7 ms·

Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifti

Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.

ralferoo 3mo ago
My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result. Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage. Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
- ValentineC 3mo ago
  > Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- fmajid 3mo ago
  And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
    Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up. I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised. I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers. It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
    - Eisenstein 3mo ago
      > I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
      - michaelmrose 3mo ago
        Home Depot self checkouts are large touch screens with a nice wireless gun. It doesn't even check weight. It is one of the least shitty SCO experiences unless you have a bunch of bolts and shit in which case why are you even in self checkout when they always have at least one physical register open? I don't understand why people do this.
        3mo ago
- dbdoug 3mo ago
  > you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
orangecat 3mo ago
Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot. (I find ways to make it worth my while..) If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
- saulpw 3mo ago
  Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
  - margalabargala 3mo ago
    The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
    - jordwest 3mo ago
      It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
  - senordevnyc 3mo ago
    The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
    - saulpw 3mo ago
      I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
      - 3mo ago
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
mhb 3mo ago
> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
- milesvp 3mo ago
  You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
  - mhb 3mo ago
    So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?
gib444 3mo ago
> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
- fmajid 3mo ago
  Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
  - gib444 3mo ago
    It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower [0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/financial-performance/five-year-record https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
satvikpendem 3mo ago
I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
_jackdk_ 3mo ago
I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.
- gblargg 3mo ago
  So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
  - _jackdk_ 3mo ago
    Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override. Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
    - gblargg 3mo ago
      Sorry, I was including time waiting in line at a cashier checkout. If there's no line, then it's faster if you've got a lot of items.
rmunn 3mo ago
Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
gblargg 3mo ago
I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
Telaneo 3mo ago
I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me. Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  Or you can go to a good supermarket with plenty of cashiers and no lines instead.
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    I'm yet to see one. There have always been lines at supermarkets, even when I was a kid. It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
    - carlosjobim 3mo ago
      If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
      - Telaneo 3mo ago
        > If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts. Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human. It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
mrweasel 3mo ago
I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  > A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
  - mrweasel 3mo ago
    Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes. It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      Understandable in your situation. > It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
EliRivers 3mo ago
(I find ways to make it worth my while..) I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.

ralferoo 3mo ago

My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result. Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage. Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.

ValentineC 3mo ago
> Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
fmajid 3mo ago
And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up. I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised. I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers. It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
  - Eisenstein 3mo ago
    > I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
    - michaelmrose 3mo ago
      Home Depot self checkouts are large touch screens with a nice wireless gun. It doesn't even check weight. It is one of the least shitty SCO experiences unless you have a bunch of bolts and shit in which case why are you even in self checkout when they always have at least one physical register open? I don't understand why people do this.
      - 3mo ago
dbdoug 3mo ago
> you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one

orangecat 3mo ago

Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot. (I find ways to make it worth my while..) If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.

saulpw 3mo ago
Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
- margalabargala 3mo ago
  The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
  - jordwest 3mo ago
    It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
- senordevnyc 3mo ago
  The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
  - saulpw 3mo ago
    I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
    - 3mo ago

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

mhb 3mo ago

> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?

milesvp 3mo ago
You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
- mhb 3mo ago
  So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?

gib444 3mo ago

> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.

fmajid 3mo ago
Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
- gib444 3mo ago
  It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower [0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/financial-performance/five-year-record https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...

satvikpendem 3mo ago

I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.

_jackdk_ 3mo ago

I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.

gblargg 3mo ago
So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
- _jackdk_ 3mo ago
  Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override. Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
  - gblargg 3mo ago
    Sorry, I was including time waiting in line at a cashier checkout. If there's no line, then it's faster if you've got a lot of items.

rmunn 3mo ago

Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.

gblargg 3mo ago

I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.

Telaneo 3mo ago

I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me. Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.

carlosjobim 3mo ago
Or you can go to a good supermarket with plenty of cashiers and no lines instead.
- Telaneo 3mo ago
  I'm yet to see one. There have always been lines at supermarkets, even when I was a kid. It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
    - Telaneo 3mo ago
      > If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts. Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human. It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).

mrweasel 3mo ago

I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.

Telaneo 3mo ago
> A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
- mrweasel 3mo ago
  Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes. It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
  - Telaneo 3mo ago
    Understandable in your situation. > It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.

EliRivers 3mo ago

(I find ways to make it worth my while..) I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.