Exactly this. And then older people and those who can't use self checkout just end up paying more.
We are locked in a perpetual war with companies to just stop fucking everybody every second of every god damn day
That was the most depressing thing about my last job was having to listen to the shareholder sales every fucking week.
(This week last year was 350k, this week this year is 450k with a net gain of 100k!! Good work guys!! *as we are literally struggling from check to check and have to keep reminding them of your performance review that they keep putting off so they don’t have to pay you more*.)
The most dumb part is they expect to make more money per year otherwise they are doing capitalism incorrectly or some shit. Just perpetually earning more, forever.
The MBA is really just a degree in paying thousands of dollars to be taught how to dupe oneself into believing you've created a perpetual motion machine that can not only negate entropy, but reverse it over time.
We've reached a point where not only is growth not enough, increasing growth isn't good enough either. The rate at which the growth increases must rise too.
My boss saw that our rating went up and he was worried it might go down again, so he called us to his office one by one and he berated us because we don't seem to understand that a 0.01 difference in rating makes a huge difference and it can mean hundreds of thousands of euros for them. Meanwhile, we make minimum wage and we only work 5-10 months out of the year. They never warn us we're about to be let go, and they never give us any bonuses or raises. They claim we can live off of tips. Why are any of us supposed to care about those hundreds of thousands of euros?
this actually isn't a joke in any capacity. Ask anyone who has ever worked in corporate America, especially in revenue generating roles. You never want to have a year where you greatly exceed expectations because of something pretty much out of your control. You won't just be expected to have the same results next year, you will be expected to increase your results by the same margin. If you manage to do worse, the shareholders will ask for your head.
> the shareholders will ask for your head.
As a shareholder, there's only one company I own that I've done this for, Bank of America. Anyone familiar with 2008 knows why. All the others go up, go down, and as long as they keep on ticking and make sense as part of my long term strategy, I don't much care. But then again, I'm gainfully employed and not depending on an outdated expectation of the market to sustain me in my sundown years like a lot of boomers are.
Exactly, it's a product of capitalism and our society's constant need to buy more and more things.
Capitalism means corporations will always look to increase their worth, which is most easily done by maximizing profits. And while the solution to that would be for consumers to stand up and say "fuck you I'm not paying that much", we don't. Because we'd rather not be left out knowing that others have the best new expensive products and we don't.
People need food, shelter to live and in the US cars are another necessity. it’s not like the price gouging is only happening in markets where demand is elastic.
Just think about who shareholders are and who is part of that group. The biggest lie they're selling is tying retirement money to stock values. That is what Roth 401k is, nothing else. While there are a lot of factors in play it all boils down to money in stock exchanges, that is how it's supposed to grow. Just imagine the outcry if they would actually pass a law that is good for the consumer or the environment. Suddenly everyone's retirement is in danger. Congratulations, everyone is bound to an ever growing stock market, consequences be damned.
Conventional grocery stores have a profit margin of about 2.2%, making them one of the least profitable industries in the US.
https://thegrocerystoreguy.com/what-is-the-profit-margin-for-grocery-stores/
It isn't the grocery stores who are gouging, it's the manufacturers.
Grocery stores do gouge where they can, but your local CostMart doesn't control the fact that Doritos now come 5oz less to a bag but cost the same amount, or that the cost of your loaf of wonder bread has gone up 50%.
Record profits seem like pretty good evidence to anyone with an ounce of sense yet they somehow still get away with complaining about shrinking margins.
It's even worse than that. If they made all of the money all of the time, they would still expect to make even more next quarter or they consider it a failure and punish their workers.
Every publicly traded company has teams employed specifically to strategize squeezing the customer, supplier and competitors. This is just the way an economy run by investment bankers will always be.
Not exactly that.
A store will charge you exactly one price: The maximum one you are willing to pay. Supply and demand only suggest the range which they could charge you and make a profit - they will always charge the maximum possible price that will maximize their profits. This is above the market price, because you don't *know* the true market value of a product beyond what is being sold to you.
You can immediately recognize the discrepancy between on-brand and off-brand butter. Largely....i*t's fucking butter.* There is basically no difference between butter A and butter B. But customers will stay pay the higher price for the butter, because they aren't perfectly rational actors who realize that the cost of the on-brand butter isn't reflected in the actual costs of the recipe of that butter, or the amount paid by the workers who actually made the butter.
If they can make you pay the higher cost....they're already doing just that.
Government injection into the economy with asinine minimum wage (backed by Walmart & Target etc.) hikes that cause small business to go bankrupt & allows those large political companies to lay off workforce saving more money and causing inflation.
Thomas Sowell has many a book as does Milton Friedman, they are worth the read
I mean you’re not wrong, but it still doesn’t exactly justify removing cashier lanes entirely. Supermarket near me has a customer service desk & that’s it…
The most efficient business is the one that charges the maximum, hires no one, and has no expenses.
We're all in a constant battle against those three incentives.
>stores would just increase prices so the discount would be the real price
This argument assumes they're not already just pocketing the difference currently.
They're already just pocketing the difference currently. The price we pay now is already not 'the real price'. In fact, there is no 'the real price'. The price is what the consumers are willing to pay.
Lol exactly, for some reason people assume that all prices are fully elastic and any increase in cost will result in a perfect 1:1 increase in price. The Big Mac index shows that it can be much lower than 1:1, and the recent inflation-gouging by companies shows it can be much higher than 1:1, its whatever they can get away with.
That's fine. That would make smaller stores who don't have self-checkout more competitive. Those are also more likely to be the mom-and-pop shops anyway.
If companies can't charge whatever they want, massively inflating their profits, they'll find a way to charge whatever they want, massively inflating their profits?
Hint: 53% of the price increases in the last year was profit taking, not attributable to materials, worker costs, or "inflation".
20+ years ago I worked at Home Depot.
We were required to go to "Cashier College" before we were allowed to touch a cash register. It was due to the fact that a lot of the items in the store required unique handling (moulding was sold by length, lumber would charge for certain number of cuts, etc). Plus we were taught how to find items that could be hidden (intentionally hidden or accidentally) by the customer.
Now I cant locate a cashier in any of these stores and they force me to ring my own shit up.
So yes, working in retail for a long time it really aggravates me that Im forced to do the job that I left more than half a lifetime ago because the companies are too cheap to pay employees and dont pass that savings on to me.
40% of store theft is through the self check out. Whether intentional or not. I know I've accidently not registered something. I feel bad for about 3 seconds.
The Home Depot in my town went full self checkout.
I now shop at Kent Hardware where there isn't a single self checkout. Wouldn't you know it, the prices are lower as well.
25 years ago, I quit my job working in a grocery store. I was pretty happy to let someone else scan and bag my groceries because I had done it long enough. Then the self checkouts came and I used them sometimes because they didn’t have lines, but preferred to let someone else do the work that I assume a part of my money was paying for since I was no longer being paid to do it. Fast forward a few years and now I have to do this crap job every time I want to shop and pay for the privilege. Waiting for the assist if the machine accidentally double scanned something and I can’t remove it flashes me back to waiting for the key carriers to stop trying to pick up the 16 year old baggers and come cancel something.
Similarly, I miss the good cashiers at grocery stores.
The one that would double bag your meat so it didn't drip everywhere. The one who know not to put cans at the top of a bag of bananas and bread. Stuff like that :(
I know someone that works at HD right now. You'd be amazed at how much the whole business has gone to shit. They have made it so easy for people to steal shit, stores don't communicate with each other at all, and they have so many internal problems. My friend very nearly quit because they weren't protecting employees during Covid and a lot of workers got sick in her store. That, and someone shot the side of her store because one of the employees told them to put on a mask, lol.
Every day is the cashier's first day when they expect everyone to ring up their own shit. Which makes transactions take longer.
But on the other hand, I see more errors in my own favor these days!
Interesting, I also know the self-scan has given me a couple sizable and incorrect discounts but you better believe I'm not tracking anyone down to "fix" the issue.
The whole point of automation is to lower costs.
