Another self-service till one!

[cologne4711]

Today I walked into my local town centre. Waitrose and Sainsburys both had massive queues so I went into M&S, where I can get most of the things I wanted to get. They've just installed some new self-service tills with screens inbetween etc. All lovely social distancing measures. So far so good.

Until I tried to buy some icing sugar. ONE packet. M&S has a limit of two, apparently. Fair enough. EXCEPT that it decided to call an assistant over when I only had one.

Come on M&S why are you doing this? If I can buy two, let me buy one or two and call someone over only if I try to buy three or more.

(the till had not registered more than one)

What is the point of putting in social distancing measures if you then end up having to call someone over to help anyway?

This is such a non-issue. As Mippo says, you just move to one side if a member of staff has to sort something out on your till. It may have been momentarily irritating, but it certainly doesn’t warrant any more headspace.

The settings on self scan tils mean they cannot flag up quantity. The till flags up the item like it would for an age restriction because its a machine it cannot make the decision without a person.

Just move out the way for the member of staff. It's not hard to do

Sainsbury's self service tills don't notice if you buy more than the stipulated amount

In my store our self scan software cannot be changed at a store level for temporary item limits due to the logistics of reprogramming it for every single item we sell in every single variety, eg if we have a limit of 3x milk we would have to set every combination of brands/sizes/type etc and it would be hundreds of combinations - and that's just one item.

To get round this, anything left on the small list of items that are still limited is flagged on the system so that instead of having to rewrite the whole software, a colleague can quickly visually verify the number being bought does not exceed the limit and you can be on your way in a matter of seconds.