Tuesday
Sep182012
Five reasons the self-service checkout is a false convenience
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 9:26AM 
On its shiny, robotic surface, the self-service checkout looks like the quicker, more efficient option if you’ve only got a few items in your basket. But, be careful, because there are irritations aplenty lying in wait. Here are five reasons why it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
- Your handbag/shoulder bag keeps falling off every time you lean down to add something to your bags. Very annoying.
- Putting your fruit and vegetables through the self-service feels horribly like being back at primary school. The machine asks you to look through the listings of fruit, with photographs, and click on the image that matches the real-life fruit you’ve got in front of you. “Well done, human, yes that is a lime, you may continue,” it might as well say.
- That moment, on a tired day, when you search through all the listings and you can’t find the picture of a courgette. You simply can’t see for looking. And a member of staff comes over and finds the image in two seconds, and presses continue, and you feel a royal idiot.
- There’s never enough space in the ‘bagging area’, so you place one full bag on the floor to make way for another – only for the machine to fly into a panic and eventually malfunction. There’s no need to call for help; the machine is sending maniacal audio-visual signals to everyone in eyeshot.
- The verification required for umpteen bottles of booze, plus the help you need when the machine malfunctions, means you’ve had more contact with members of staff than you would have had to endure at the bloody real-life checkout.
Reader Comments (5)
I was just debating with some people over the weekend on whether self-serve at grocery stores is a good thing or work of the devil. I'm in the former camp but you raise important issues...
How about:
They screw people out of jobs (OK maybe not very exciting jobs but jobs is jobs)
They make us (the customers) do the work that we're paying for. Which is almost like theft.
They're no quicker than humans. In fact, probably slower than humans. But they give an apparent justification to get rid of humans, which actually slows everything down, but costs the supermarket less. Will we the customer see those savings? Don't be daft.
However, everyone one of us who has a bank account, insurance, pension etc will own shares in large supermarkets. Therefore in its our (indirect) interest for supermarkets to improve their profits. So, what to do?
Is the trick to avoid them then to always present a bottle of booze first? Or do the staff then bugger off again after?
(BTW Waitrose made it easy, don't know why the rest couldn't have imitated their system.)
Thank you. I hate, detest and loathe these dreadful machines. When one admonishes me with 'unexpected item in bagging area', I yell at it: 'Yes, it's a bag. That's why it's in the bloody bagging area.'
Why would anybody want to endure the humiliation of being ticked off for being stupid, suspected of thievery or, worse, found talking to a machine? The stress is just not worth it.
Such is their ubiquity (and the corresponding shortage of manned check-outs) that queues form to use them, but these are 'virtual' queues by necessity, as each queue has to cover four machines. Another nightmare to deal with - queue-jumpers.
Sorry. Rant over.
Fantastic if you've a klepto streak and a yen for organic fruit and veg