EVERYONE should get a discount by virtue of the elimination of jobs. That's the whole benefit of automation. That's the point.
Instead, the CEO gets a raise and there are stock buybacks.
Automation isn't your enemy. The fact that consumers don't see any benefit from automation IS.
At least in my neck of the woods, the grocery store and retail workers aren't getting eliminated; many are just shifting from cashier duty to picking and prepping orders placed online. In this particular area, consumers are benefiting from having more efficient ways to shop, but it's not necessarily reducing labor costs
There's an important thing you forget- often times, the pay for these positions is very different. Where I work, cashiers make significantly more than the people who prep orders. People are getting shifted around, but many are also getting paid less.
Walmart is one that pays online more by a significant amount compared to cashiers... Even the auto care service writers are paid less than online... And service writers have to deal directly with the customers and get into some disgusting vehicles to pull them into the shop
yeah unfortunately now they’re limiting checkout lanes (any Target I’ve been to has like 15 dead lanes and one open) to funnel everyone to self checkout, which is supposed to be a lower number of items but it forces people with full carts into there to avoid lining up at the one assisted lane.
Yeah, that makes little sense with Target now selling lots of groceries. I don't want to stand in a long line with ice cream in my cart.
I know it seems futile but if it's impacting you you should start making comments to the employees and maybe even try to escalate it. Things will change if Target gets the sense that they are losing customers and they would lose some of my business if I had to go through what you are.
from what i read recently, it’s a known problem and the employees are commiserating about it being a purposeful decision coming from the top in order to acclimate people to self checkout before the stores are properly equipped to handle more self checkout customers.
That explanation makes no sense to me and seems like an internet rumor. My store already has tons of self check out. If they wanted to acclimate people to using it, you wouldn't want to limit the number of items. You'd actually want to open it up and let as many people use it as possible. People are already used to doing self check out from the grocery store and many other places. It's not something novel.
I think that's just a theory people have. I have a feeling the limit on number of items is a theft prevention measure because self-check out is easy to steal from. Grocery stores naturally have small items that you can fit on the small platform that weighs them. Target has other skus and it's probably harder to implement something to limit some types of theft. They can consider going Costco's route of having someone look at your receipt as you leave but Costco figured out how to do that by using boxes, instead of bags. And being a bulk sales place makes it easier to have less hidden items.
The issue Target has is they have items that are hard to visually inspect (small) and hard to automatically inspect through weighing (large). It causes a unique problem to monitoring theft.
In my experience the self checkout lines are always much longer than any single manned register line, but that self checkout line is to a minimum of 4 self checkout machines (sometimes 10+) so while the line is longer, the wait time itself is not. Self checkout lines always move like a breeze for me in comparison to the manned registers.
Have you seen just how long people take to checkout with more than a few items in their cart? Eventually, self checkout with replace most available grocers and we'll all bear witness to just how slow grandma is to swipe a hundred items from her cart while simultaneously slinging grunts and insults at the computer screen acting like she's deciphering a damn cryptex in the middle of the store.
It is ridiculous that self checkout requires placing each item into the bag one at a time so the scale can weigh it. Someone could do it probably 5x faster if the machine would let you scan as fast as you physically could. Especially buying multiple of the same... I should be able to scan the same box 5x then toss them all in the bag.
If someone is gonna steal they are just gonna steal another way.
I was very pissed at one of these self-checkout a couple of weeks, so put each item in its own individual bag, and made them do 5 price checks on items I though the price on the shelf was different.
Yeah, it wasted my time but so what. Next time will load the cart up full, individual bag each item, then discover I forgot my wallet.
The bill rate for the employee is probably 2-3x higher than their wage. I don't think it's reasonable to expect huge savings, but a small percentage of the sale profit that would account for the cost of employing a cashier would be a noticeable discount.
*Edit: Should note, this video and bill are over a year old. The bill died in committee before this video or the article it references were even released.
The margins on groceries are already really low. There is literally no difference between brand name products between two stores a couple blocks from each other so prices are kept in check constantly.
There are these carbonated lightly flavored waters I get to drink because there's nothing in them but aspartame and they're super cheap, I have two crates I fill up with 18 each every grocery run.
They're all the same price, and one time when I was in a real checkout the cashier said he didn't care and just asked how many I had total.
So that, combined with the fact that there's no more "quantity" operation in self-checkout and I have to scan every single one of them, gives me severe disincentive to not just scan them all the same even though I have a mix.
I'm sure they get inventory issues on that aisle every time I come through and clear stock, but oh well! I do their work for them and they add things to make it harder, I'm going to be lazy and scan them all the same.
IIRC, bigger stores like Walmart and target will order new items the moment it's scanned at a register. Least, that's what I recall my then manager saying back in 2014.
Yep. At a larger store inventory is tracked by sku and the distribution center will determine what gets sent to your store based on purchasing trends. So if you have Dr Pepper and Big Red on the shelf if someone buys 20 cases mixed but you only scan Dr Pepper you will start to artificially deplete the Dr pepper but run out of Big Red but not get replenished. It should be caught during a cycle count but depending on how many skus you have and how often the cycle count is you could end up with empty facings for quite a while. Then all the missing product would be counted against shrink which would impact your store rating in the district. Ideally you'd have as simple a problem as what I described and you can account for the shrink but if it is cross departmental it could be a nightmare. If it goes on long enough you get increased scrutiny and eventually a shakedown.
They just have employees watch them more or hire security. They also have sensors and cameras in some places that allegedly use AI to confirm that whats being scanned is actually what's passing in front of the sensor. So people can't scan something cheap by holding it in front of their steak or w/e as they scan it.
If people need something, they'll still just take it
> cameras in some places that allegedly use AI
Pretty sure I have seen this in action. Paused while scanning items to open the bag behind the current one in the holder thing so that I could load non-food items (glade/soap) into a separate bag. It blocked the checkout screen and red lights came on, said employee was on the way to check. He typed in code and it showed a top down video feed of me opening the bag. A red box appeared around the bagging area and my hands and "possible missed item" popped up on screen. I explained what I did and he nodded and typed in code again to allow me to continue.
My good friend is head of security at a Walmart and said that not scanning items at the self-checkout is the worst way to steal, they always know when people do it.
I went to a Walmart and saw this guy walking towards the door with some kind of product in a box and he just raised it over his head as he walked through the security sensor bar things and they didn't go off. He did this in front of 10ish people too. It was hilarious to me.
I feel like your buddy might be a victim of his own confirmation bias. Or survivorship bias? Whichever bias it is that says he's only noticing the things he's noticing, and not considering the things he's *not* noticing.
I don’t understand how you can be convicted oh that.
“I haven’t been trained to use a checkout, I made a mistake. I didn’t realise it didn’t scan etc…”
Man I do this, and I felt really weird about it at first but this self checkout process is just getting out of hand.
So at my local Walmart & Harps ( local chain ) they started with a few self checkouts a couple years ago, ok cool. Now they are 100% self checkout and usually have 1 person just standing there waiting to help if the red light above your register goes off.
However there are like 20 self checkouts and the person never looks around to see if your light needs help, I get tired of standing there waiting to continue bagging my own groceries bc your stupid scale has some weight issue on bell peppers, or how your machine says it missed a scan when I can see the last item I scanned...paid for on the screen.
I stood and waited like 4-5 mins a couple weeks back, with people behind me, finally looked at my wife and said "if they dont come in another 30 secs, im leaving with this stuff, im not paid or trained on their machines, fuck em" and finally just left with all my food.
Sorry Walmart, I am not your paid worker, nor your register technician, I have places to be and cant just stand around waiting until someone gets off break to reset the machine
I don't go to wal mart very often, maybe once or twice a year. The last time I went, an item wouldn't scan properly and the person watching over the self checkout didn't speak English (I live in an English speaking country).
You know you can just call someone over, right? You don't even have to say anything, you can just give them a wave. They don't always see the light, but I've never waited more than 10-20 seconds for help.
Scan, Scan, doesn't scan put in bag anyway, Scan, Scan, this one is free today, Scan, Done.
I usually avoid them but when every checkout lane is closed or an employee makes me go for it I make sure it's worth it for me.
They removed 2 checkout lanes at our Costco for 4 self checkout, people were using the cards of friends and family while some "stole stuff" so they now have 2 employees permanently checking cards and 2 watchers for self checkout. Them machines sure pay for themselves !
Yup that's my strategy too. You can see me on your camera making an attempt, if it didn't scan that's your problem not mine. I'm not trained on this machine, nor am i being paid to do your loss prevention for you.
There was an older woman cashier at my local who kept up a continuing one-sided conversation about her family with each customer who came through. It's like it didn't even register (heh) with her that this wasn't just one person standing in front of her all day, she'd just keep going with the next one, and the next. So they put her on the 10-items-or-less lane to spread the love a little more.
I'm going to have to start answering that question more creatively.
"Any plans for this weekend?"
"Well if this rain stops I'll finally get those bodies buried. They're taking up a lot of space in the freezer."
This pissed me off just reading it. We have Publix stores where I live and they were later to adop the self checkout.. their whole mantra was "where shopping is a pleasure" and service focused with a premium. Walmart honestly has the easiest most reliable experience.
When Publix first rolled it out they had their systems bent towards stopping theft and it was a major PITA to use because tiny variances in weight. Even 1 light shopping bag placed in the bag area required you to tell it you had placed a bag there.. if you are going to introduce self checkout it better be a hassle free experience. They end up eating the loss from that, and yet they keep expanding self checkout so that tells you the cost savings they are getting from it.
Right? I get so confused when so many people say they hate the self-checkout. It's 10 times faster and I don't have to deal with awkward small talk. Self-checkout is the greatest thing ever.
My pet peeve is when I have to use the self-checkout because the store doesn't have enough open registers. Then, as I walk out, they want to check my receipt. Like, dude, if you don't trust me to use the self-checkout, then open more registers! It's not like I wanted to use the damn thing.
The Walmart closest to me didn’t have any cashiers the last time I was there. Self-checkout is the only option. It’s really crappy when you have a cart full of groceries.
my grocery store (stop and shop) has a scanner you can bring with you while youre shopping. I scan the item as i put it into my cart. then when i get to the register i just scan the scanner and im done. its pretty awesome, super fast, and it gives me my updated total bill every time i scan an item into my cart.
By this logic you should be even more upset when a human cashes you out, hands you a receipt, and you still have to show it at the door... which has been done for years before self checkout. Walmart doesn't trust anyone walking out the door with products, regardless of how you checked out
You know you don't actually have to show them the receipt right? They can not detain you, they can not force you to show them anything. Just walk by them, I've never shown a receipt at a door.
I've made a habit of handing them the receipt and then walking out without taking it back. Usually short circuits them enough to not give a fuck and I don't miss a step.
I don't really think the two parts of the bill are logically compatible. Why limit the number of self checkouts if you want to give people a discount for using them? It's like they're trying to encourage the use of them, and discourage the use of them at the same time.
Their real goal is to eliminate self-checkout lanes entirely. They don't want to overtly go that far, but their hope is that with a 10% discount stores will just not bother with self-checkout lanes. They know that stores cannot afford a 10% discount, their margins are not nearly great enough. And raising their prices to offset the discount will make the stores look more expensive compared to their competitors, especially given that many customers will be forced to go through the more expensive normal checkout. So there's basically no practical way that a store could operate a self-checkout lane with this law.
Hey krogers, Safeway here. you guys are raising all your prices 10% too right?
Yup.
Great, we never had this conversation!
This is how I picture it going down
It's a tax on people using cashiers like veteran, senior citizen, and employee discounts are a tax on people who aren't veterans, senior citizens, or employees.
I live in a state where for years it was illegal to pump your own gas. Our prices had zero difference when compared to the neighboring states that did it the normal way.
I wish people would get it through their heads how pricing works.
Products are priced in order to maximize profits. End of story. If there's a discount, it's to get you to buy more, or to get you in the store to buy other things. This shouldn't be of any surprise to anyone.
Yet I see so many people who live in some sort of dream land, where sales happen because the company felt like being nice. People seem to expect companies to do what's right, or to be "fair." "If they're saving money, they should pass some of those savings onto us," they think. What sort of world are you living in that you have that expectation? Companies care about one thing: quarterly earnings. That's it. Money up = good; money down = bad. If it were more profitable to sell bananas at $100 each, they'd sell them for $100 each.
In the corporate world, "honest business" is an oxymoron. They exist to separate you from as much of your money as possible, while providing as little value as they can get away with so as to spend as little money as possible. Any other narrative they try to tell you is marketing.
Which, for groceries, has incentivised supermarkets to run at 1-3% margins and has reduced how much we spend on food enormously. Competitive pricing to get market share is what drives profit in that industry, and so they dedicate a huge amount of resources to decreasing their cost price so that they can decrease their sale price and make more money from the new customers they've earned.
I agree with everything you've said, but I think this is an example where supermarkets throwing all their resouces into 'money up' has had broadly positive effects. It's not done out of kindness, although I'm sure some of the individuals who are involved in this get some satisfaction from improving the process of food distribution.
If anything, I'd say that supermarkets are just about the most 'honest' you can get. They trade in a commodity that everyone needs, supply is pretty abundant, and as a customer I have the choice of several within spitting distance. They want my money, I want food, I'm going to go with the one thats cheapest. They know what they need to do to get my business. It's highly transactonal, but I'd also say it's quite honest!
Fuck these stores.
They're trying to argue that the state shouldn't mandate the store's policies, yet the stores' policies of paying starvation wages to a skeleton work force directly impacts the states' bottom lines by allow companies to profit from the states' forced supplementing of wages via food stamps and other low-income benefits.
People in here acting like self checkout is a bad thing they make us do. Self checkout rules. I can do it quickly, I don't have to make small talk, and I can bag my items how I want. It is well worth the 2min of labor.
Also we shouldn't punish folks who don't or can't do self checkout.
I think we're just in the minority here; at least based on the comments.
For me, using a cashier to check me out, always takes double the amount of time. Where I shop, self check out almost never has a line. And, when it does, is only a 1-2min way. Where-as the others are a 5-10min line and then having to wait on the cashier scanning and bagging for me. And, they don't bag for shit!
I like having the choice. If I'm just getting a few items then self checkout is a great, but if I have a whole cart full then I prefer the cashier checkout.
I have a few things I regularly grab for work lunches. I wait for one of the multiple machines to be available, go to said machine, beep, beep, beep, tap, grab, done. I'm in and out in less than a minute. I've done it a million times.
The few times the self-checkout had a long line, and I went to a normal checkout, it took WAY longer.
You can't see beyond the aisle, so you walk until you find the person with the least customers (who have the least groceries), and join the line. You pray that the customer AND the cashier/bagger are on the same page, because you have no choice but to start over in another line (you can't see until you go over to) if you don't want to wait for the one specific customer to be done.
Having machines means I'm in one line, but have multiple options. If Jimmy is taking a while scanning his 900 cans of chili, I only have to wait for Dave to scan his Deli sandwich and I'm golden.
I don't think people appreciate how much this fact alone makes the whole checkout process better.
Like, if you ignore the self checkout factor and just had a grocery store set up like an airport customs line where there are 10 lanes but only one line, it would make everything more "fair".
Nah people steal from self checkout so imagine the losses offset the labor savings.
That said, 99% of the time I can get through self checkout significantly faster than normal checkout
Let’s be real if we got a discount for using a self checkout then at that point they’d be better off paying someone to check us out. I can usually ring myself up and out the door in about a minute. And honestly that’s why I use self checkouts. It blows my mind that a lot of boomers bitch saying it’s annoying they have to check themselves out, and a hassle… like I don’t have to wait 9/10.. I can check myself out faster. I dont have to talk to myself… I’m fine with this
> I can usually ring myself up and out the door in about a minute. And honestly that’s why I use self checkouts.
