"This isn't exactly the labor-minimizing tech retailers were promised."
"This isn't exactly the labor-minimizing tech retailers were promised."
https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-costco-kroger-facing-self-checkout-reckoning-2023-10
Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.
Praxis
This just them whining. One person watching the door (that they had anyway) and one person assisting at a self checkout corral is still less employees than all the cashier's I've seen them do away with.
yeah it's wild to think about, but i don't think i've been in a grocery store in years that had more checkout lanes open than closed. most of the time it's no more than 2. i'm assuming that if they were still building new stores they'd just get rid of them altogether.
It's weird, I felt this was a trend pre-pandemic (and at least it made sense in the off-hours) but after it really kicked into gear. I almost never see more than 2 checkout lanes staffed at any one time.
You still have to have them for the big holiday rushes, but that's pretty much the only time working at a grocery store that I've seen all of them used
I'm one of those weirdos who prefers the self-checkout but they're just not fucking practical when you got a cart full of stuff. These morons keep trying to implement a business plan that is one part having their cake and one part eating it to make the line go up for the quarter and it does not fucking work.
This is the biggest failure by far of self checkouts. PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN BAGGING AREA UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA PLEASE RING UP EVERYTHING THE BAGGING AREA PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN'T TRYING TO STEAL REPEAT FOREVER BECAUSE YOUR CART IS FULL OF 2 WEEKS OF GROCERIES FOR A FAMILY
It's extra funny in my location too because a tax on plastic bags means most people bring their own bags, but if you put your own bag in the bagging area it yells at you because it thinks you're trying to steal and won't let you do anything. So mostly people just pile everything unceremoniously in a giant grocery heap in the "bagging" area and then spend another 5 minutes reloading their cart and bagging everything.
Self checkouts are great when you have a couple of small things but they're absolutely the peak of inefficient bullshit for any regular sized grocery shop. They're one of the reasons why grocery shopping for me went from "a task I enjoy" to "a task I talk about in therapy". They have become anxiety zones.
And the thing is they're just fine if you're at one of the rare stores where it's not clearly geared to assume every customer is stealing every product, but then you go buying something in an area that's lower income and suddenly it takes 20 minutes to buy 3 things because the system is too busy screaming at you to drink the verification can to let you scan anything.
self-checkouts are wonderful bc anything that's more than $10 is fucking free
i will never stop stealing
Damn straight
Wal Mart near me has no pressure plate/"Please move item to bagging area", and a Home Depot nearby doesn't even have those RFID security gates lmao
Wal Mart near me has no pressure plate
yup, same. well, actually one of them does, and it's sensitive as a motherfucker. you'll never guess what most of the people who shop there look like...it feels gross but that's why i near-exclusively stick to the stores in crackertown. "security" is usually just someone's grandma waving hello and goodbye. just gotta be careful that the prices aren't inflated to match the egos of the clientele or else you'll end up spending more than you save. deeply envious of your HD btw, all the hardware stores here are locked down hard and it suuucks.
self-checkouts are wonderful bc anything that's more than $10 is fucking free
what do you mean?
ah let me be clear: when shit is expensive, i steal it. not actually everything, of course, i'm not completely bereft of sense
but yeah if you're careful and calm (and tbh white) and you make sure not to shop in impoverished neighborhoods (they have more security) you can get away with murder. i routinely steal about 60% of my groceries. my actual threshold/selection process is a little bit more nuanced but i don't wanna get too deep into details
i do highly recommend it though, just pass shit over the scanner with a fingertip on the barcode. easy peasy, grocery bill goes down.
my employer implemented self-checkout for an employee/open to the public cafeteria. the prices are extremely reasonable for good quality food, so i am not trying to be a dick about it... but if the barcode fails to read 3 times, that means it's free to me.
Reverse convenience surcharge
running an inside-out prison to keep people away from food and complaining that I have to pay for guards
Liked these things at my Safeway until they installed some machine learning computer vision software to prevent stealing
Not that I was stealing anything, of course, I would never do anything illegal. It's just the principle of it.
That shit fails all the time for false positives. Thankfully you can skip past it.
I frequently buy multiples of a single item so I do what a cashier does - I take a single version and just swipe it the number of times of things I'm buying, then swipe the whole lot in my bag. It always comes up with the video saying something like it appears there was some error in checkout (I'm assuming the video is to try to guilt shoplifters, saying hey look we have video). Anyways you can skip and ignore it. I've never had any repercussions to my account - granted if someone were to actually watch the video and cross it to receipt it would be obvious what I'm doing, but if they were to tie some sort of repercussion like banning my account I assume that would be automated (and fail just the same) too.
Funniest shit is it doesn't even call an associate over. I need an associate to badge in for my 50% coupon you stuck on the milk, but you think you saw me swipe some shit? Nah, not gonna raise any flags.
The old implementation was fine. This machines are great for getting people with a small number of purchases out of line and out the door. But that wasn't enough, now they feel the need to have only the self-checkouts. Turns out? It stinks! They bottle-necked their own ability to take customer's money for no reason.
