I mean, walmart could easily fix that by having fucking cashiers.
At the walmart I go to they put in like 60 self checkouts and have, maybe, one cashier running at a time.
I don’t mind self checkout as a concept. Its fine if you are just buying a couple things, or something you might be personally embarassing for you… but they are not a replacement for cashiers.
Cashiers and belts are needed to handle bigger purchases like monthly groceries and shit.
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
I’m 100% against self checkout.
They’ve put the burden of sale on you instead of themselves. If you fail to check something out accidentally, you are liable for theft.
If they don’t have a cashier, I go to customer service and tell them to ring me up even if it’s one item.
Which is why I’m against making people do big orders through self checkout, cause thats when an accident can happen.
Not when you’re getting your genital itch cream.
A lot of the grocery stores near me have a limit of 15 or 20 items for self-checkout. Safeway says “about 15 items” which is strangely vague. Any more and you have to go through a regular checkout.
i would say even 10 items is to much for self checkout, but thats better than walmart expecting you to take a cartful of monthly groceries through self checkout.
NAL, but i believe that they have to show intent in order to prosecute. As long as the legal system works properly, they would have to prove that you’re lying when you say “I forgot that was down there”
I can’t imagine a judge taking a case where someone unwittingly stole something
Don’t need to get to a judge. They can just tresspass you and then you have to drive 30 miles to another supermarket cause you cant ever set foot in that one again.
Thats enough to fuck shit up for a lot of people.
I admire your faith in our legal system but despair at you lack of imagination.
They’ll prosecute a bag of money for potentially being involved in a crime.
Do you live in the US? I do and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that happens here
Depends how white you are
Not even cause the checker should have seen it but also what store prosecutes someone over 1 item
You don’t get to be 3 of the richest people on the planet by paying for labor
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
I also faced that scenario once and walked out of the store leaving my $400 worth of groceries sitting in front of the abandoned cashier lanes. The profit from just my purchase would have paid for a full cashier shift that day. Instead they got to pay for restocking and ruined frozen food and meat.
Yeah and then I had a lady ask to check my receipt because there’s not enough room to put everything on the fucking thing all at once so I told her no and walked out.
It’s cute that you think 25% of your sale is going towards labour, even before self-checkouts became so commonplace.
Its cute that you are trying to twist what I said into something that I didnt say.
No wait, not cute. the opposite of that.
I said I want a 25% discount for doing their job and saving them the labor. Not that their labor is 25% of my bill.
I’m sorry you’ve taken offence to my throw away comment, as no offence was meant.
Is it actually “cute” that this person allegedly overinflates the worth of checkout labor, or were you being condescending?
Just curious, I have no idea what the real number is, what do you think it is?
I have no clue. I guess you can look at the profit margin for a supermarket (Walmart is around 2%, I just checked), then figure out the average full food shop spend, and finally see what the average hourly wage is for a worker and how long it would take to ring up a full shop.
Although, this also highlights why they can’t give OP 25% off as their margin isn’t anywhere near this figure. I guess we should also factor in handouts that companies like Walmart get from the government to subsidise their staff etc.
Apparently they spend about 7.67% of their operating budget on labor. Just in case anyone was wondering. Source.
I would wager that a significant piece of that is centered around the logistics and distribution element. Cashiers are probably rounding errors.
Thanks for posting this.
From reading a few reports, after looking this up, it seems walmart spend about 7% of it’s revenue on hiring, and about 32% on payroll. The other costs towards labor seem to vary greatly from source to source, depending on exactly what they take into consideration as a labor expense. So it is somewhere between 39% and 60% of the revenue.
So that other person was probably being super condescending for no reason? That’s kind of the impression I got when they said they had no idea the actual number.
Walmarts keep the same number of cashiers before and after self checkouts are installed.
not in any walmart where i’ve witnessed the changeover.
I’m just basing it off of being married to a Walmart manager for 10 years but hey, maybe outsiders’ anecdotal feelings on the topic are more accurate than observed first hand experience.
Walmart is ALWAYS hiring cashiers.
Yeah, and you know where they are? stocking shelves and picking for the online pickup orders. Not running checkout lines.
That number is between 0-2 depending on how many cashier lanes there are.
What’s so bad with self checkout I run through it faster then a cashier does
Not wanting to do free work for a company (they don’t even give you a discount if you use self-service) is being a boomer?
That’s the first time I’ve seen the word “boomer” on the opposite side of the word “sucker”.
Exactly! Back in my day, people used to fill up my gas for me and carry my things up to my hotel room. Young people are getting lazy and entitled! Makes it hard to humiliate the poors if they make ME do the work.
Tbh back then the pay was more fairly in line with cost of living for some of the jobs. however, it has been a good 20 or so year since it was more fair. Nowadays, it is absolutely scary the cost of living. it’s down right criminal.
Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!
Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!
That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.
In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.
Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.
In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.
So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.
Maybe you can go the warehouse and pick it up from the boxes, drive down to the farm to het the produce or, even better, grow your own food ALL THE WHILE STILL PAYING FULL VALUE TO THE SUPERMARKET.
“People used to have even more done for them and now they don’t and pay the same” is not the powerful argument for us having even less done for us that you think it is.
Okay boomer
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.
But also, fuck off walmart
I hate self checkout. I work all day to then check out my shit and bag my own groceries? And pay 2x for the same food and less service than 5 years ago?