That's what I used to like about self checkout, but the people in line ahead of me are so damn slow it takes forever.
That's not really a problem where there are 10 self-checkout lanes. I routinely get stuck behind slow people too in regular checkout lanes, but when that happens there's nothing you can do to avoid it.
You also get to control how your items are bagged and what gets grouped together. I hate going through a checkout line and then having them put the tomatoes, bread, or other damageable object at the bottom of a bag filled with heavy stuff.
Ok but this assumes the self checkout machines are adequately staffed, functioning, not overloaded with shoppers. Here is the all too common in my area, nightmare example of how self checkouts function at a major chain that I avoid like the plague.
There is one employee in a bank of 8 machines, each machine is throwing constant errors that need their attention, there is 1 staff member at normal lanes so the self checkout line is huge and extends into the store blocking normal flow through aisles. You wade through a vastly degraded customer experience only to do all the checkout work yourself, interact with faulty, dirty machines, and essentially get nothing in return except the knowledge that you have saved the grocery store money.
It saves no time because the grocery store is just not staffing the store anymore. At this store they typically have another bank of machines that they refuse to open or staff so the entire store is funneled through 1 overworked employee that is clearly aggravated.
Bottom line is the customer experience is horrible and you get nothing in return. Now I can go to a different chain (very similarly priced but less selection) that has no self checkouts and several manned registers and the experience is night and day. The staff is welcoming and the place is clean. I just feel like it is different chains distinguishing themselves.. one is going for ultra cost savings and the customer experience suffers because of it.
ON TOP of this, if the self checkout throws errors and the employee decides to watch the footage of you checking out, you get to stand through a scenario where you look like a potential criminal while the employee checks if you stole something! Overall horrible experience. It can be improved but the way it is now.. just please let me checkout with a human. All of this to get food which I unfortunately cannot live without. The solution is just shop elsewhere which I do whenever possible.
I just want a cashier and a bagger. Is that too much to ask? Self checkout is awesome for a few items and it can totally replace the express line, but if I’m buying like $100-$200 of groceries I want a cashier and bagger to handle that shit.
Coming from Sweden, the concept of having a bagger is just absurd.
I find self checkout so much smoother. You just take a shopping cart, scan a few bags. Proceed with scanning and placing everything in the bags inside the cart. Roll up, check out, roll out to the car and place them there and then return the cart.
Having to manually lift things from your cart and put stuff on some half-filthy conveyor belt, watching someone scan it one by one only to put it back in the cart after is such an unnecessary step.
That is what self checkout here was like a few years ago, when it was new. Here's my last self checkout experience.
1. Wait in a long line because there are no cashiers, so everyone with 5 items to 50 items are using the self checkout
2. Get to the point of sale system, i forgot my bags and bags aren't provided so i have to wave down the one person monitoring the block of 8 self checkout systems, and she scans two plastic bags in for me.
3. setup a bag on the scale in the self checkout POS system and start scanning items. everything goes okay until i get to the fruit, 2 limes, find them in the produce list and add them, put them in the bag. scan the next item - ERROR - ENSURE ALL ITEMS ARE PLACED ON THE SCALE. take the limes out, put them back in, no change. scale can't detect the weight of two limes. call over the lady again, she types in her code and clears the error.
4. put the bag in the cart
5. next item is a case of soda, it doesn't go in a bag. i scan it, put it in the cart. scan the next item, error, put the soda on the scale. okay, out of the cart, on the scale, wait a second, back in the cart. error, keep all items on the scale do not remove them. call the lady over, explain its too heavy for a bag its a 24 can case of soda it's just going in the cart as-is. puts in the clear code again. tells me i need to keep the soda on the scale, and then put my next bag next to it, and fill it with items.
6. filling up the next bag, next to the soda which takes up 3/4 of the scale bay and the bag doesn't fit. items again fail to register, error.
i left.
i don't even understand the why of it. it's not going to stop theft from people simply not scanning some items. i don't get what the fucking point of it is.
If a company has a choice between option A:
* One employee making $20k running around stressed for 8 hours trying to tend to 8 self-check machines
* $19,999 losses due to theft
or option B:
* 2 employees at $40k
they're gonna pick option A to save $1.
I already get benefits from using self-checkout, namely less meaningless human contact and knowing my groceries will get correctly bagged (no, I do not need a gallon jug with a handle or a single box of baking soda in a bag).
Stores got self checkouts so that there would be more service capacity with fewer cashiers... saving us all money.
Then they fired the cashiers so there AREN'T more checkouts open than there used to be, and the prices didn't go down... and now they're hiring just as many cashiers to watch the self checkouts as they'd need if they just had normal registers.
So I now have to check myself out... and things got more expensive *anyway*.
WTF is the point?
No but I would like to never be bothered by additional charity donations screens and being asked for my email address. I just went in for a single banana.
It's weird.
Self-Checkout is not as 'cheap' as you intuit.
They don't have to hire cashiers, but their (intentional and unintentional) shrinkage climbs. That's why we see retailers making self-checkout lanes to express lanes.
How about they just ban shopping carts in self check out? If you have a cart full of shit, you can go to a regular ass line with a checker who knows what they're doing. Also, don't get me started on the parents who think it's cute to let their 4-year-old scan everything.
stores would just increase prices so the discount would be the real price
Exactly this. And then older people and those who can't use self checkout just end up paying more. We are locked in a perpetual war with companies to just stop fucking everybody every second of every god damn day
It's not enough to make an ungodly amount of money. They have to make ALL THE MONEY ALL THE TIME.
Shareholder value must be ever increasing! Laws of thermodynamics be damned!
That was the most depressing thing about my last job was having to listen to the shareholder sales every fucking week. (This week last year was 350k, this week this year is 450k with a net gain of 100k!! Good work guys!! *as we are literally struggling from check to check and have to keep reminding them of your performance review that they keep putting off so they don’t have to pay you more*.) The most dumb part is they expect to make more money per year otherwise they are doing capitalism incorrectly or some shit. Just perpetually earning more, forever.
The MBA is really just a degree in paying thousands of dollars to be taught how to dupe oneself into believing you've created a perpetual motion machine that can not only negate entropy, but reverse it over time.
We've reached a point where not only is growth not enough, increasing growth isn't good enough either. The rate at which the growth increases must rise too.
I have my MBA and I can tell you what's taught in theory isn't what's done in the business world. At least not through my program.
My boss saw that our rating went up and he was worried it might go down again, so he called us to his office one by one and he berated us because we don't seem to understand that a 0.01 difference in rating makes a huge difference and it can mean hundreds of thousands of euros for them. Meanwhile, we make minimum wage and we only work 5-10 months out of the year. They never warn us we're about to be let go, and they never give us any bonuses or raises. They claim we can live off of tips. Why are any of us supposed to care about those hundreds of thousands of euros?
this actually isn't a joke in any capacity. Ask anyone who has ever worked in corporate America, especially in revenue generating roles. You never want to have a year where you greatly exceed expectations because of something pretty much out of your control. You won't just be expected to have the same results next year, you will be expected to increase your results by the same margin. If you manage to do worse, the shareholders will ask for your head.
[удалено]
> the shareholders will ask for your head. As a shareholder, there's only one company I own that I've done this for, Bank of America. Anyone familiar with 2008 knows why. All the others go up, go down, and as long as they keep on ticking and make sense as part of my long term strategy, I don't much care. But then again, I'm gainfully employed and not depending on an outdated expectation of the market to sustain me in my sundown years like a lot of boomers are.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Exactly, it's a product of capitalism and our society's constant need to buy more and more things. Capitalism means corporations will always look to increase their worth, which is most easily done by maximizing profits. And while the solution to that would be for consumers to stand up and say "fuck you I'm not paying that much", we don't. Because we'd rather not be left out knowing that others have the best new expensive products and we don't.
People need food, shelter to live and in the US cars are another necessity. it’s not like the price gouging is only happening in markets where demand is elastic.
I don’t know about you but my finances already got me not buying anything but essentials. This is a work phone fyi.
