I know this isn’t the most popular opinion, but I love self-checkout systems when they’re available and used correctly. My local supermarket closed 2 10-item-or-less lanes and put 6 self-checkouts in the same space. I probably make 2 trips/week to the store for fewer than 10 items, and being able to check myself out has been a huge time saver. There are still another 8 lanes with cashiers for larger shopping trips. If the supermarket can avoid the race to the bottom thinking of "well, we replaced 2 lanes, maybe we can also replace the other 8), it’ll be a nice compromise.
Now contrast that with my local Home Depot, which typically has 1-2 cashiers MAX at any given time. They have turned the checkout process into a tedious pain in the ass, and I’ve more or less stopped shopping there as a result.
When self-checkouts were first rolled out, my friends and I loved them.
As twenty-something introverted nerds, it helped a lot when buying “embarrassing” things like condoms.
You didn’t have to have the checkout person giving you the stink-eye because they’re ultra religious or something.
Now, twenty-some years on, they’ve been abused to the point that some places they’re all that’s ever open, Target and Walmart seem to be the biggest offenders there. When there’s a line down three different aisles because the self-checked is so backed up, it’s defeated the purpose of creating “efficiency.”
However, I’ve noticed that about a lot of business practices lately. We’ve rounded the bend and they’re still doing things that aren’t actually producing efficiency anymore. Like staffing with nothing but a skeleton crew, so anytime someone calls out sick, everything falls apart because you’re short a person. Personal opinion, but if one person missing work wrecks everything, that’s not an efficient way to schedule people.
It’s proof that these MBA business school chucklefucks are just repeating the shit they tell each other ad nauseum, because when it comes to real-world results the results are abysmal and inefficient.
That’s just lean. If one employee is sick, everything falls apart. If the delivery of a specific part to the production line is delayed, everything stops.
It’s all very intentional, because it’s lean. Having buffers of any kind costs money, while making everything lean makes it cheaper to run your company. As usual, all of this is also reflected on profits and dividend income.
And it pushes the cost of redundancy into the backs of the workers who didn’t call in sick, and have to work more hours or more tasks in a day or risk being responsible for an underperforming store.
If it actually hurt monthly profits, they wouldn’t do it. The fact that it may hurt longer term profits—through delays, employee retention, or quality control—either isn’t understood by the C suite, or they just don’t care.
No it’s probably the method that lands the most euros into the shareholders pockets, regardless of the effects in other places. Dollarstore in the US is this but then at an extreme, John Oliver did a nice piece on it.
My supermarket implemented these barcode scanner you can carry in the store so that you can scan and put your stuff in your grocery bags in your cart as you go, as well as some scales so that you can also scan those items paid by weight, which you can then scan at the self-checkout terminal. They also spot-check every 4th scanners and scan for random items in the cart to make sure you actually added them to your list as a theft-deterrent.
It’s way faster and less finicky than dealing with the scale that checks if you added the item you just scanned (and complains often that something’s wrong).
I hope this kind of system will stay, it’s really nice going to a self-checkout terminal and pay with your bags already filled.
when I worked at a grocery store for a bit (until a year go), we had that kind of system alongside the regular and self checkouts. It was interesting to see as I had never heard of it before, but it was very fast when it worked. That being said, almost nobody actually used it, and whenever the random checks happened it was almost always when someone had bought more items than usual (not sure if that actually triggers anything or if it was just coincidence) and the system for looking through everything was frustratingly slow for both me and the customers. I feel like the scanners are a great idea, but the theft-deterrent system for it could use a rethink, though Im not sure what exactly could best replace it
Meijers uses your own phone and their app as the scanner. GF loves it, but I find it’s more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth.
The only advantages I’ve seen are that you can use your own bags, and that nobody else uses it, so there are always 4 kiosks available to finalize your transaction.
Yeah. I’m fine with using them at wal mart most of the time, but the grocery store where I load up at once every other week just went full send on self checkout and outside of being a pita dealing with so many bags and no place to set them without going into the cart with stuff you haven’t even scanned yet, some have a stupid conveyor belt after you scan and if you let like ten items get on it the damned machines locks you out until a worker comes by and unlocks it after the belt has been cleared off. Total piece of junk, but there’s now usually only 1 real person.
