To wonder why people hate the self check outs at supermarkets

[Mumto123monkeys]

It’s driving me a bit mad....people moaning.
I don’t get what’s wrong with them, I’ve heard ‘why would I use them, I don’t work hear’. But surely it shortens the que...

Also ‘I like to speak to people, not a machine’ ok....it’s not difficult to strike up a convo in most places...
and loads of others! Personally, I can’t see the issue! I use both, I prefer self serve-scan as you shop too, if it’s available! It’s much quicker, and the kids love it so helps keep them happy!
I know they can be glitchy, but some shops have got them really good!

I use them for small shops but they rarely work smoothly, you still need a staff member for anything with a security tag or age restriction (more things than are immediately obvious) or things that are too light for the sensor to pick up (loads of stuff) so for me yes they cut down queue times (sometimes) but that can be wiped out easily by what you are buying or a computer says no moment.

The bloody CoOp ones drive me insane, barking instructions at you but not managing to keep up with what your doing. She’s still banging on about scanning and item and I’m at the point of paying. I hate them. You don’t need to keep hectoring me when I am doing what I’m supposed to be doing but you’re not technically advanced enough to keep up. Rah!!!

The only supermarket near where l live is a very small Asda. They have one manned checkout (apart from the kiosk) which isn't actually manned very often. The rest are self scan. They're a nightmare. l work on a checkout (not in Asda) and l have trouble with them.

I am amazed at people saying they use them to get rid of change. All the ones I have used take ages to take each bit of change.

I love scan as you shop.

It always seemed so pointless to have to put everything into the trolley to then take it out to be scanned to then put it back into the trolley again.

They give me the rage!! I used one today in Sainsbury's, the supervisor had to come over 4 times as the items I put in to my bag didn't register and it kept saying please place item in the bagging area.....I already had!!!! Argh!!!
This is why I don't like them!

They give me the rage, but you can nick Quavers easily.

I have to say although I recognise the issue of them taking jobs and having issues for me they have been a god-send. I have autism and some days I just want to buy what I need and get out the shop and having to go to the till avoid eye contact with the check-out lady wonder whether shes judging my shopping etc can all be a bit much. I think for people like me and with other similar disabilities they give us another option on days where we have minimal strength for anything outside my confort zone x

I absolutely love scan as you shop. We don’t have any stores near us doing it anymore.

I love them. We’ve had no job losses since introducing our self service machines. It has just meant that we’re able to spend more time on the shop floor putting the stock out and doing other jobs than before. I am pretty sure if we took them out the company wouldn’t splash out on more employees, we’d just have bigger workloads.

I don't hate them but it's annoying when...

You have to get medicine or alcohol verified

Unexpected item on the bagging area

Waiting to get security tags removed

Failure to recognise lightweight items

Loathe the things I swear they are haunted and it's a ghost that's the unexpected item in bagging area

I will use them in Tesco express if the staff are all off busy doing other things and they work fine there.
Any big supermarket no no no.
Ide rather queue up.

I don't mind them, Morrison's and Tesco's are the fastest. Morrison's have the odd problem I use these on the way to work most mornings and 99% of the time they are fine.

Coop machines are awful, but if you buy alcohol or anything that needs verifying, they can do this from the kiosk, usually in sight of the self serves so they can check you look old enough, etc, and just press a button, rather than having to wait for the assistant.

Not too worried that the majority seem to hate self checkouts as it should mean shorter queues for me when I want to use one (which I would only do if I have a small number of items and nothing which is likely to cause an issue, that’s probably why I hardly ever have a problem).
And according to the reasoning on this thread, none of the people who boycott them because of job losses should actually use a supermarket at all, as I am old enough to remember when you were served by an assistant who scooted about behind the counter finding all your purchases individually. Obviously I was too young to remember the outcry that must have occurred because the introduction of supermarkets was reducing the number of jobs.

Because they are rubbish. Every.single.time I use them I’m told the weight is wrong and have to then wait for the assistant to help me. If they upgraded the system I wouldn’t have an issue.

I find self serve more stressful than going through normal checkout & can take longer. I hate all the noise, barking orders and moaning about unexpected items etc, frequently end up needing assistance for something too.

Tesco's ones in particular seem to give me grief. One didn't have change so lady had to come open it and then needed a manager to put code in, which still didn't produce my note, 10 minutes later they just went & got £5 for me.
Anything reduced always tends to cause issues too, once I had assistant type in code and it still wouldn't accept it so then I needed to go to a manned till. I now just avoid self serve with yellow stickers as its quicker to queue for an operator.

And according to the reasoning on this thread, none of the people who boycott them because of job losses should actually use a supermarket at all, as I am old enough to remember when you were served by an assistant who scooted about behind the counter finding all your purchases individually. Obviously I was too young to remember the outcry that must have occurred because the introduction of supermarkets was reducing the number of jobs.

