WTAF M&S self service tills for clothes??

[tinkywinkyshandbag]

Went to my local M&S today and was queueing for the checkout. A girl came up and told me to go over to the self service tills. They now only have two with staff instead of their previous six and the rest are self-service. What an actual pain! You have to scan fold and bag your own things while also juggling your shopping bags et cetera and they are really cut down on their returns period as well.
Feels like M&S are doing everything they can to make the shopping harder for their customers not easier! Am I alone in hating these tills?

I think all of my local Matalan tills are the same, its quicker now but not good if people have lost jobs.

It's been like this at my local Matalan for ages - such a pain trying to get the security tags off and fold the clothes nicely. I bloody hate the way all the shops are increasingly going self service.

X post Saffy

I work in a shop that is predominantly self check out.

I do hear the majority hate them but doesn't change anything. Unfortunately I think it is just going to continue

It’s horrible. I tried one in Pull & Bear. I miss the customer interaction we used to have. Worked in shops myself, loved chatting to customers!

My local M&S isn’t enormous, but it is in three floors. Frequently when I go there in the last couple of hours before closing there is nobody at all on the tills in one of the floors, and I have to go to another floor to pay. I might prefer a self-service version, as long as there is plenty of room to fold my clothes. I’m better at it than many of their staff, who (I was told) are not taught how to fold things properly anyway.

There are always lots of staff in the Food Hall so that must be where they are making their profit.

I hadn’t heard that the returns period had changed. It’s only 14 days for sale stuff, but it’s been like that for several years,

Well at least my clothes would be wrapped with care, and not scrunched into a bag

Not happened in my M&S yet but as others have said Matalan have been doing it for a while. I hate it. I feel as though I should have a job there. I rarely get through the checkout without having to call the staff member over to help as something doesn't work.

I definitely think M&S have made it harder to buy stuff from them, so much so that I gave up and just bought the jeans from eBay instead of them direct. But I’ve paid for clothes at the food hall self checkouts before so I don’t mind this. Only thing is what to do with the hanger if you don’t want to keep it?

OMG! I was just thinking the exact same thing. Finally get a day off without kids and went out for some me time & a bit of a shopping spree only to get to the tills and have to serve myself. It was so annoying and personally not what I expect when spending £300+ on a new wardrobe.

I feel really bad about this as eventually they’ll do away with most of the staff, and the few that will be left won’t know how to interact with people. Did Covid not teach us anything? People matter :-)

@Makemakee

OMG! I was just thinking the exact same thing. Finally get a day off without kids and went out for some me time & a bit of a shopping spree only to get to the tills and have to serve myself. It was so annoying and personally not what I expect when spending £300+ on a new wardrobe.

I feel really bad about this as eventually they’ll do away with most of the staff, and the few that will be left won’t know how to interact with people. Did Covid not teach us anything? People matter :-)

Couldn't agree more! People matter as does good customer service where you leave with a smile. Profits before customers.

I feel really sorry for the staff manning the self service tills - they are always going wrong and in our M&S food hall there's about 20 tills to one member of staff

Why does it matter if the stuff is folded?
Surely you wash before first wear so it's going straight in the machine.

I say no thank you when I'm offered a self service till. Life is too short to battle with my hearing and sanity on one of those bloody things.

I've always run clothes through the self service, you used to get a free decent carrier bag if you were putting clothes through. Although not now obviously. M&S seems to be the only shop that has decent self scan, there rarely seems to be issues. Tesco self scan however is always sulking, even the new fancy pants tills that show pictures of every item.

Uniqlo in my local shopping centre has individual plastic bucket things. You literally just chuck the clothes in. It magically reads the prices and the amount you owe comes up on the screen and you pay. I actually like it but I get the annoyance re. Scanning each item in M&S

I came on to say how much I Iove Uniqlo self service too!

At least they get folded properly if I do it

Rotten for the staff as they need less of them with self service tills

Does this mean they've done away with security tags that need removing?

Perhaps they've weighed up the cost of increased shop lifting against the savings to be made by less customer facing staff on tills?

Well they had staff standing around making me use the self service - this was a weekend day and barej

It's a shame but proper customer service has gone down the toilet in most places. It's all about profit now.
I worked for a well know supermarket for years and when I started it was always very heavy on " The Customer is King". We had to run around like idiots bowing and scraping, making sure no customer was kept waiting 10 seconds etc etc. Fast forward 15 years and there's just no customer service anymore. All they are interested in is the profits and they no longer give a shift about the staff. Used to be a great place to work!!

Sounds perfect, imo. I would always choose self service over a human checkout assistant anyway. I don’t want to have to make polite small talk with a random stranger!

I want my purchases beautifully folded and wrapped in tissue paper!

... which is what I get at our local John Lewis

That's horrible. I always make a point of refusing when they direct me to them and go to the till instead.