Boomer uncle literally drives his electric bill payment to the local office to pay it when they have a perfectly fine online portal.
Same exact response ‘that’s someone’s job’ like the employee actually has a say.
There’s no justification from a pure convenience standpoint, but I could respect the pettiness if the electric company ran their shit like one local government office in my hometown, where there was this small annual fee they charged like $9 for…but then to pay it, you could either mail in a check, hand deliver cash or check or card…or pay online…where they added a $5 “convenience fee” to a sub-$10 payment.
You bet your ass that I paid that shit in person every year, in loose change, and requested a receipt (which they had to write up manually because they didn’t have a system to process and print one).
My city’s water bill went from a free online portal to a shittier one with a fee. I pay it by check now out of pettiness.
Yeah I refuse to pay a “convenience fee.” I’ll mail a f*ing check if they try to charge me.
I live by this philosophy
If you charge me more to make both our lives easier, I will make both our lives harder out of spite.
It will cost you more than the fee you tried to squeeze out of me, and I will have spent nothing.
Now do Ticketmaster
I would but arson is a crime
No fee for the portal. His only justification was it is some human interaction, which is fine. Just feels like a boomer mentality.
Hell, you can even pay through a check via the banks online portal. Dude doesn’t have a cell phone and never has.
Well, the funny thing is… it IS somebody’s job, and they get paid for it. There more they push “self service” the less workers they’re hiring and paying wages to, and the more your ever-increasing grocery bill just goes to pad some executive’s bonus so they can buy a bigger boat or whatever.
What about the jobs of the people that maintain the online portal though??
Well…fuck em, I guess!
If they’re charging so much that the local govt needs to pass that on in the form of a $5 fee on a $9 payment, they’re either gouging, or have an unsustainable business model.
Either way, fuck 'em.
Most of them are useless and horruble ti use. Don’t get me wrong I love the cinvinience, but they need to hire competant designers/dev.
Most corporate bill portals I’ve personally used were terrible and charged me a significant convenience fee for using them.
None of my utilities charge a fee. Seems foreign to me. Usually only the bmv charges one online.
You’re kidding, right? Are You trying to tell me, You physically walk somewhere to pay Your electricity bill? Are You also using cash to do it?
I feel like most memos in Walmart break rooms are this kind of fodder for shitposting material
Self checkout in the PNW rules.
Self checkout in South (east) Florida sucks.
Why? Because the volume is on 11, and the customer base is as dumb as a rock. Seriously, stand at any self checkout in SF for 10’ minutes and watch.
In 11 minutes you will either want to kill them or yourself, sometimes it’s a tossup.
Even though ya specified south Florida I still read it as fucking San Francisco.
I enjoy turning this one around. “Oh, you’re one of those socialists who wants everybody else to do your work for you, too lazy to lift your own groceries. Nobody wants to work anymore!”
i’m sure you use that zinger all the time
Never understood that argument. I want to be in and out as quickly as possible. Self checkout makes that happen.
Some people are too entitled and think everyone else exists to serve and fawn over them
I have to scan an item, then wait 10 seconds for the weight sensor to register that I actually put it in the bag. If I have a cart full of shit it’s going to take me 5 minutes just to scan everything. A cashier can blow through that in a minute or two. I wouldn’t be opposed to self checkouts if they didn’t suck ass.
It works fine until someone tries to buy an age restricted item (ye gods help you if you have more than one!) or inevitably every available kiosk is being hogged by a octogenarian who can’t figure out the machine at they all take half an hour each to check out.
For your convenience, half of the machines are broken, and the employee assigned to unjam the remaining working ones when they get their electronic knickers in a twist is on lunch.
This situation has gotten so bad that my local Home Depot has started assigning an employee to “assist,” i.e. work the machine from start to finish, every customer at the self checkout. So for those of you keeping score at home, that means what we’ve done is reinvented the standard checkout lane, except worse, and both people are standing on the same side of the counter for some reason.
I’ll be honest, going with the people that get paid to do it is way faster for bigger buys
I’ve found that I scan quicker than most of the people who are paid to the job.
So you have never tried to out-scan an ALDI cashier.
Sometimes… I’ve had lots of bad experiences with super slow checkout people. I would say most of the time, they were boomers themselves and spent half the time trying to make chit-chat.
That being said, I will still line up for a staffed checkout if I have a cart full because it is easier since I can bag and put in the cart as they’re scanning. But also, many of the self checkouts here have a limit of like 10-20 items posted.
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!!
Haha, I am using the “I don’t work here” line 🤣
I’m on Team Boomer on this one.
I am and I’m not. If it’s like 2 items, give me a self checkout. If it’s over 15. Bring on a cashier.
I always prefer self checkout because too many people suck at bagging.
Don’t put a leaking pack of meat with my deli you dumb shit. All while I see people pushing full carts that have meat touching produce…
The only place I trust to bag for me is Trader Joe’s. Tetris masters over there.
They still do bagging in the US? Greeters, too?
You buy meat pack that’s leaking?
To add to that, you don’t wash your produce before eating it?
Management can fuck right the hell off. Self checkout is taking jobs away from people and getting us to work for free.
I mean, both are right. Clients shouldn’t have to do the cashier job.
But clients should stop going there to send a message instead of harassing the minimum salary employee.
Corporate gaslighting be like:
