I started using grocery self-checkouts during COVID, but I’ve kept using them because there’s rarely a line (and I’m a misanthrope). I’d probably go back to using regular human checkouts if I had to dig through all my crap to prove what I bought.
Having said that, I’ve noticed myself making mistakes. I’ve accidentally failed to scan an item, and I’ve accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I’ve probably missed a few.
I guess the easiest answer is for grocery chains to reinvest some of those windfall profits and hire more cashiers.
Ha! Not that I steal, but I don’t care about supermarkets losing money from people stealing.
If they want their customers to know how to use the self-checkout machines better, they ought to pay them for training.
Always making a big deal out of theft for pennies or dollars from individual customers … but seldom highlighting the theft of thousands and millions by corporate heads at the top
Ya anyone with an ounce of brain cells predicted that theft would be an issue with self-checkputs but stores were blindsided by the savings they saw with getting rid of cashiers.
Also sometimes the machines a super finicky. It hasn’t happened very recently for me, but the amount of times you need an employee to reset the machine or enter a code is too damn high.
I steal, it’s very convenient. Great way to save no groceries.
Corporations want it both ways …
… docile workers that will work for little or no pay, which make them poor and more apt to want to steal in order to get cheap food
… honest customers that won’t steal, even if they become desperate because corporations refused to pay them a living wage to afford food
Economically speaking … it’s a no brainer … pay people a living wage and pay for more cashiers to work at the front … the company makes more money by securing purchases and keeping everyone honest and you maintain a workforce of highly paid people who go to spend their money with your stores anyway
Instead, we want to maintain a system where money and wealth continually keep getting shoved to ever smaller groups of people and we wonder why those of us at the bottom keep trying steal and rob the system just to get by.
‘If you give a man gun he can rob a bank; if you give man a bank he can rob the world.’
It’s not the job of corporations to treat people well, they’re an entity designed to maximize profit within the framework they operate in.
A democratic government is designed to represent the will of the citizens. If we aren’t happy with the way corporations treat us, then we should vote in a government that will regulate corporations to force them to treat us well.
The goal should be jobs that are boring to humans being automated completely AND not having theft because people don’t need to do it in order to have a good life.
When do you do when your choice in voting is carefully handpicked insiders from a group that has insulated themselves from outside forces over the past 50 odd years and the only choices with a real chance of winning are not going to work in their constituents best interest?
You join those parties and start voting at membership conventions.
That’s where actual policies get set.
When do you do when your choice in voting is …
The answer’s the same
- Pick the least bad
- Repeat
And also
A. Fight for better voting so that minority candidates with good ideas get the nod they need.
Picking the last bad is why we are slipping AS A WHOLE in the wrong direction.
Well let’s stick with the second-worst as long as it keeps the absolute worst out and their bootstraps bullshit and the dissolution of services that keep us from being Americans. They have even more work to do down south than we do, and I’d like those fools from Edmonton NOT to make us imitate that idiocy wholesale.
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No we’re not. Go look at some numbers.
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If your campaigning some ‘bootstraps’ idiocy, it’s easier than changing us into America and their Medical Bankruptcy if you just move there for a few years. Put the fear of the aristocracy in you.
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It get harder and harder for government to regulate corporations as they get bigger and bigger and are multinationals. That’s what happens with tax heavens.
I understand corporations motives, but the parent commenter explains well that it doesn’t work well if they are too greedy about it.
I get the whole living wage thing, but a cashier’s position was never a living wage, in the past it was a wage used to supplement a family’s income, or to pay for post secondary tuition. What changed? My local Wallyworld supercentre was the first in the region to go self serve, the manager said he couldn’t find staff, but in all honesty whether it was a living wage or not, I think he just didn’t want the staff.
The minimum wage was enacted to provide all citizens with a basic quality of life, including food and housing. Full stop. Everything after your incorrect statement is irrelevant as it is founded on an untrue principle.
My bad. I never knew a 16 year old working at a fast food outlet was supposed to support a family. I formally apologize as a white colonial male with priviledge
sTuDeNts sHoUlD wOrK tHroUgh cOlLeGe tO cOmE oUt dEbT fReE
Also
sTuDeNts sHoUld mAkE sLavE wAgEs cAUse tHeyRe yOunG.
Did you know McDonald’s workers in Denmark make over 20 an hour AND the food is cheaper than in the states?
This is the same logic my old man has. I like to ask him if his breakfast is being made by a 16 year old on a school day.
A friend of mine, her father was a bagging clerk at a grocery store for literally his entire life. He was able to support two kids and a spouse on that salary, and retired maybe ten years ago.
How far in the past? I’m sure I remember unionized cashiers at, I think, Safeway getting paid comparable to me as a unionized welder in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I could be completely wrong about that, because I think it was the whole store on strike, not just the cashiers.
A couple of my aunts were cashiers around the same timeframe, one of em a single mom. I don’t know how much they were paid, but they had decent apartments in Toronto around Roncesvalles with enough square footage for a kid and his cousins to get “up to speed” (I mostly recall the injuries)
That lines up with my memories in Saskatoon. Injuries aside :) By then I had my own son to manage!
AND LET THE CASHIERS FUCKING SIT FOR FUCK SAKE!
I never use the self-checkouts. That’s bullshit. I don’t work there.