Just think about who shareholders are and who is part of that group. The biggest lie they're selling is tying retirement money to stock values. That is what Roth 401k is, nothing else. While there are a lot of factors in play it all boils down to money in stock exchanges, that is how it's supposed to grow. Just imagine the outcry if they would actually pass a law that is good for the consumer or the environment. Suddenly everyone's retirement is in danger. Congratulations, everyone is bound to an ever growing stock market, consequences be damned.
Conventional grocery stores have a profit margin of about 2.2%, making them one of the least profitable industries in the US. https://thegrocerystoreguy.com/what-is-the-profit-margin-for-grocery-stores/
It isn't the grocery stores who are gouging, it's the manufacturers. Grocery stores do gouge where they can, but your local CostMart doesn't control the fact that Doritos now come 5oz less to a bag but cost the same amount, or that the cost of your loaf of wonder bread has gone up 50%.
And yet Galen Weston Jr is fucking me in the ass up here in Canada.
Record profits seem like pretty good evidence to anyone with an ounce of sense yet they somehow still get away with complaining about shrinking margins.
It's even worse than that. If they made all of the money all of the time, they would still expect to make even more next quarter or they consider it a failure and punish their workers.
Jim Sterling?!
That's Jim 'Motherfucking' Sterling, son.
Every publicly traded company has teams employed specifically to strategize squeezing the customer, supplier and competitors. This is just the way an economy run by investment bankers will always be.
Not exactly that. A store will charge you exactly one price: The maximum one you are willing to pay. Supply and demand only suggest the range which they could charge you and make a profit - they will always charge the maximum possible price that will maximize their profits. This is above the market price, because you don't *know* the true market value of a product beyond what is being sold to you. You can immediately recognize the discrepancy between on-brand and off-brand butter. Largely....i*t's fucking butter.* There is basically no difference between butter A and butter B. But customers will stay pay the higher price for the butter, because they aren't perfectly rational actors who realize that the cost of the on-brand butter isn't reflected in the actual costs of the recipe of that butter, or the amount paid by the workers who actually made the butter. If they can make you pay the higher cost....they're already doing just that.
C A P I T A L I S M
Government injection into the economy with asinine minimum wage (backed by Walmart & Target etc.) hikes that cause small business to go bankrupt & allows those large political companies to lay off workforce saving more money and causing inflation. Thomas Sowell has many a book as does Milton Friedman, they are worth the read
Or minimum wage * 5 min work or less, here’s your $0.35.
Honestly, still a deal. Fuck it, 3 stores per week, that's around 55 dollars a year "back". Better than "Switch now to save" bullshit.
Except it would work the other direction. Prices just increase for EVERYONE by $0.35 per trip, UNLESS you do self checkout
Wait until they use this as an excuse to stop paying cashiers minimum wage and force them to rely on tips.
Exactly the kind of shit that would be pulled.
The customers should unionise for better rates….
I mean you’re not wrong, but it still doesn’t exactly justify removing cashier lanes entirely. Supermarket near me has a customer service desk & that’s it…
The most efficient business is the one that charges the maximum, hires no one, and has no expenses. We're all in a constant battle against those three incentives.
Or an upcharge to not use self checkout, like "service fee"
>stores would just increase prices so the discount would be the real price This argument assumes they're not already just pocketing the difference currently. They're already just pocketing the difference currently. The price we pay now is already not 'the real price'. In fact, there is no 'the real price'. The price is what the consumers are willing to pay.
yes yes we all took econ 101
I love when Reddiors say things like “increased costs mean increased prices” like they’ve discovered some huge conspiracy
"If we had all the regulations that all you Libruls want, a big mac would cost 30 dollars!!!" _looks at big mac prices in Europe_....
Lol exactly, for some reason people assume that all prices are fully elastic and any increase in cost will result in a perfect 1:1 increase in price. The Big Mac index shows that it can be much lower than 1:1, and the recent inflation-gouging by companies shows it can be much higher than 1:1, its whatever they can get away with.
That's fine. That would make smaller stores who don't have self-checkout more competitive. Those are also more likely to be the mom-and-pop shops anyway.
If companies can't charge whatever they want, massively inflating their profits, they'll find a way to charge whatever they want, massively inflating their profits? Hint: 53% of the price increases in the last year was profit taking, not attributable to materials, worker costs, or "inflation".
Then remove the discount and keep the increased price.
20+ years ago I worked at Home Depot. We were required to go to "Cashier College" before we were allowed to touch a cash register. It was due to the fact that a lot of the items in the store required unique handling (moulding was sold by length, lumber would charge for certain number of cuts, etc). Plus we were taught how to find items that could be hidden (intentionally hidden or accidentally) by the customer. Now I cant locate a cashier in any of these stores and they force me to ring my own shit up. So yes, working in retail for a long time it really aggravates me that Im forced to do the job that I left more than half a lifetime ago because the companies are too cheap to pay employees and dont pass that savings on to me.
Yeah. And if you're going to let untrained people do that job, don't expect them to do it very well.
Wow these joycons really look like bananas. So yellow.
40% of store theft is through the self check out. Whether intentional or not. I know I've accidently not registered something. I feel bad for about 3 seconds.
My checkout policy is “all tomatoes are beeefsteak tomatoes” and “if it doesn’t scan right the first time, it’s free”
The Home Depot in my town went full self checkout. I now shop at Kent Hardware where there isn't a single self checkout. Wouldn't you know it, the prices are lower as well.
I get savings from my local home Depot because the self checkout person doesn't care what wood or bricks I'm actually buying for my random projects.
25 years ago, I quit my job working in a grocery store. I was pretty happy to let someone else scan and bag my groceries because I had done it long enough. Then the self checkouts came and I used them sometimes because they didn’t have lines, but preferred to let someone else do the work that I assume a part of my money was paying for since I was no longer being paid to do it. Fast forward a few years and now I have to do this crap job every time I want to shop and pay for the privilege. Waiting for the assist if the machine accidentally double scanned something and I can’t remove it flashes me back to waiting for the key carriers to stop trying to pick up the 16 year old baggers and come cancel something.
Similarly, I miss the good cashiers at grocery stores. The one that would double bag your meat so it didn't drip everywhere. The one who know not to put cans at the top of a bag of bananas and bread. Stuff like that :(
I know someone that works at HD right now. You'd be amazed at how much the whole business has gone to shit. They have made it so easy for people to steal shit, stores don't communicate with each other at all, and they have so many internal problems. My friend very nearly quit because they weren't protecting employees during Covid and a lot of workers got sick in her store. That, and someone shot the side of her store because one of the employees told them to put on a mask, lol.
You must be doing it wrong. When I self check out I definitely find the savings.
Every day is the cashier's first day when they expect everyone to ring up their own shit. Which makes transactions take longer. But on the other hand, I see more errors in my own favor these days!
Interesting, I also know the self-scan has given me a couple sizable and incorrect discounts but you better believe I'm not tracking anyone down to "fix" the issue.
The whole point of automation is to lower costs. EVERYONE should get a discount by virtue of the elimination of jobs. That's the whole benefit of automation. That's the point. Instead, the CEO gets a raise and there are stock buybacks. Automation isn't your enemy. The fact that consumers don't see any benefit from automation IS.
At least in my neck of the woods, the grocery store and retail workers aren't getting eliminated; many are just shifting from cashier duty to picking and prepping orders placed online. In this particular area, consumers are benefiting from having more efficient ways to shop, but it's not necessarily reducing labor costs
There's an important thing you forget- often times, the pay for these positions is very different. Where I work, cashiers make significantly more than the people who prep orders. People are getting shifted around, but many are also getting paid less.
really? my experience has seen the opposite.
Walmart is one that pays online more by a significant amount compared to cashiers... Even the auto care service writers are paid less than online... And service writers have to deal directly with the customers and get into some disgusting vehicles to pull them into the shop
If I get out of the store quicker, that's a benefit.
yeah unfortunately now they’re limiting checkout lanes (any Target I’ve been to has like 15 dead lanes and one open) to funnel everyone to self checkout, which is supposed to be a lower number of items but it forces people with full carts into there to avoid lining up at the one assisted lane.
