In some places, they are making you subscribe to Walmart+ to use self checkout. Like, it wasn't just annoying enough, now if you don't have their subscription service, you have to stand in the extra long non-self checkout line. Can they make us hate it any more?

Yeah. Give a cashier a wage, or give me a staff discount.

Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!

Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it's normal now!

That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There's no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn't one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.

Exactly! Back in my day, people used to fill up my gas for me and carry my things up to my hotel room. Young people are getting lazy and entitled! Corporations need to make them work harder. Makes it hard to humiliate the poors if they make ME do the work.

I once asked a cashier in Germany if she thought self-checkouts would take away her job. She said she liked them because there's enough to do anyway and they take away the boring task of cashier-ing.

Do you feel the same about self serve gas?

I like them because it makes my bagging more efficient. At the lanes, if I'm getting a decent amount of groceries, I usually end up bagging for a while after I've paid and feel like a dick because I'm in the way of the people getting rung up behind me.

At self checkouts, I take it out of the cart, scan, then stick it right in the bag. Even better if they don't have the stupid weighing thing that assumes I'm trying to steal shit if they don't micromanage every item going into my bag.

Also, in this case, management is telling workers to not make fun of people who don't want to use self checkouts.

even faster if u skip some items from being scanned

When they are that rude and stupid they have it coming

I love it. Less social interaction after a long day of work, I can keep my headphones on. It's a bliss for me.

I like to have both. Self check out if I only have <10 items. But if I have a full cart I'd like to go to a cashier who has the scanning down to a T. I think this the best of both worlds.

How is saying I" don't work here" in response to the employee approaching them to direct them to the self-checkout - how is that harassing them?

We're you at a strip club?

i'm sure you use that zinger all the time

Self checkouts that just let you scan items without issue and accept payment are a nice enough idea for a bag or less of shopping, my problem with them is how they are implemented in reality (in Australia anyway). The first implementations I encountered I considered an useful addition but both the machines and the staffing changes due to them have steadily gone downhill in terms of user experience.

Instead of a quick painless experience you get a horribly touchy weight sensor which can't reliably handle particularly small items, particularly large items, or non-standard bags (and there are no longer standard bags due to plastic bag bans), a machine which demands assistant intervention at the slightest issue (and the assistants are understaffed so never arrive quickly), and when you finally get to payment it makes you click through an annoyingly slow interface to tell it you don't have a rewards card and don't care to donate to some charity before it will activate the card reader. To make things worse the manned checkouts are never staffed at a level - if any are even open - to cater for people with full trolleys so these end up clogging up the self checkouts (which have tiny bagging areas and are not intended to handle a trolley load) and making everything slower.

The icing on the cake is the self checkout treating you like a thief and throwing errors if the camera system thinks you didn't scan something in the trolley or letting off an alarm like you're trying to make off with something when you just want to buy a can of paint.

Ok boomer