I’ve worked in a supermarket for most of my adulthood. I can confirm that nobody likes the self checkouts. Least of all the staff. We’re supposed to be in eight places at once, monitoring for compliance, preventing shrinkage, helping with the exceptions. But the people using the checkouts haven’t been trained to, they’re customers, they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re going to compound it by making mistakes too.
When I started out, you had to be specifically till-trained to operate a checkout. Now they throw people on self checkout duty with no training and say “figure it out”. Customers hate it. We hate it. Store management had the bright idea of putting someone on “receipt checking” duty which went down about as well as you’d expect.
I said just put them on a till.
They laughed and said I “don’t get it”.
What is it?!
Im just shocked by all the comments that seem to love it. Im on the side where its useful if you only buy like 5 items, but i want nothing to do with it if i have a cart full. I am also not a fan of some systems in general.
One store by me forces me to put every item down to check its weight and its super finicky and will not like it which then means someone comes over to override it so i can continue. This is frustrating and in no way helpful at all. Another place has the worst barcode scanners where im waving each item in front of it like 5 times before it scans. Outside those issues im fine.
I also try to plan my big orders for store pickup now and order online which helps and is the best thing that was created. I am also tempted to try the scan as you go through the store methoe, but never seem to pull the trigger when i go.