I prefer self-checkout. I'm fast and I don't really like small talk.
What really sucks is that modern self-checkout requires so much babysitting and cashier assistance, because they assume everyone is a criminal. The supermarket has become the panopticon.
The grocery store closest to me now has cameras on each self checkout register that are labeled as AI theft protection. In practice what that means is if you hover an item over the bagging area, even for a second, before scanning it it stops you and then plays the video of you “stealing” until the bored teenager making minimum wage comes over and just presses “continue” because they don’t give a shit and the line for the registers is like 10 people long.
It’s that long because despite having like 20 registers designed to be staffed by actual people they rarely open more than one because they fired most employees years ago. So now self checkout is basically the only option, even for people buying a months worth of groceries for a family of 8
I hate the future
Yep, exactly my experience at basically all the grocery stores near me.
Self-checkout used to be quick and easy, now it's just an exercise in patience and being treated like a crook.
I'm autistic so I really like self checkout but they've definitely gotten shittier over time. Many of the problems with them are really just the store itself being shitty and not self checkout.
You sound like someone who complains about pumping your own gas.
I prefer self-checkout, a lot faster. Especially when you can scan your products with your phone while shopping.
shop at aldi. the prices are better, a lot of the food is better, and you don’t give your money to kroger.
we switched to aldi and our grocery bill went down by 1/3 immediately. kroger sucks.
I like the ones where you scan the item while putting it into your cart much more. I can sort everything into my reusable bags right away. No needless shifting from the shelf to the cart to the cashier to the bag to the cart into the better bags in my car.
Only easier thing is when we order online and they put everything into sturdy baskets you can borrow instead of bags.
the Kroger corporation
There was your mistake. Kroger is a nightmare from dystopian hell.
It used to be a friendly place but no, that wasn't enough money for them.
Personally I love using the machines. I don't want to hear a clerk's personal opinions or comments. People have lost a sense of professionalism.
However. If you are going to only have 6 machines available, and people waiting for long periods, you need to give Self Check users a 10% discount for their hard work. Either that or have all 30 machines open at all times.
My local grocer is part of a small chain (3 locations, all in the same county). I know the owner by name, he's a regular at my restaurant. They don't have any self checkouts, just an express checkout and then 5 normal ones. It works out great. They've also got a State Store inside (where I live, only the State government is allowed to sell bottled spirits), which is a huge bonus. I went there yesterday since my vodka stash was running dry, and I needed to stock up on trash stickers for Spring cleaning. I picked up some cheese and buns while I was there. Had a chat with the butcher, small talk with the cashier, helped an old lady load her groceries into her car. It was a genuinely enjoyable, and very human, experience.
Contrast with the Walmart supercenter. They have 50 self checkouts, and just one manned register, which is only really used to buy age restricted products like cigarettes. I don't physically go there anymore because the checkout experience is damn near torture. It feels sterile, more like a warehouse than a grocery store. If I need something from Wally World, I get it delivered to my door, usually in an hour or less.
I get what I can from a grocery store chain in my area. They have three stores in the same county as well but they're part of an overall larger family of different named chains of a conglomerate if I remember right. They have no self checkout, and though the findings there are less than say Wal-Mart I'm not shopping at a big box store where the profits all leave the local area into some rich family's pocket.
One of the main reasons why I refuse to use self-checkout.
A few more reasons:
In some stores, gift cards, discounts, coupons, etc can't be used in self-checkout.
It's essentially making me do the job of the cashier for free. Fuck that noise. They want me to do it, they can pay me.
The line for real registers is sometimes a bit longer, but it tends to move much faster, because it's not full of a bunch of grandmas having their first experience with a robot accusing them of theft.
Gross germs all over the self-checkout machines, which I'm sure are never cleaned at all.
To you point 1: all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them (2) products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers (3) the grandmas tend to pay with cash, taking ages to search their wallets for red coins (4) you don’t want to know where those red coins have been.
all those cards etc are just provided to tie you in, to increase the margin of the store. Reject them
Nah, fam. I'm getting that 10% veteran's discount.
products will be more expensive in stores that use more expensive cashiers
All stores have at least some cashiers. At least, all the ones I ever go to.
