I used to love using the self-checkout. But then it became a trend among the corporate overlords here to get all paranoid about people stealing food, so now they have the weight system calibrated too strict. Now if you breath on the items in the bag it locks you out and someone has to come unlock the system to continue scanning. So it's not really worth the hassle, and seems kinda pointless since an employee has to unlock the system after every few items.
Pickup orders are fantastic. Now I don't have to give a shit about any of this.
I actually prefer self checkout. Idk. I get it though.
I live here in Toronto.
When I go to a store, I pay with cash.
I pay with Canadian money, because I'm a Canadian who buys from stores in Canada.
That was easy to do in Ontario Wal-Mart stores.
But then they put up self-check-outs that only accepted credit and debit cards—maybe because they're in cahoots with the banks and the NSA/wp:CSEC.
Then I had to use a cashier.
So I went to Wal-Mart fewer times as I didn't like to wait (as well as the increased prices during and after Covid-19).
Now they have a person at the self-checkout who will scan my stuff and accept my cash.
It seems that Wal-Mart adapted—somewhat—to people like me: people who pay with cash.
Still, I do more purchases at Food Basics and Dollarama because their self-check-outs accept cash, including pockets full of loose change that I purposely carry when I go there.
The self checkout is a perfectly viable option, so long as Walmart can find the strength inside themselves to open 3-6 manned tills on a Sunday for folks with large carts or children. Nothing is more demoralizing than getting up to the checkouts after a huge shop and finding there isn't a single till open whatsoever. Throw in a four-year-old who wants to help scan every item and you're ready to burn the store down by the time you leave.
I've never understood the people who seem to not get that some people actually don't mind scanning their stuff and putting it in bags, and insist that that's the line between what the customer does and the employee. They also used to carry your groceries to the car for you, and you can also get them to pick everything up, bag it and bring it to your car or house. It's not like the checkout process is the special part that can't change.
Yeah, they want to save money by having fewer people get more customers checked out faster. I don't really care since the part I like, getting finished at the store, happens faster.
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.
Corporate gaslighting be like:
So this is pro-self checkout? Why would you be pro self checkout? Besides the extra time and effort for the customer to check out if they have more than a couple items, I recently read an article saying that even for the companies they haven't worked out: besides the problems and delays they cause where they have to provide employee assistance anyway ("Unexpected item in bag", etc), they've lost more to theft and are having to spend more money on adding more anti-theft tech, etc. One company they interviewed is phasing them out.
(edit after reading some comments) The article also talked about people getting in trouble for accidentally not getting something scanned.
Recently had a support call with a woman who was complaining about our 2 factor authentication system because she could only access one web page at a time. When I asked her if she couldn't just open a new tab, she said she was too old to learn how computers work and couldn't do that. She went on to claim that there's a lot of people at her level of ineptitude, and that we shouldn't have implemented 2fa because "most people don't have multiple monitors."
It was so, so hard not to throw out an OK Boomer as they proudly lectured me on the depths of their ignorance.
Reading the comments, do people not like self checkout? Is it another one of these American things, that baffle the rest of the world? Like grocery baggers. I'm European, living in Poland and Denmark and if given the choice, I will always pick the store with self checkout. It's simply faster. Only old people don't use self check out, not because of boomer ideology, but because they need the cashier's help.
They also don't schedule enough employees to keep the lines running quickly, they only have 2-3 lanes open most of the time when it's busy as having another line is 2x $13-15 an hour for a bagger and a cashier. This gets people to either go to self checkout or wait forever. Naturally most people go through self checkout, which they'll probably use as an excuse to make more self checkouts.
(talking about the store I work at specifically, which isn't a Walmart, but I assume Walmart does the same)I feel like most memos in Walmart break rooms are this kind of fodder for shitposting material
But also, fuck off walmart
I get being mean to walmart because corporations are bad but being needlessly rude to random employees rubs me the wrong way. Most of us can't get a job anywhere better despite having a degree. We have to deal with the mental abuse of people constantly treating us like dog shit just because we exist. The job situation is so fucked right now. I should not be having to compete with people that have masters degrees and decades of experience for tech support jobs that pay $15 an hour. Fuck this broken society.
The last time I was not underemployed was 2018.
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.
When I bring my banana through the cashier lane they give me a dirty look. But when I ride one of the lawnmowers inside and try to mount a self check out, I get kicked out of the store. MAKE UP YOUR MIND!
I didn't know there were places that even asked that.
I'd rather check myself out than deal with other idiots. It's a win for my sanity.
Screw Walmart. During the storms here in NC, I went there to buy some relief supplies, and it was awesome to see the whole store getting picked apart by people buying supplies to donate. What was definitely not awesome was the only 3 checkout lanes open out of the total 12, because Walmart has a 3 per employee rule and they don't want to assign enough workers for the checkout lanes, even during times of crisis like this.
The closest Walmart to me has about a dozen or so self checkout tills and there is usually a line of 20 people waiting to get to them. There's 3 cashiers that are there to badge the machines when they need to check ID for alcohol or override the machine if you double scan an item. I love self checkouts in other stores but Walmart has always been infuriating.
I've recently visited a grocery store in Hamburg, where you just put all your items on the self checkout counter, it detects all the prices and quantities in an instant (yes, including fruits and vegetables that require weighted!) you pay, you go. So great ! The only truly practical implementation of a self checkout, in my opinion. I've seen this in other types of store before (clothing) but never for groceries.
Okay
I wouldn't mind if either the cost savings by the grocery store would be transparently passed on to the customer and not greedily put in own pockets OR the checkout process is like " walk through a gate, everything is self scanned due to RFID tags and you can pay immediately at a machine"
...because it's a non-sequitur and makes no sense as a response.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to get fired by Walmart. You'd have to go on welfa... oh.
Would the RAtM reply be too insubordinate? 😛
Personally, I'm faster and better at bagging my items. Most grocery stores don't even bag your stuff for you anymore, so it's actually much slower for me to wait for someone to scan my item, then slide it down the conveyor belt so I can wait for them to scan the thing that should be at the bottom of the shopping bag. Too much hassle. Yes, it's fucking stupid that I'm essentially doing labor that someone who is actively employed could be doing, but I also don't have all fucking day to wait in line ups.
I've only been mistaken as an employee in one store I used to frequent. I was very disappointed when all three of those other customers actually accepted I didn't work there.
I was in the camping section checking out the flashlights and the idiot that actually worked there wasn't expected to learn what those lights will actually do. Told the customer it runs at the maximum output for the runtime of the lowest output because the employee only looked at the simplified status on the side of the box.
I had to show the customer the chart on the back of the box where the runtime and brightness of each mode is listed there and talked at length about all the different lights on display that I saw and was familiar with.
When I stepped away three different customers asked me about stuff in different departments of that store and I told them I didn't work there. Some of them gave me a dirty look, others were more chill about it.
You can make anyone believe you're supposed to be somewhere if you just act like you know what you're doing. But in this case I actually did know more about those flashlights than the employees did.
ok boomer
punchline in the title?...
ok boomer
