And it’s a little embarrassing when you’re a Self-Checkouts whose screen goes off and starts flashing, causing the janitor to come and leave you looking like a kid who got wrecked by a bus.
“Please can I continue to pay for my groceries”, you ask, the clerk replies “Okay”, so you can continue to do their work for them .
Is this thing there?
We are well over 20 years into the great self-checkout experience, and the results are a bit mixed, and customers are developing a love-calling relationship. The shop too. In recent years, chains like Costco and Albertsons have phased out self-checkouts and brought them back. Big Y did the same. All of these things must be confusing for robot accountants. Everyone is familiar with occasional stress. You bring your goods in for self-checkout under the idea of checking out quickly and avoiding negotiations, but the opposite happens. The scanner doesn’t detect or detect too much and it’s scanned seven times. He tells you to put the thing in the bag like the killer in Silence of the Lambs. Then he insists that there are things that are not fished there.
“Are you calling me a liar?”
you want to answer. At this point, your self-analysis gets frustrated and starts flashing like a slot machine, but you haven’t achieved anything. You show up to the lifeguard and stand there helplessly while Jeopardy guesses the music plays longer than it takes to get through the human slot. Because other machines have failures too. The attendant checks you in no time, checks your bags like airport security, and lets you go on your merry way. OK, OK, it’s not all bad.
Will you pay for this?
Security machines in stores.
In fact, one of the elephants in the room is a robbery, because you can walk the elephant on the autopay road without paying. Even “the unexpected in the bag area” will not stop him.
Many grocery stores continue to experience significant losses by promoting stores in self-checkout stores. Operators have all kinds of tricks: making steak look like a cheap product (known as “banana grass”), putting cheap wine labels on expensive products, or checking out and leaving without paying in full. Don’t even think about doing that, young man.
But losses are not the only result of theft, it is clear that most of us are bad with money. Customer errors also lead to losses (of course they blame us), people entering the wrong code or not measuring things correctly. Maybe the store could have some kind of human operator that checks the merchandise instead.
This is one of the reasons that most self-monitoring shows a camera two feet in front of you, showing your face. Bellagio is more subtle in its security. But, ironically, this feature can help unknowingly protect someone’s wallet when there’s no security screen watching you. Many customers resent the adversarial system. Some (me) don’t want to see the feeling on my face when I buy whiskey and red grapes after work. I’m fine with self-viewing – glitches and all – until the camera shows up. Do I still use them when I only have a few? It’s clear.
Stay here
Still, even with mistakes, thefts, and customer frustrations, don’t think for a moment that self-checkout is going anywhere. The cost of labor and the possibility of more active customers ensure that they are here to stay. The problem will be solved over time, and many stores are taking advantage of the opportunity to get closer to Amazon Go and change through self-checkout without money, which is clear and without problems.
So the basic question is this: you’re in a grocery store and the self-service line is longer than the human line, but it’s moving fast. What are you doing? You order a pizza and go home, that’s it.