And I'm going to need a source about those self-checkout stores being cheaper, because I sure haven't seen that.
Someone clearly isn't bothered by inane small talk. Check your privilege.
You have smalltalk at the cash register? All I say there is: ‘Hi!’ or ‘Good [part of the day]!’, cashier essentially repeats the same thing; the cashier scans groceries, I put them back into my cart, then when they’ve been scanned the cashier reads out the price, I pay, cashier gets ready to ask if I want a receipt, but I cut them off saying ‘I don’t need the receipt! Thanks, bye!’
One of my pet peeves has been stores blocking off half the self checkout except when there's high volume of customers. I didn't need to be waiting in line. You have perfectly fine self checkouts there, but no, I have to wait, and possibly walk to the other side of the store for no good reason.
Dude makes my blood boil, there's a store I go to very often near my house that ALWAYS has 4 of the 8 self checkout lames closed, and the one or two cashiers they have staffed also use the self-checkout stations, so it's completely fucked and idiotic. Sometimes there will be a huge line and still they never open the other 4
Yes, also these are the times when the people self checking in front of you are all the people in town who haveliterally never seen a barcode before in their life, so they spend 5 mimutes puzzling over each item.
Like shit man, shoce all your shit across at once, the checkout will get it. Moce move move.
I never had a problem with self checkout and like it very much that I don't need to talk to anyone or wait in line. Everywhere I go there's also the old checkout method so you can always choose
I like self checkouts but I'm not in the US so ours aren't garbage.
The only stupid thing I've seen is a certain hardware store where the self checkouts are closed 90% of the time, and there are only two normal checkouts, so you often have to wait in a huge line while the self checkouts just sit there, chained off and doing nothing. It's ridiculous.
At my local supermarket, I scan every product while I shop, then scan my phone at the self checkout terminal, and then walk out. The payment is via the app. My groceries are at this point either in the trolley, so that I can load them into my pannier bags on my bike, or if I came on foot, they're already in my backpack or in the shopping bags I brought with me.
So. Much. Better than queueing at a checkout counter and having someone scan my groceries and then having to handle them again.
How does this work with produce? It all needs to be weighed right?
There's a scale with a printer in the fruit and veg section. You weigh your produce and scan the barcode that comes out of the printer and stick it on.
Same with the Pfandautomat.
Now this is interesting. Based on your use of "trolley" I can assume you aren't from the US. Is there anything stopping you from throwing some extra items in the cart and walking out without scanning? I can't imagine this happening in the states unless they could ensure you pay every penny first.
U.S. definitely has that system. In the Boston area the stores called "Stop & Shop" have the handheld scanners. Or, you can use your phone. It's not 100% of their stores, but, most.
I personally like it. I usually have one canvas bag and buy no more than a handful of items.
I understand the complaints about self checkout and agree it's unfortunate that it cuts back on # of employees.
To each their own. Some folk prefer a bit of banter and the human touch.
Well, it is convenient if you have only like three items and in front of the regular checkout there is the mid-afternoon small-change-paying pensioner queue of doom...
All the criticisms of self checkout are valid. Can't argue against them.
However I've been kind of a fan since they first came out. Simply because I don't have to make smalltalk with a cashier.
I have to to deal with customers all day at work. Shopping is a chore I want to be over with without having to further drain my limited extroversion tank.
Used to be that way, now you have to awkwardly interact with someone who is explicitly checking to make sure you didn’t steal something.
Also cashiers stopped making small talk a while ago and started looking dead in the eyes when the major supermarket chains exploited them out of basic humanity.
2026 is brutal
Was this at a Kroger or related store? Their stupid self checkouts are over tuned and constantly bitch about not scanning even if it scanned. The Walmart ones, for example, do not, ever. Not vocally anyway.
I only use self-checkout if it isn’t annoying. Albert Heijn in the Netherlands has self-checkouts which are mostly quiet. You can scan your groceries there, or get a scanning ‘pistol’ at the entrance to do it beforehand. You are checked at random by underpaid 16-year-olds, the only real downside. This is really annoying when you’ve already packed your groceries, as they have to scan them all to see if it matches what you’ve scanned yourself. And those 16-year-olds as a result have to deal with annoyance and even aggressivenes by customers.
