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?!
As a customer, the only self checkout worth having is the kind you mostly find in clothing stores, where you dump all your purchases in a tub and RFID does it’s magic to detect all the items in a second. You pay, you pack, you go. Only once have I encountered it in a grocery store (REWE in Hamburg) and it works even with the fruits and vegetables! The printed label you get from the scale in the fruits and veggies section also has RFID ! Magic. All the rest is absolutely trash, it’s annoying and doesn’t saves time at all unless you have less than 5 items.