That is what it is, but the person isn't watching just you, they're watching 10 at once, which means less queuing
I find I do it much faster than cashiers tend to, it's not a lot of effort and it takes less time out of my day than if they were to have done it for me
It’s the opposite for me, I feel liberated for not having to make small talk with the cashier. I can scan at my leisure and don’t have to really talk to anyone. I may be being observed but it’s less direct compared to going through the regular checkout.
I don't mind that, I really hate having to wait in queue for 25 minutes while someone checks out their family of 8's monthly shop in the only open lane when I've got a packet of biscuits and a couple tins of soup
Or wait for the cashier who's fed up with their job to scan things 3x slower than I would, ask me if I've got a loyalty card, ask me if I want a receipt etc
I am a rather impatient individual I realise but self checkouts solve those problem for me. I get why people like normal ones but self checkouts seem logical
I'm with you about the cashier. I don't see how having somebody working an extremely mechanical job is a good thing for them. It must be so depressing.
I understand that people need to earn a living, but using people to be robots is a waste of their potential. At least with self checkout it's a bit more dynamic for that one person monitoring several checkouts.
All of these issues are trivially solved by the supermarket being less of a dick. Pay your employees better, hire more people to shoulder the load - self checkout only seems logical because stores make the regular checkout process as shitty as possible.
They're always going to be able to have more self checkouts than manned checkouts, the more of them there are the more throughput so the faster you get in
I like it a lot. It's way quicker. Self check out greatly increase efficiency. One person can handle at least a few checkouts. Self checkouts also use way less space so there can be more checkouts than otherwise.
Here we also often have the option of carrying around a portable scanner when shopping so when it comes to paying you just dock the scanner, pay, walk out with your prepackaged bags.
Occasionally someone will check that you actually scanned everything but that's pretty rare and self checkouts still saves a lot of time.