this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Burn down the self chechouts
Hell no. They're a godsend. Don't have to interact with people and I get out of the store in way less time. And you don't have a person standing behind you waiting for you to pack your shit.
If they made some system where you could buy booze with some sort of pre-authentication tied to whatever that approved you then that'd be perfect
You must not buy a lot of produce, gift cards or otc medicine; the self checkout is slower every time I have to buy any of these things and it’s given some companies (cvs, Walgreens) a reason to make their employees who would otherwise be working the register do other things and leave the front of the store almost completely unstaffed every time I go in there. Now I have to use a self checkout to buy something I know they need a person there for and then stand around like an idiot waiting for the cashier to come and assist.
If it’s a grocery store and I have even a moderate amount of produce, I don’t have the codes memorized and there’s no bar codes on it, so I have to find everything I’m buying on their checkout machine. Something else inevitably doesn’t scan or the bagging area detector freaks out about something and then I have to completely stop what I’m doing and wait for an employee to come and scan their card.
It has made it a lot easier to steal things though and with the terrible experience that comes with these things, I’m not far from doing.
Produce I buy a lot and it's pretty quick to do them, put on the scale, find the item, press the button, done. Not much different to how you would weight them, press the button, put on the sticker and then get it scanned/scan it. Sometimes I have a brainfreeze trying to find where the produce is on the menu but I also have brainfreezes about the scale number so evens out.
Gift cards and medicine, no I don't think I've ever bought either from a store. Gift card maybe but it was before the machines.
Oh, I guess our produce checkout system is different; that definitely seems like more of a 1:1. For the grocery stores in my area, we just bag up what we want and the cashier puts in the code and weighs it up at checkout time. It’s much faster for them to do it since they usually have the codes memorized or at least know where it is on their cheat sheet.
Here you normally weigh it yourself. There's a scale near the produce that has a number pad and you press the corresponding number. The number is mentioned in the price listing for the item and sometimes by an icon. Press that and you get a sticker you put on the produce or the bag. Nice for checking out weight/cost too. So it's very similar to the self-checkout yeah, just without the sticker.
Lidl is different, they do it at the checkout. Don't like it myself since I have to be on watch they get it right, sometimes I would've paid a lot more.
Gift cards are a scam.
Do your grocery store's checkout have a search by name? Mine can search by name and have a picture of every produce.
For OTC, i dont see how its a problem unless you buy age restricted stuff?
They may have a search by name, but by the time I hit the produce button, then the search by name button and start keying in the name, a cashier could have rung up two things.
For OTC it happened the other day, just to buy NyQuil at cvs.
I mean... thats because the cashier memorizes the codes because they do it hundreds of times in a single day. You could do it equally as fast too if you knew the codes too.
Ah yes, stuff like nyquil is ussually age restricted...
Yeah, that’s my point; I’m never going to memorize those, so I’ll never be as fast as a cashier.
Eh. Thats only a minor issue imo. The real issue is they provide no room to take items from the cart, scan and bag it and keep it in the bagging area. After 2 bags, the area is full. Why dont they have carts stationed there so you just transfer from one cart to the other?
Another issue I have is the machine scans a barcode that is not a 'product' barcode and you cant clear it yourself. You need an attendant to clear it. Thats very annoying.
Ah yeah, both good points. The bagging areas are always too small and badly positioned.
We buy most of our produce at Costco or something, where we avoid the self-checkout. At the grocery store, we'll usually only get a couple produce items and the rest will be stuff we can't reasonably get at Costco, like snacks, drinks, etc, and most of those have bar codes. If we have a bunch of produce or a full cart in general, I'll get the cashier, but 9/10 times, we'll take self checkout since it's faster.