https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-costco-kroger-facing-self-checkout-reckoning-2023-10
Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.
Praxis
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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This is the biggest failure by far of self checkouts. PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN BAGGING AREA UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA PLEASE RING UP EVERYTHING THE BAGGING AREA PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN'T TRYING TO STEAL REPEAT FOREVER BECAUSE YOUR CART IS FULL OF 2 WEEKS OF GROCERIES FOR A FAMILY
It's extra funny in my location too because a tax on plastic bags means most people bring their own bags, but if you put your own bag in the bagging area it yells at you because it thinks you're trying to steal and won't let you do anything. So mostly people just pile everything unceremoniously in a giant grocery heap in the "bagging" area and then spend another 5 minutes reloading their cart and bagging everything.
Self checkouts are great when you have a couple of small things but they're absolutely the peak of inefficient bullshit for any regular sized grocery shop. They're one of the reasons why grocery shopping for me went from "a task I enjoy" to "a task I talk about in therapy". They have become anxiety zones.
Funny enough, this generates so many false positives that none of the workers I've seen even bother to check anymore. It's just "Oh, the screen locked up again, I'd better get that"
For minimum wage I'm barely being paid enough to unlock the robot. I'm definitely not being paid to care about theft, and if they wanted me to care about lost revenue they could give me shares in the company so I have an incentive to care.
One time I saw a customer stealing at the self checkout but I wasn’t in a mood to approach them, but I had to configure the machine next to them. Security guy came up to me a few hours later and congratulated me and said he saw me “combatting theft on the camera earlier.”
I never confronted the customer and they left with everything without paying, so I don’t even know what crack that security guy was smoking.
Based
IIRC when I worked retail/grocery you're always told to never engage, but make your presence known (how that will stop someone stealing, I dunno.)
maybe theyll get spookified
And the thing is they're just fine if you're at one of the rare stores where it's not clearly geared to assume every customer is stealing every product, but then you go buying something in an area that's lower income and suddenly it takes 20 minutes to buy 3 things because the system is too busy screaming at you to drink the verification can to let you scan anything.
Not even the machines. I worked at a grocery store that was in a predominately black and Hispanic neighborhood. Most of my managers were black as well, but I’m Asian lol. They would come up to tell me they think some random customer is stealing or might steal just because they’re checking out a family’s worth of food at the self checkout.
They tell me I should approach them and ask them for help just to keep an eye out and to check their receipt. I’ve been yelled at many times for singling out customers like that and the managers just say “good job bro”
The only store I've been to without a fussy self-checkout is a pretty large euro-style grocery chain in North America. Their attendants are usually also attending to a standard check-out, so they don't even walk over. If you click the help button, they'll just void the last item you scanned lol.
Europeans are evil. But at the very least they demand some quality of life for themselves. Americans are made miserable and will threaten to kill your family if you suggest things don’t have to be this way for them.