I’ve worked in a supermarket for most of my adulthood. I can confirm that nobody likes the self checkouts. Least of all the staff. We’re supposed to be in eight places at once, monitoring for compliance, preventing shrinkage, helping with the exceptions. But the people using the checkouts haven’t been trained to, they’re customers, they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re going to compound it by making mistakes too.
When I started out, you had to be specifically till-trained to operate a checkout. Now they throw people on self checkout duty with no training and say “figure it out”. Customers hate it. We hate it. Store management had the bright idea of putting someone on “receipt checking” duty which went down about as well as you’d expect.
I said just put them on a till.
They laughed and said I “don’t get it”.
What is it?!
I personally prefer self-checkout when I’m at the grocery store, but I 100% agree about running the things. I was working at a grocery store when they first started rolling out, and there wasn’t any training on them back then. I am not at all surprised to hear that hasn’t changed. I distinctly remember the way the # of tills that needed help would seem to spike all at once, like one problem would cause another and soon you have four people all needing help with different things and being very unhelpful about it. Felt like playing a surreal game-show version of whack-a-mole for eight hours.