machines. I don’t want to hear a clerk’s personal opinions or comments. People have lost a sense of professionalism.
However. If you are going to only have 6 machines available, and people waiting for long periods, you need to give Self Check users a 10% discount for their hard work. Either that or have all 30 machines open at all times.
Also you don’t have to deal with them bagging stuff in whatever random order they scan stuff in.
I love them. Much shorter queue times because so many are set up in one zone. But they only work if people with carts still use stationed checkouts.
One of the main reasons why I refuse to use self-checkout.
A few more reasons:
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In some stores, gift cards, discounts, coupons, etc can’t be used in self-checkout.
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It’s essentially making me do the job of the cashier for free. Fuck that noise. They want me to do it, they can pay me.
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The line for real registers is sometimes a bit longer, but it tends to move much faster, because it’s not full of a bunch of grandmas having their first experience with a robot accusing them of theft.
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Gross germs all over the self-checkout machines, which I’m sure are never cleaned at all.
To you point 1: all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them (2) products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers (3) the grandmas tend to pay with cash, taking ages to search their wallets for red coins (4) you don’t want to know where those red coins have been.
(2) products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers
I have a hard time believing they would pass the savings on to the buyer. At least not any big chain.
I know the retail industry well, professionally. It is a low margin, high throughput industry, meaning that you want to tie in the customers as best as you can. The best tie in is price; Walmart, Kroger, Aldi, Target, Costco, they all fight for audience, in the end by lowering the price points. The most expensive “parts” in a store are the employees, and if you can reduce those numbers, you can lower your prices too. So the automation helps these retailers to keep the customers from wandering off to cheaper stores, while increasing the margins.
all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them
Nah, fam. I’m getting that 10% veteran’s discount.
products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers
All stores have at least some cashiers. At least, all the ones I ever go to.
And I’m going to need a source about those self-checkout stores being cheaper, because I sure haven’t seen that.
We haven’t seen a drop in prices, as inflation is way up, thanks to the Orange Chimpanzee. Yet, a store with 100% employees and 0% automation will always be more expensive than a store with 30% employees and 70% automation- that’s the reason humans invent machines…in the end machines and robots are always cheaper than humans. Those profits will not be passed on 100% to consumers, but parts will be, to draw more people into the store.
That is completely false. Safeway is 25-40% more expensive for basic items like limes, onions and tomatoes compared to the Mexican market right across the street.
The Mexican market always has 2 butchers, 1-2 cashiers and 1-2 people stocking items. Safeway maybe has 50% more staff for a store that takes up like 10x the amount of space once you add in the parking lot.
Economies of scale would say Safeway should be able to obliterate the smaller store in price but that has never been the case in the 6 years I’ve lived here. They do have more items and longer hours (3 extra hours in the evening with a skeleton crew), but at the prices they demand, you are better off going to the Mexican, Asian and Indian markets while accounting for gas and wear and tear on a car and still have a better experience and overall cost.
Large corporations are just syphons of local money into offshore accounts at this point.
What has that to do with automated cash tellers?
Those profits will not be passed on 100% to consumers, but parts will be, to draw more people into the store.
Really, though, got any data on that? Because what’s to stop a store from passing 0% of that onto consumers and thus increasing their profits?
It’s from my close business interactions directly with the managers of these stores. I did business with them, areas of brand and category management, POS, etc.
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At my local supermarket, I scan every product while I shop, then scan my phone at the self checkout terminal, and then walk out. The payment is via the app. My groceries are at this point either in the trolley, so that I can load them into my pannier bags on my bike, or if I came on foot, they’re already in my backpack or in the shopping bags I brought with me.
So. Much. Better than queueing at a checkout counter and having someone scan my groceries and then having to handle them again.
How does this work with produce? It all needs to be weighed right?
There’s a scale with a printer in the fruit and veg section. You weigh your produce and scan the barcode that comes out of the printer and stick it on.
Same with the Pfandautomat.
Now this is interesting. Based on your use of “trolley” I can assume you aren’t from the US. Is there anything stopping you from throwing some extra items in the cart and walking out without scanning? I can’t imagine this happening in the states unless they could ensure you pay every penny first.
U.S. definitely has that system. In the Boston area the stores called “Stop & Shop” have the handheld scanners. Or, you can use your phone. It’s not 100% of their stores, but, most.
I personally like it. I usually have one canvas bag and buy no more than a handful of items.
I understand the complaints about self checkout and agree it’s unfortunate that it cuts back on # of employees.
To each their own. Some folk prefer a bit of banter and the human touch.
