Check Yourself Out

Several months ago the grocery store which I go to all the time (the specific location, I mean, because even without a car I could be at five of this particular kind of grocery store within an hour and three are in the same town) installed three self-checkout units in their store. I loved the self-checkouts from the moment I tried one. Why? Because I often buy lunch at this grocery store while I am at work. I go in and grab three items, scan them all through in a few seconds myself and swipe my card and I'm in and out in a few minutes and I never have to wait in line. At least it was like that for the first few weeks. Until other people started using them.

At first there were a lot of weight errors from these people but that can mostly be blamed on an inherent flaw in the self-checkout system. In fact, there are several flaws with the self-checkout system I'd like to point out. People have no idea what to do with their baskets because there's no place to put them so they leave them on the first scale to cause problems for the next person. There should be a delay built into the message the machine gives when something is set on the second scale or placed into a bag that the machine feels is incorrect as the vast majority of the time after a couple seconds the item settles and it cuts off the message. The input for eco-bags should be much more obvious so people don't end up with weight errors from the bags. There should be blank areas in the carrousel so eco-bags can be loaded easily as the flat top of it is too high (especially for short people) and you can't load on the part with the plastic bags or it's uneven and you get weight errors. There should also be a super-obvious way to enter the PLU code of a produce item rather than going through the menus to find it. So yes, there are several flaws with the machines, and I just listed them so obviously they're not that hard to figure out and avoid.

Perhaps, I should have said before that all was going well until other people started abusing them. People had used them before but this was all in a very competent manner and there were three of those things so you never saw a line forming. But then, all of a sudden, it somehow became okay for all of these idiots to use the self-checkout. A perfect example of all the things not to do at the self-checkout presented itself to me the other day. I ended up having to go to a line with people in front of me and a actual human handling the transaction and it took me less time than it would have waiting at the self-checkout because of the people there. One of the people was trying to buy a big bottle of alcohol- something it should be obvious that you cannot do because, after all, there's no one there to check your ID and see that you're of age or remove the big lock thing on the cap. One of the other people had a giant cart full of groceries that they were running through the self-checkout which the poor machine is emphatically not intended for (not to mention the large signs posted that indicate that large orders should be taken to other registers). The person with the giant cart also had a bunch of produce items that they were many levels less adept at finding than a real cashier would be causing the process to take even longer. And at the third one there were two people puzzling out how to use the machine and the one in charge sent the other back into the store to collect some forgotten item while he and everyone else waited. Those two people then attempted to pay with cash instead of credit and while the machines are admittedly better at taking cash than a standard vending machine they still aren't nearly as good at that as they are at reading a magnetic strip.

WIC checks, cigarettes, alcohol, weight errors, eco-bags, produce flubs, EBT cards, using cash, leaving baskets or even carts, going back to get stuff, giant orders, leaving unwanted items on the scale, failing to take receipts and on and on and on. All things that could be avoided if these people made the sensible decision to allow at least a trained if not necessarily "professional" employee of the store handle their transaction instead of thinking (mistakenly) they can do it themselves. Self-checkouts should be reserved for people that can handle them because honestly I don't know how some of those people manage to check themselves out in the mirror in the morning and indeed some of them look like they don't even own one. And if you can't even check yourself out in the mirror perhaps you need to check yourself in somewhere (or have someone do it for you).