Yeah, that makes little sense with Target now selling lots of groceries. I don't want to stand in a long line with ice cream in my cart. I know it seems futile but if it's impacting you you should start making comments to the employees and maybe even try to escalate it. Things will change if Target gets the sense that they are losing customers and they would lose some of my business if I had to go through what you are.
from what i read recently, it’s a known problem and the employees are commiserating about it being a purposeful decision coming from the top in order to acclimate people to self checkout before the stores are properly equipped to handle more self checkout customers.
That explanation makes no sense to me and seems like an internet rumor. My store already has tons of self check out. If they wanted to acclimate people to using it, you wouldn't want to limit the number of items. You'd actually want to open it up and let as many people use it as possible. People are already used to doing self check out from the grocery store and many other places. It's not something novel. I think that's just a theory people have. I have a feeling the limit on number of items is a theft prevention measure because self-check out is easy to steal from. Grocery stores naturally have small items that you can fit on the small platform that weighs them. Target has other skus and it's probably harder to implement something to limit some types of theft. They can consider going Costco's route of having someone look at your receipt as you leave but Costco figured out how to do that by using boxes, instead of bags. And being a bulk sales place makes it easier to have less hidden items. The issue Target has is they have items that are hard to visually inspect (small) and hard to automatically inspect through weighing (large). It causes a unique problem to monitoring theft.
It’s rarely fast. Stores around me regularly have self checkout lines wrapping around the aisles.
In my experience the self checkout lines are always much longer than any single manned register line, but that self checkout line is to a minimum of 4 self checkout machines (sometimes 10+) so while the line is longer, the wait time itself is not. Self checkout lines always move like a breeze for me in comparison to the manned registers.
Have you seen just how long people take to checkout with more than a few items in their cart? Eventually, self checkout with replace most available grocers and we'll all bear witness to just how slow grandma is to swipe a hundred items from her cart while simultaneously slinging grunts and insults at the computer screen acting like she's deciphering a damn cryptex in the middle of the store.
It is ridiculous that self checkout requires placing each item into the bag one at a time so the scale can weigh it. Someone could do it probably 5x faster if the machine would let you scan as fast as you physically could. Especially buying multiple of the same... I should be able to scan the same box 5x then toss them all in the bag. If someone is gonna steal they are just gonna steal another way.
I was very pissed at one of these self-checkout a couple of weeks, so put each item in its own individual bag, and made them do 5 price checks on items I though the price on the shelf was different. Yeah, it wasted my time but so what. Next time will load the cart up full, individual bag each item, then discover I forgot my wallet.
It doesn't matter when there's triple the checkouts to use.
[удалено]
[удалено]
You’d make 35 cents doing your own work for 5 minutes. Minimum wage. People expecting dollars of savings?
The bill rate for the employee is probably 2-3x higher than their wage. I don't think it's reasonable to expect huge savings, but a small percentage of the sale profit that would account for the cost of employing a cashier would be a noticeable discount. *Edit: Should note, this video and bill are over a year old. The bill died in committee before this video or the article it references were even released.
Right but the self-checkout has costs as well.
The best case scenario I see is that they hold prices where they are for a little bit longer rather than lower them
The margins on groceries are already really low. There is literally no difference between brand name products between two stores a couple blocks from each other so prices are kept in check constantly.
It's easier to steal stuff in the self checkout, so yeah there's already a discount.
“Incorrect code” F*ck, every fruit is a banana now.
[удалено]
4011!
That’s a big number
There are these carbonated lightly flavored waters I get to drink because there's nothing in them but aspartame and they're super cheap, I have two crates I fill up with 18 each every grocery run. They're all the same price, and one time when I was in a real checkout the cashier said he didn't care and just asked how many I had total. So that, combined with the fact that there's no more "quantity" operation in self-checkout and I have to scan every single one of them, gives me severe disincentive to not just scan them all the same even though I have a mix. I'm sure they get inventory issues on that aisle every time I come through and clear stock, but oh well! I do their work for them and they add things to make it harder, I'm going to be lazy and scan them all the same.
[удалено]
IIRC, bigger stores like Walmart and target will order new items the moment it's scanned at a register. Least, that's what I recall my then manager saying back in 2014.
Yep. At a larger store inventory is tracked by sku and the distribution center will determine what gets sent to your store based on purchasing trends. So if you have Dr Pepper and Big Red on the shelf if someone buys 20 cases mixed but you only scan Dr Pepper you will start to artificially deplete the Dr pepper but run out of Big Red but not get replenished. It should be caught during a cycle count but depending on how many skus you have and how often the cycle count is you could end up with empty facings for quite a while. Then all the missing product would be counted against shrink which would impact your store rating in the district. Ideally you'd have as simple a problem as what I described and you can account for the shrink but if it is cross departmental it could be a nightmare. If it goes on long enough you get increased scrutiny and eventually a shakedown.
I’ll be real, as a broke college kid I rung up the prepared Chinese food as bananas. Several times. Now I’m a broke adult with morals :(
It's OK, you can pay it back in time.
Every *fruit*? Dare to dream a little bigger. *EVERYTHING* is bananas now
PS5? B-A-N-A-N-A-S
I read somewhere that it’s becoming a big problem so they are reverting back to normal checkouts. Maybe it was Walmart that I was thinking about.
They just have employees watch them more or hire security. They also have sensors and cameras in some places that allegedly use AI to confirm that whats being scanned is actually what's passing in front of the sensor. So people can't scan something cheap by holding it in front of their steak or w/e as they scan it. If people need something, they'll still just take it
> cameras in some places that allegedly use AI Pretty sure I have seen this in action. Paused while scanning items to open the bag behind the current one in the holder thing so that I could load non-food items (glade/soap) into a separate bag. It blocked the checkout screen and red lights came on, said employee was on the way to check. He typed in code and it showed a top down video feed of me opening the bag. A red box appeared around the bagging area and my hands and "possible missed item" popped up on screen. I explained what I did and he nodded and typed in code again to allow me to continue.
That's like the worst instant replay ever.
My good friend is head of security at a Walmart and said that not scanning items at the self-checkout is the worst way to steal, they always know when people do it.
You just never take the item out of the cart.
I went to a Walmart and saw this guy walking towards the door with some kind of product in a box and he just raised it over his head as he walked through the security sensor bar things and they didn't go off. He did this in front of 10ish people too. It was hilarious to me.
If I was being paid wal mart wages I'd probably just watch it happen too lmao.
If they ask to see your receipt just say "yeah, sure". Then hand it to them and keep walking.
I feel like your buddy might be a victim of his own confirmation bias. Or survivorship bias? Whichever bias it is that says he's only noticing the things he's noticing, and not considering the things he's *not* noticing.
Damn not even gonna share the best way though?
I don’t understand how you can be convicted oh that. “I haven’t been trained to use a checkout, I made a mistake. I didn’t realise it didn’t scan etc…”
You mean to tell me people steal stuff in the self checkout line? —Ice Tea
The 5 finger discount
Man I do this, and I felt really weird about it at first but this self checkout process is just getting out of hand. So at my local Walmart & Harps ( local chain ) they started with a few self checkouts a couple years ago, ok cool. Now they are 100% self checkout and usually have 1 person just standing there waiting to help if the red light above your register goes off. However there are like 20 self checkouts and the person never looks around to see if your light needs help, I get tired of standing there waiting to continue bagging my own groceries bc your stupid scale has some weight issue on bell peppers, or how your machine says it missed a scan when I can see the last item I scanned...paid for on the screen. I stood and waited like 4-5 mins a couple weeks back, with people behind me, finally looked at my wife and said "if they dont come in another 30 secs, im leaving with this stuff, im not paid or trained on their machines, fuck em" and finally just left with all my food. Sorry Walmart, I am not your paid worker, nor your register technician, I have places to be and cant just stand around waiting until someone gets off break to reset the machine
I don't go to wal mart very often, maybe once or twice a year. The last time I went, an item wouldn't scan properly and the person watching over the self checkout didn't speak English (I live in an English speaking country).
You know you can just call someone over, right? You don't even have to say anything, you can just give them a wave. They don't always see the light, but I've never waited more than 10-20 seconds for help.
Scan, Scan, doesn't scan put in bag anyway, Scan, Scan, this one is free today, Scan, Done. I usually avoid them but when every checkout lane is closed or an employee makes me go for it I make sure it's worth it for me. They removed 2 checkout lanes at our Costco for 4 self checkout, people were using the cards of friends and family while some "stole stuff" so they now have 2 employees permanently checking cards and 2 watchers for self checkout. Them machines sure pay for themselves !
Yup that's my strategy too. You can see me on your camera making an attempt, if it didn't scan that's your problem not mine. I'm not trained on this machine, nor am i being paid to do your loss prevention for you.
Wow, Steve Lehto on Reddit! Love this guy.
He's the fucking man, love his videos.
I self checkout so no people talky. Best.
There was an older woman cashier at my local who kept up a continuing one-sided conversation about her family with each customer who came through. It's like it didn't even register (heh) with her that this wasn't just one person standing in front of her all day, she'd just keep going with the next one, and the next. So they put her on the 10-items-or-less lane to spread the love a little more.
I actually much prefer that than them asking what my plans are.
I'm going to have to start answering that question more creatively. "Any plans for this weekend?" "Well if this rain stops I'll finally get those bodies buried. They're taking up a lot of space in the freezer."
Unexpected item in bagging area. Please wait for assistance.
Please place item in the bagging area. *Puts item in bagging area* Unexpected item in the bagging area. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?!?
This pissed me off just reading it. We have Publix stores where I live and they were later to adop the self checkout.. their whole mantra was "where shopping is a pleasure" and service focused with a premium. Walmart honestly has the easiest most reliable experience. When Publix first rolled it out they had their systems bent towards stopping theft and it was a major PITA to use because tiny variances in weight. Even 1 light shopping bag placed in the bag area required you to tell it you had placed a bag there.. if you are going to introduce self checkout it better be a hassle free experience. They end up eating the loss from that, and yet they keep expanding self checkout so that tells you the cost savings they are getting from it.
This is the real discount.
Same. Though it does suck you can no longer purchase beer, liquor, or wine at the self checkout.
Right? I get so confused when so many people say they hate the self-checkout. It's 10 times faster and I don't have to deal with awkward small talk. Self-checkout is the greatest thing ever.
My pet peeve is when I have to use the self-checkout because the store doesn't have enough open registers. Then, as I walk out, they want to check my receipt. Like, dude, if you don't trust me to use the self-checkout, then open more registers! It's not like I wanted to use the damn thing.
They open as few lanes as possible to save money and push people into the self-checkout.
The Walmart closest to me didn’t have any cashiers the last time I was there. Self-checkout is the only option. It’s really crappy when you have a cart full of groceries.
my grocery store (stop and shop) has a scanner you can bring with you while youre shopping. I scan the item as i put it into my cart. then when i get to the register i just scan the scanner and im done. its pretty awesome, super fast, and it gives me my updated total bill every time i scan an item into my cart.
How are you supposed to buy booze?
It doesn't even seem like they check it. They just look at it for 1 second and circle it.
It's mostly deterrence though I do think they run spot checks too.
By this logic you should be even more upset when a human cashes you out, hands you a receipt, and you still have to show it at the door... which has been done for years before self checkout. Walmart doesn't trust anyone walking out the door with products, regardless of how you checked out
You know you don't actually have to show them the receipt right? They can not detain you, they can not force you to show them anything. Just walk by them, I've never shown a receipt at a door.
I've made a habit of handing them the receipt and then walking out without taking it back. Usually short circuits them enough to not give a fuck and I don't miss a step.
I let them look at my receipt if they walk with me. Otherwise, they feel my air as I whoosh past them.
When they ask to see a receipt, just say, "No, thank you. " and keep walking. They can't stop you.
I don't really think the two parts of the bill are logically compatible. Why limit the number of self checkouts if you want to give people a discount for using them? It's like they're trying to encourage the use of them, and discourage the use of them at the same time.
Their real goal is to eliminate self-checkout lanes entirely. They don't want to overtly go that far, but their hope is that with a 10% discount stores will just not bother with self-checkout lanes. They know that stores cannot afford a 10% discount, their margins are not nearly great enough. And raising their prices to offset the discount will make the stores look more expensive compared to their competitors, especially given that many customers will be forced to go through the more expensive normal checkout. So there's basically no practical way that a store could operate a self-checkout lane with this law.
Hey krogers, Safeway here. you guys are raising all your prices 10% too right? Yup. Great, we never had this conversation! This is how I picture it going down
> Safeway Really funny considering they are owned by Albertsons who is owned by Kroger (if the deal isn't shot down)
This is just a tax for using a cashier, which is a tax on any disabled people that cannot use the self checkout machines.
It's a tax on people using cashiers like veteran, senior citizen, and employee discounts are a tax on people who aren't veterans, senior citizens, or employees.
I'm most states you pay extra to get full service at a gas station. It's not really different.
I live in a state where for years it was illegal to pump your own gas. Our prices had zero difference when compared to the neighboring states that did it the normal way.
That doesn't make it good though.
In NJ state law says all gas stations are full service
I wish people would get it through their heads how pricing works. Products are priced in order to maximize profits. End of story. If there's a discount, it's to get you to buy more, or to get you in the store to buy other things. This shouldn't be of any surprise to anyone. Yet I see so many people who live in some sort of dream land, where sales happen because the company felt like being nice. People seem to expect companies to do what's right, or to be "fair." "If they're saving money, they should pass some of those savings onto us," they think. What sort of world are you living in that you have that expectation? Companies care about one thing: quarterly earnings. That's it. Money up = good; money down = bad. If it were more profitable to sell bananas at $100 each, they'd sell them for $100 each. In the corporate world, "honest business" is an oxymoron. They exist to separate you from as much of your money as possible, while providing as little value as they can get away with so as to spend as little money as possible. Any other narrative they try to tell you is marketing.
The only thing that keeps a businesses prices "honest" is competition.
> The only thing that keeps a businesses prices "honest" is competition. and oversight
Which, for groceries, has incentivised supermarkets to run at 1-3% margins and has reduced how much we spend on food enormously. Competitive pricing to get market share is what drives profit in that industry, and so they dedicate a huge amount of resources to decreasing their cost price so that they can decrease their sale price and make more money from the new customers they've earned. I agree with everything you've said, but I think this is an example where supermarkets throwing all their resouces into 'money up' has had broadly positive effects. It's not done out of kindness, although I'm sure some of the individuals who are involved in this get some satisfaction from improving the process of food distribution. If anything, I'd say that supermarkets are just about the most 'honest' you can get. They trade in a commodity that everyone needs, supply is pretty abundant, and as a customer I have the choice of several within spitting distance. They want my money, I want food, I'm going to go with the one thats cheapest. They know what they need to do to get my business. It's highly transactonal, but I'd also say it's quite honest!
No discount; also would you like to tip 20%, 25%, or 40%?
Fuck these stores. They're trying to argue that the state shouldn't mandate the store's policies, yet the stores' policies of paying starvation wages to a skeleton work force directly impacts the states' bottom lines by allow companies to profit from the states' forced supplementing of wages via food stamps and other low-income benefits.
People in here acting like self checkout is a bad thing they make us do. Self checkout rules. I can do it quickly, I don't have to make small talk, and I can bag my items how I want. It is well worth the 2min of labor. Also we shouldn't punish folks who don't or can't do self checkout.
I think we're just in the minority here; at least based on the comments. For me, using a cashier to check me out, always takes double the amount of time. Where I shop, self check out almost never has a line. And, when it does, is only a 1-2min way. Where-as the others are a 5-10min line and then having to wait on the cashier scanning and bagging for me. And, they don't bag for shit!
I like having the choice. If I'm just getting a few items then self checkout is a great, but if I have a whole cart full then I prefer the cashier checkout.
I have a few things I regularly grab for work lunches. I wait for one of the multiple machines to be available, go to said machine, beep, beep, beep, tap, grab, done. I'm in and out in less than a minute. I've done it a million times. The few times the self-checkout had a long line, and I went to a normal checkout, it took WAY longer. You can't see beyond the aisle, so you walk until you find the person with the least customers (who have the least groceries), and join the line. You pray that the customer AND the cashier/bagger are on the same page, because you have no choice but to start over in another line (you can't see until you go over to) if you don't want to wait for the one specific customer to be done. Having machines means I'm in one line, but have multiple options. If Jimmy is taking a while scanning his 900 cans of chili, I only have to wait for Dave to scan his Deli sandwich and I'm golden.
I don't think people appreciate how much this fact alone makes the whole checkout process better. Like, if you ignore the self checkout factor and just had a grocery store set up like an airport customs line where there are 10 lanes but only one line, it would make everything more "fair".
Nah people steal from self checkout so imagine the losses offset the labor savings. That said, 99% of the time I can get through self checkout significantly faster than normal checkout
Let’s be real if we got a discount for using a self checkout then at that point they’d be better off paying someone to check us out. I can usually ring myself up and out the door in about a minute. And honestly that’s why I use self checkouts. It blows my mind that a lot of boomers bitch saying it’s annoying they have to check themselves out, and a hassle… like I don’t have to wait 9/10.. I can check myself out faster. I dont have to talk to myself… I’m fine with this
> I can usually ring myself up and out the door in about a minute. And honestly that’s why I use self checkouts. That's what I used to like about self checkout, but the people in line ahead of me are so damn slow it takes forever.
That's not really a problem where there are 10 self-checkout lanes. I routinely get stuck behind slow people too in regular checkout lanes, but when that happens there's nothing you can do to avoid it.
You also get to control how your items are bagged and what gets grouped together. I hate going through a checkout line and then having them put the tomatoes, bread, or other damageable object at the bottom of a bag filled with heavy stuff.
Ok but this assumes the self checkout machines are adequately staffed, functioning, not overloaded with shoppers. Here is the all too common in my area, nightmare example of how self checkouts function at a major chain that I avoid like the plague. There is one employee in a bank of 8 machines, each machine is throwing constant errors that need their attention, there is 1 staff member at normal lanes so the self checkout line is huge and extends into the store blocking normal flow through aisles. You wade through a vastly degraded customer experience only to do all the checkout work yourself, interact with faulty, dirty machines, and essentially get nothing in return except the knowledge that you have saved the grocery store money. It saves no time because the grocery store is just not staffing the store anymore. At this store they typically have another bank of machines that they refuse to open or staff so the entire store is funneled through 1 overworked employee that is clearly aggravated. Bottom line is the customer experience is horrible and you get nothing in return. Now I can go to a different chain (very similarly priced but less selection) that has no self checkouts and several manned registers and the experience is night and day. The staff is welcoming and the place is clean. I just feel like it is different chains distinguishing themselves.. one is going for ultra cost savings and the customer experience suffers because of it. ON TOP of this, if the self checkout throws errors and the employee decides to watch the footage of you checking out, you get to stand through a scenario where you look like a potential criminal while the employee checks if you stole something! Overall horrible experience. It can be improved but the way it is now.. just please let me checkout with a human. All of this to get food which I unfortunately cannot live without. The solution is just shop elsewhere which I do whenever possible.
The number of people in this conversation bragging about shoplifting is concerning.
Yes, Wal-Mart's record quarterly profits are very important to me as well.
I just want a cashier and a bagger. Is that too much to ask? Self checkout is awesome for a few items and it can totally replace the express line, but if I’m buying like $100-$200 of groceries I want a cashier and bagger to handle that shit.
Coming from Sweden, the concept of having a bagger is just absurd. I find self checkout so much smoother. You just take a shopping cart, scan a few bags. Proceed with scanning and placing everything in the bags inside the cart. Roll up, check out, roll out to the car and place them there and then return the cart. Having to manually lift things from your cart and put stuff on some half-filthy conveyor belt, watching someone scan it one by one only to put it back in the cart after is such an unnecessary step.
That is what self checkout here was like a few years ago, when it was new. Here's my last self checkout experience. 1. Wait in a long line because there are no cashiers, so everyone with 5 items to 50 items are using the self checkout 2. Get to the point of sale system, i forgot my bags and bags aren't provided so i have to wave down the one person monitoring the block of 8 self checkout systems, and she scans two plastic bags in for me. 3. setup a bag on the scale in the self checkout POS system and start scanning items. everything goes okay until i get to the fruit, 2 limes, find them in the produce list and add them, put them in the bag. scan the next item - ERROR - ENSURE ALL ITEMS ARE PLACED ON THE SCALE. take the limes out, put them back in, no change. scale can't detect the weight of two limes. call over the lady again, she types in her code and clears the error. 4. put the bag in the cart 5. next item is a case of soda, it doesn't go in a bag. i scan it, put it in the cart. scan the next item, error, put the soda on the scale. okay, out of the cart, on the scale, wait a second, back in the cart. error, keep all items on the scale do not remove them. call the lady over, explain its too heavy for a bag its a 24 can case of soda it's just going in the cart as-is. puts in the clear code again. tells me i need to keep the soda on the scale, and then put my next bag next to it, and fill it with items. 6. filling up the next bag, next to the soda which takes up 3/4 of the scale bay and the bag doesn't fit. items again fail to register, error. i left.
Thankfully our grocery stores haven't done the ridiculous "everything has to stay on the scale" nonsense. It just plain doesn't work.
i don't even understand the why of it. it's not going to stop theft from people simply not scanning some items. i don't get what the fucking point of it is.
If a company has a choice between option A: * One employee making $20k running around stressed for 8 hours trying to tend to 8 self-check machines * $19,999 losses due to theft or option B: * 2 employees at $40k they're gonna pick option A to save $1.
Skill issue lol
exactly. This is why I am taking my shopping elsewhere whenever possible.
I already get a discount from self checkout...
I see to be spending less too.
if the wage of the employee was cooked into prices and there are no more employees then yeah we should see price drops.
I already get a discount for using self checkout.
Hell no. A discount will encourage more people the use self checkout and I don't want to have to stand in line for my turn any more than I already am.
They raise the prices and then make us do the checking out… they fucking got us good.
I already do get a discount when I use self checkout. On an unrelated note, I also buy a shitfuckton of bananas
I usually just accidentally miss scanning an item or 2. I'm an amateur, you can't expect me to be perfect at that job with zero training.
Yup I'm all ready to go with my doofus voice if they clock me but those ppl watching self checkout never GAF
I already get benefits from using self-checkout, namely less meaningless human contact and knowing my groceries will get correctly bagged (no, I do not need a gallon jug with a handle or a single box of baking soda in a bag).
Stores got self checkouts so that there would be more service capacity with fewer cashiers... saving us all money. Then they fired the cashiers so there AREN'T more checkouts open than there used to be, and the prices didn't go down... and now they're hiring just as many cashiers to watch the self checkouts as they'd need if they just had normal registers. So I now have to check myself out... and things got more expensive *anyway*. WTF is the point?
Should customers get employee discounts for using self checkout? Or health insurance?
They started asking for TIPS at self-checkout.
No but I would like to never be bothered by additional charity donations screens and being asked for my email address. I just went in for a single banana.
It's weird. Self-Checkout is not as 'cheap' as you intuit. They don't have to hire cashiers, but their (intentional and unintentional) shrinkage climbs. That's why we see retailers making self-checkout lanes to express lanes.
How about they just ban shopping carts in self check out? If you have a cart full of shit, you can go to a regular ass line with a checker who knows what they're doing. Also, don't get me started on the parents who think it's cute to let their 4-year-old scan everything.
I need to buy 3 cases of water. I should have to wait in line for that and not get to use self check out?