Comment by whatever1
5 days ago
Similar example in the grocery stores with the self checkout. In the past if the employee did a scanning mistake, worst case the manager / customer would be mad.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
Well, even without exaggeration - if the employee made a scanning mistake, most of the time they (or the customer) would notice during or immediately afterwards, so the employee would just hit undo or scan a negative or such, and carry on.
No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.
Do they ever actually analyze the situation? In my experience they just ignore any issues and hit "approve" and on you go. I could have done that myself.
It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.
I'm sure plenty of things get by them this way.
Some times I'm curious to see how stores work at the US nowadays.
My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).
Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.
Between Costco/Target/Winco/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Kroger/Uniqlo, my experience is that I can check out quicker than before. I rarely have to wait for assistance, which itself is rarely needed.
I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.
For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.
> Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
If this happens, it’s a problem with the judicial system, not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened, though.