And making self-checkouts for less than 10 items and keeping actual cashiers for many items must’ve been too complex of an idea
This is just like North Korea
One of the major chain grocery stores in my area introduced new self checkout stations that are just full on check lanes without a cashier. So you have to scan your item, place it on the conveyer belt, watch it travel down and just dumped in a little pile at the end, then walk down to the end of it and bag your own items. It's even more of a pain in the ass and I'm sure it's only because there's even more surveillance equipment to ensure items are what they're scanned as. Just fucking pay people. Death to America
when talking about workers: "Workers don't create value!!!! Bosses do through their unique labor of guidance and supervision without which the workers would be lost and confused!!!"
after "automating" the jobs of the workers (but not really): "WTF, machines don't create value???? They are merely the embodiment of past labor already done by humans???? Workers are needed to operate the machinery through the labor of guidance and supervision, without which the customer would be lost and confused???? WTF?!?!?!?! I thought I was good at economics and these machines would save me money!!! I thought technology was supposed to be magic and not simply constant capital that decays over time and requires maintenance!!!! WTF?!?!?!??!?!"I would argue that self-checkout machines are less about automating labor away and more about transferring that labor to an unpaid workforce (customers).
you make a fine point. thinking about it now, doesn't this show that the bourgeoisie is even more clueless and less able to "innovate" than they suggest in their propaganda? Since they aren't even automating away the drudgery, or improving customer satisfaction, but simply transferring the labor from the worker to the customer? That seems like a desperate attempt to stop the declining rate of profit rather than a real "innovation"
What if we just replaced all cashiers with cops?
this is my local target. no checkers, no employees on the floor, only self-check out, but there are 3 dudes in black/OD plate carriers standing by the door
Last week the theft gate alarm went off, so I checked the receipt, saw that they had stolen like $150 of shit and said, "yup, you're good"
whoops, didn't feel like doing work 🤷♂️
If I would work at a self checkout (not denying nor conforming) I would let people steal. Just looking away when the do, making sure I have plausible deniability. I won't give a fuck, steal whatever you want.
If they won't train or keep employees, well I'm not trained either. If it doesn't scan the first try, it doesn't scan :if-he-dies-he-dies:
It seems many stores still need real people to help customers with their purchases
Don't worry, retailers don't view human cashiers as real people either
When I worked at a grocery store about 40% of my time at self checkout was bypassing the security freeze because the camera thinks every customer is stealing if they scan products faster than 1 per 45 seconds and don’t put it on the bag scale within .44 seconds.
If you don't mind, what store?
Target just doesn't seem to give a shit. I'll take a product out of my big cooler bag in my cart, scan it a few times quickly because I got multiple, then put it back in the bag, no problem.
Oh boy I sure do love buying several pounds of bananas multiple times on the same shopping trip.
if you see someone stealing at a self checkout, you didn't see anything
Fuck them for trying to steal our labor, they deserve every theft loss and more
Another capitalist contradiction, what fun! Will we ever run out of them?
I never use the self checkout. I am already paying more and you want me to do the work for you. Lol I would rather wait in line for hours than scanning the shit for you and then also pay for it.
Not using self checkout will actually help to economy as these major retailers will have to hire people. So stop using self checkout.
but i want to use the self-checkout lane to steal things. Fuck these companies.
Hahaha more power to you.
B-but... i don't like people. Self checkout helps me avoid them. Besides do you want to move items over the register for >8h a day? Me neither.
It also helps the economy to build houses and demolish immediately them afterwards (creates demand for building materials and jobs), that doesn't mean it makes sense. "The economy" is something the bourgeois made up to brainwash people to think exploitation is a good thing.
Why cant ppl just not have that job? make the robot do it so the former cashier can start a prog rock band.
Self checkout is for scabs. Support the grocers union.
Matt Kelley, a loss-prevention expert who worked in asset protection at Home Depot
Lol a bit late for that one this is the easiest store to steal from
Switching my hardware store shopping to Home Depot for unrelated reasons
people don't like to talk to an automated phone bot, why is it different irl
Embarrassed for anyone else to see the junk they are buying.
Also, there is something psychological about the line moving quicker in a self-checkout, because there is only one line for multiple registers. I've been kinda getting annoyed through, because some stores people role up with a full fucking cart instead of like 10-15 items.
A lot of these machines struggle to process food-stamps. Quite the oversight considering what these places tend to pay their workers.
A supermarket nearby implemented anti-theft devices. First step was putting a bunch of pharmacy-type material behind locked displays so you had to call someone.
Then they added self-checkout. First a couple, then 5, 6, and 10. It needed two full-time attendants to get the line moving and help people with bad scans, missing barcodes, or telling them they have to go stand in a regular line if they want to buy alcohol.
A while later, an automated gate showed up. It had plastic saloon doors with LEDs and a claxon. Looked pretty complicated (and expensive). All self-checkout customers had to scan their receipt (after already scanning their own groceries) to open it. Many didn't know what it was about and just grumbled and pushed through the damn gate as the red lights flashed and the claxon blared. They needed another employee running after people who had pushed through the gate and explain they had to go back and scan their receipts. Many who were already on their way to their cars just ignored the attendant. Others used choice language.
A month later, the gate mechanism was still there but the saloon doors had been removed. They just sat there. Waiting for when they get rid of the whole self-checkout and go back to what worked just fine.