Or the department stores where the till person would send your money by chute up and air tube - there were cashiers at the end of the tube to count/give change etc and write up the sale. All these modern wicked supermarkets where the cashier does that herself have taken away the jobs of that army of back-scene cashiers.

Not to mention the thousands of jobs and livelihoods destroyed in the "corner shops" that the supermarkets themselves caused to close down.

A slight whiff of hypocracy perhaps?

I neither like or dislike them. I use them if I have only a few items and there are long queues at the manned tills. Yes sometimes you need an assistant but I find generally that they are usually quick at responding. I use Tesco Asda Sainsbury and M&S tills. Also a good way to use up a load of change as it counts it rather than standing at a manned till with people getting frustrated behind you.

Love self checkout. If shop assistants did something vaguely value add like pack your bags (as they do in other countries) I might miss them, but they add very little to the transaction.

I hate them. I think they were launched before the technology was ready. Hence all the points driving people to distraction on this thread. The inability to cope with lightweight items (so I end up throwing it into the bagging area with increasing force in an attempt to get it to register) or cope with our own bags I'd really bloody annoying.

I've used the Decathlon tills mentioned upthread and they are great. I think we will end up at a point where the trollies just automatically scan everything put into them and that will be great. I'm not anti technology. It's just this particular technology is a bit shit.

I think they were launched before the technology was ready.

All technology is launched before it's ready. Nothing would ever be launched otherwise. There's only so much testing you can do in an artificial environment - sooner or later you have to roll it out, monitor it, and the feedback is then used for improvements. The key skill is knowing when it's "good enough" to be launched.

Look at major Microsoft Windows updates and Apple phone IOS updates. The first launch never works fully - there are always glitches etc which are rectified in subsequent minor updates. These days most people realise they don't want to be "early adopters" and reject major operating system updates for a few weeks/months until the problems have been ironed out.

Look at airports - the first few holidays ( decade or so ago) where we printed our own tickets and boarding passes at home were a disaster as the machine readers at passport control/security could never read our bar codes, so ever single time, we had to go back to the check in to ask them to print old fashioned boarding passes. For the last few years, never had any problems like that at all. Problems were fed back and resolved.

Today's self service checkouts are generally a lot better than they were 2/3/4 years ago when they first rolled out. The well known problems of light weight items etc are being sorted, that's why different stores are better than others - some will have more modern equipment. Likewise the supervisory methods will evolve, hence the poster above mentioning a supervisor being able to "do their bit" from a remote station without having to physically walk over and swipe into each machine.

At the end of the day, the technology is in its' infancy. The next wave will already be in the pipeline which may remove the "physicality" of needing a scanner and light to read a barcode and needing scales to weigh the item - I think they're researching using transmitters/receivers instead of barcodes, so each item you buy can be scanned electronically using radio waves (like a chip in a dog or cat), maybe even grouped rather than individually, so your entire shopping bag can be scanned just by walking past a scanner which reads all the different items you have in it in a matter of a fraction of a second - scan your payment card at the same time, and you've "checked out" without even stopping.

Waitrose muse be better than average as people seem to choose the self-service even when it would be quicker to use the human cashiers. (When there are queues I always end up using the humans because I calculate the queue is shorter, and nine times out of ten I turn out to be right.)

I don't think my Waitrose has a "bagging area" message, I've never heard it.

Given I only buy one or two items at a time, the biggest irritation I have with the machines is the time take to print a receipt. 50% of the time I spend standing in front of the machine is waiting for this, either because the last customer has walked off without taking their receipt and I have to wait for the machine to be ready for a new customer, or waiting for my receipt when I've finished.

To be clear, it's not that human cashiers are quicker. I judge the queues on the number of people per available machine/till in each.

Same with bank cash machines when they first introduced the ability to scan/read cheques and cash being paid in. Years ago, to pay in, you stuffed the cheques/cash in an envelope and someone in the bank would later open the envelopes, count the contents and record the amount banked. Now, the machine does all that. At first, the machines were pretty crap - they made mistakes when reading the cheques, they rejected genuine bank notes, they miscounted bank notes, etc. I tried but gave up pretty quickly. For the last year or two, I used them all the time now and barely ever have a problem - the equipment is now more refined, the software improved, etc., so it works most of the time.

@Kazzyhoward That is only true because it is about profits. And it is why people hate self checkouts. Just as back in the day people used to moan about trolleys because they were awful.
Most people are not anti technology. They are anti crap technology which does not benefit them, and only benefits the company making a profit.
Interesting you talk about a decade ago scanners in airports never being able to read barcodes. Any of the automatic airport machines never seem to be able to read DPs passport. I have no idea why. They read mine fine, but we always need an actual human to process it for DPs. Annoyingly they always try his passport in the machine first after we have said it does not work, as if we are too thick to use it. Then they express surprise it does not work and let us go to an actual desk with a human to process it. Every single time.