I don’t blame anyone that takes advantage of the system that corporations are building.
I will happily use self checkouts if it gets me out of the store faster/ lets me interact with the least amount of people possible. I work retail, I need that energy for my job.
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100%. Life is too short to spend it standing in line.
I feel the same way, but sometimes I show up and the lines for actual cashiers is so long and there’s no one at self checkout. I can wait for ten minutes or I can scan my twizzlers and gtfo.
I don’t use self-checkouts in retail stores, and I hate that some stores, like Shoppers, will try so hard to direct me to one when I’m in the queue for the cashier. I have put down merch and walked out of stores over this stance, and I no longer visit some stores (like Shoppers).
I’m not entirely against automated purchase systems. A completely touchless system would get a pass from me. I am against retailers forcing their customers to manually scan and check-out their products though, all while treating them as untrustworthy by dictating where they can place their scanned merch, weighing the merch as it’s scanned, and checking the receipts after doing so.
Obviously, none of this addresses the question of whether fully-automated retail spaces are actually good for the working class as a whole.
My local No Frills has shut down their express lane and directs people to their newly built self checkout. It’s basically the express lane except instead of the cashier scanning my items and taking the payment. I scan the items and give payment while a cashier hovers over my shoulder to make sure I’m not stealing anything
I was at Walmart the other day and there were four employees standing around the self checkout. They all said bye to me when I left. Weird shit.
At that point, why not just have them work the tills??
Because cashiers are a different cost-centre, and thusly a different budget on the company’s financial statements. The VP or senior director that controls the cashiers’ services would end up looking bad if they had to retrench on that decision, and “looking bad” is death at that level.
A lot of what happens inside a company makes more sense when you realize it’s a power struggle between a bunch of narcissists and their lackeys, and that VPs and CEOs aren’t really as powerful as you’d think. Companies can be as inefficient and cut-your-nose-off-to-spite-your-face as any non-profit or public sector employer is, but we often don’t see it because we’ve been trained to assume that “private sector == well-oiled machine” and “public sector == clusterfuck”.
I was waiting to self checkout at a Walmart where there are 4 of around a dozen self-checkouts working. I asked about the ones that were not working and the employee told me that they can only open 4 units for every employee present. In order to have all 12 open they need 3 people there.
Unless there’s a barrier to entry (like a membership at Costco), they can’t force you to show your receipt or check your items.
You’re kinda wrong.
Even Costco can’t “force” you. What they can do is ban you, which any store can do. It’s harder to enforce without someone at the door checking, but totally possible.
What I do is deliberately go to a cashier, even if the line is extremely long, and I see more and more people doing the same. This forces more lines to open. One time they asked if I could use the self-checkout to speed up the process. I replied that if the items were cheaper at the self-checkout, sure, otherwise I’d stay in line.
This forces more lines to open.
Does it really, though? I have yet to see a rollback on self-checkouts.
I noticed this at my local Loblaws. At first they only had one to two lines open and they were extremely long. Now they have several lines open and it’s very fluid.
Oh, nice. I guess hope is not lost!
Theft is one thing and who knows what the numbers actually are for self checkout. Even with theft and us making a mistake or two, they don’t have to pay cashiers, I’m sure they’re coming out wayyyyy ahead.
I doubt they’re coming out way ahead considering these cashier’s usually get paid minimum wage, £10 and hour to not have people steal is probably more profitable.
Then they should be delighted to hear that I refuse to use self-checkout. Problem solved, right?
All I can do is act with ethics and integrity. The rest is their god-damned problem. I can’t say I have ever been harassed at the door though. Maybe this was just one security guard going overboard.
I’ve never seen anyone stealing food and neither did you…
It does make it much easier to steal, it’s very convenient.
Any time I’m buying more than 3 items, I typically just go straight to a human-operated register.
The grocery store near me has the most annoying security feature on their self-checkout machines. After you scan your item, it must be placed on the checkout shelf before you can do anything else. If the weight is “unexpected”, you’re stuck asking for help. If you have a full cart of items, you can’t parallelize tasks because of this deadlock; the machine refuses to scan the next item until your current purchase is on the checkout shelf and verified.
After you scan your item, it must be placed on the checkout shelf before you can do anything else. If the weight is “unexpected”, you’re stuck asking for help.
My grocery store had this when there were only a couple of self-checkout machines. When COVID got and they built a bunch more, the new machines didn’t verify the weight.
Removing the weight verification would make me reconsider self-checkout machines. There are other stores that I frequent where the weight verification is off, but my grocery store seems to be the only one to keep it enabled.
The part that grinds my gears is if I don’t allow the machine to verify the weight and scan the next item, I have to sit through the entire TTS message that explains what I’m doing wrong before I can correct my mistake and move on.
Lol. That sounds like a real pain. I can see why you don’t use it.
Am I the only one that hands my stuff to the staff member standing there and asks them for help? I really don’t mind saying I don’t understand how those things work, as I truly don’t care enough to pay even the slightest bit of attention to them… If there’s a staff member just standing there watching, why can’t they help me as a customer?
I’m always polite about it, except that one time at Dollarama where there was 4 people standing there acting like I was being rude for asking them to ring me thru a till rather than use a self checkout. That time, I just put my stuff down and walked out. If they don’t want to help me, I’m not giving them my money.
