Opinion of self-checkout lanes

[Santander]

They should be banned outright. They're eliminating a lot of entry level jobs--making it harder for people to enter the workforce to start with, but it's really annoying when you have 20 people at the self checkouts, and ten closed checkout counters.

Personally I think at least half of the counters should be required to be manned at all times for larger stores anyway.

So a 24-hour grocery store should have 5 checkout lanes open at 3am?

Life evolves. 100 years ago, there was no such thing as self-serve retail. Self-checkout is just the latest in a long history of retail innovation. Checking out itself will eventually become obsolete, and there's no point in resisting. Rowing upstream never works.

Not knowing what will happen is scary, but the fact is there's never been a better time to be alive.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I'm not opposed at hand (although I find the rationale of "cutting down the need for socialisation" rather troubling tbh, given the rise in mental health problems - at the height of my own isolated spiral during university, small talk with checkout staff almost felt like therapy), but it must be accompanied with something. I'm not opposed at hand to one of those robot tax ideas that are floated around occasionally - not to dis-incentivize auomation but to smooth over the transition. At the very least, you're going to massively increase further and higher education, and maybe even put into place a Yang style UBI.

[Badger]

They have their uses, but for large carts I prefer a checkout Clerk rather than having to take time to bag each item before the machine lets me continue on. Besides, there's always inevitably waiting around for a minute or two whenever I buy some beer and have to wait to get carded

[AN63093]

If you're the store owner, then obviously I can see why you'd prefer them, since they take up less space and you have lower labor costs.

For the consumer, they've been a complete disaster, and in fact, they are an excellent example of technology that was intended to make things better, actually making things worse.

In theory yes, they would be faster.  In reality, what happens is you often have a much longer line waiting to use the self-checkout area than the normal lines, even with customers that have full carts.  The problem is consumers are not fast enough with the machines, and there is usually only one attendant for the whole area (~6 machines, usually).  So what happens is you have customers fiddling around with produce codes, trying to find their item (or putting in the wrong code).  Customers waiting for an attendant to put in the code for beer or buying cold medicine.  Add in an old person that's completely befuddled with the machine, and the attendant has to stand there the entire time and basically do their whole check-out for them.

On top of that, the machines themselves are finicky- often they'll think you added something to the bag when you haven't, or will keep telling you to place the item in the bag (even though you already have).  And god forbid you want to try and use your own reusable bags, which no machine at any store I've ever been at can work flawlessly with.

Each one of the above issues will require an attendant to come over and do something.  So frequently you have the situation where 4-5 people are in the area waiting for the attendant to come over and fix some issue, and all the while the line keeps growing.

I actually was curious about this a couple years ago and started timing how long it took me to get through the checkout lines.. this was years ago so I don't remember the exact times, but it was like 90% of the time faster to go through the normal checkout line.  If you go to the self checkout area and see like 4-5 people in line, and then a normal line with just one person (albeit with a full cart), you will still get through the normal line faster 100% of the time.

[7,052,770]

I support Yang so that we can continue to have self-checkout lanes and other technological improvements without feeling any guilt.