On the other hand, self-checkouts at the Lidl here (used to) show you on film and be overly loud, every step being explained at volume level 10. If self-checkout sucks this much, I’ll just wait in line at the normal cash register. I’m pretty sure it has improved there as well in the meantime, but I now go to the cash register at Lidl anyway.
This is the privileged opinion of someone who has never bought groceries in a country where they don't even come close to speaking the language, such as Slovakia.
UPDATE: This place doesn't have to become Reddit. We could simply choose not to do that. You can choose.
Why? 🤷
As someone who often doesn't talk during shopping, can you tell me why a language barrier is an issue? Only questions I get are cash or card, which is answered by my card in my hand, and receipt which is answered by me leaving without it
Only questions I get...
I believe you've answered your own question.
Nah, I’ve done that many times. You memorize a few phrases first just in case: “thank you,” “I don’t speak Slovak,” “do you accept card,” and you watch the cash register display to see how much it is, hold your card up to indicate your payment method, then you’re done.
You can even pay attention first and probably figure out if the cashier is asking people about a loyalty card ahead of time by seeing if they ask something in a bored tone of voice that most people say no to before the payment method determination, if you’re interested.
It’s a little uncomfortable to be surrounded by a language you don’t understand at first, but you get used to it pretty quickly. Obviously things like social anxiety can affect how you feel about it, but they also affect how you feel about those interactions in any language
To be fair, it was more like:
Poster: this has been forced on us, which is unfair (in a community for complaints)
You: check your privilege, some people have language barriers
Other commenters: this is how I get around language barriers/what language barriers do you encounter?
You: let’s not be Reddit
But is speaking necessary in a scenario that can be substituted by self-checkout?
My typical conversation during normal checkout is "Hi." - "Card, please" - "Bye".
Pretty sure I can learn those basics in Slovakian within less than a minute, but I doubt I even need to...
I don’t buy into the claim that self checkout is to save the grocery store money. They still need to have cashiers on staff and from what I’ve seen they all seem to have the same number of cashiers they did beforehand.
At the very least, I wouldn’t assume it saves money unless I saw some solid evidence to back that up.
Instead, I suspect the real reason is that self checkout can better handle large surges in the number of people trying to check out at the same time.
Wait til you learn how grocery stores used to be physically arranged...
I like self checkout because I steal from major corporations without fail. They will almost always just scan you in if you add something small and extra to your bag and the machine complains. Never been caught but if I am it must not have scanned. I don't work here. How would I know how to work these things?
it was until, chains started realizing people were just shoplifting, stores around me phased them out already.
I have literally never used self checkout without needing to wait and flag a person down to help fix the stupid machine.
A professional is about twice as fast as me in scanning groceries so I'm stuck there for twice as long as I need to be, with enough room to scan maybe 2 bags worth of items. If I have a trolley full I'm fucked.
It is a worse experience by every metric, and the worst part is you have no choice. I can't recall the last time I saw an actual human staffed checkout that wasn't a 12 items or less line.
Thé best self checkout is decathlon.
No scanning. Just throw everything in and you're done.
I've waited in register lines while people hurry through the self-checkout like lightening. I refuse to self-checkout unless there is an automatic 10% discount. My labour means something.
And my time is just as valuabke, probably moreso. I don't need to wait for some fumbling cashier to ask how my day was.
I've written about this before but it seems self checkout is very different in the US (and probably some other countries) from here in Sweden (and, again, other countries). A lot of people prefer it here and it's easy so to use and you rarely need to call for help. The descriptions in several of these comments about it requiring babysitting and cashier assistance was only a thing for a while when it was new about 20 years ago until the tech got better. Now it's rare to see more than one person, even in big stores, needed to help and they often do other things around the self checkout area because they are so rarely needed. I'm sure part of it is cultural, people in the US are definitely more prone to try to cheat it or do other things that forces the stores to have that babysitting.
Time to start scanning everything as bananas. Deodorant? No, this is a banana. Shove that 10 dollar parmesan in a 2 dollar head of lettuce.
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