I know this isn’t the most popular opinion, but I love self-checkout systems when they’re available and used correctly. My local supermarket closed 2 10-item-or-less lanes and put 6 self-checkouts in the same space. I probably make 2 trips/week to the store for fewer than 10 items, and being able to check myself out has been a huge time saver. There are still another 8 lanes with cashiers for larger shopping trips. If the supermarket can avoid the race to the bottom thinking of "well, we replaced 2 lanes, maybe we can also replace the other 8), it’ll be a nice compromise.
Now contrast that with my local Home Depot, which typically has 1-2 cashiers MAX at any given time. They have turned the checkout process into a tedious pain in the ass, and I’ve more or less stopped shopping there as a result.
When self-checkouts were first rolled out, my friends and I loved them.
As twenty-something introverted nerds, it helped a lot when buying “embarrassing” things like condoms.
You didn’t have to have the checkout person giving you the stink-eye because they’re ultra religious or something.
Now, twenty-some years on, they’ve been abused to the point that some places they’re all that’s ever open, Target and Walmart seem to be the biggest offenders there. When there’s a line down three different aisles because the self-checked is so backed up, it’s defeated the purpose of creating “efficiency.”
However, I’ve noticed that about a lot of business practices lately. We’ve rounded the bend and they’re still doing things that aren’t actually producing efficiency anymore. Like staffing with nothing but a skeleton crew, so anytime someone calls out sick, everything falls apart because you’re short a person. Personal opinion, but if one person missing work wrecks everything, that’s not an efficient way to schedule people.
It’s proof that these MBA business school chucklefucks are just repeating the shit they tell each other ad nauseum, because when it comes to real-world results the results are abysmal and inefficient.
That’s just lean. If one employee is sick, everything falls apart. If the delivery of a specific part to the production line is delayed, everything stops.
It’s all very intentional, because it’s lean. Having buffers of any kind costs money, while making everything lean makes it cheaper to run your company. As usual, all of this is also reflected on profits and dividend income.
edit: splling and gremmar
And it pushes the cost of redundancy into the backs of the workers who didn’t call in sick, and have to work more hours or more tasks in a day or risk being responsible for an underperforming store.
If it actually hurt monthly profits, they wouldn’t do it. The fact that it may hurt longer term profits—through delays, employee retention, or quality control—either isn’t understood by the C suite, or they just don’t care.
No it’s probably the method that lands the most euros into the shareholders pockets, regardless of the effects in other places. Dollarstore in the US is this but then at an extreme, John Oliver did a nice piece on it.
Link to said piece
deleted by creator
My supermarket implemented these barcode scanner you can carry in the store so that you can scan and put your stuff in your grocery bags in your cart as you go, as well as some scales so that you can also scan those items paid by weight, which you can then scan at the self-checkout terminal. They also spot-check every 4th scanners and scan for random items in the cart to make sure you actually added them to your list as a theft-deterrent.
It’s way faster and less finicky than dealing with the scale that checks if you added the item you just scanned (and complains often that something’s wrong).
I hope this kind of system will stay, it’s really nice going to a self-checkout terminal and pay with your bags already filled.
when I worked at a grocery store for a bit (until a year go), we had that kind of system alongside the regular and self checkouts. It was interesting to see as I had never heard of it before, but it was very fast when it worked. That being said, almost nobody actually used it, and whenever the random checks happened it was almost always when someone had bought more items than usual (not sure if that actually triggers anything or if it was just coincidence) and the system for looking through everything was frustratingly slow for both me and the customers. I feel like the scanners are a great idea, but the theft-deterrent system for it could use a rethink, though Im not sure what exactly could best replace it
Meijers uses your own phone and their app as the scanner. GF loves it, but I find it’s more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth.
The only advantages I’ve seen are that you can use your own bags, and that nobody else uses it, so there are always 4 kiosks available to finalize your transaction.
Yeah. I’m fine with using them at wal mart most of the time, but the grocery store where I load up at once every other week just went full send on self checkout and outside of being a pita dealing with so many bags and no place to set them without going into the cart with stuff you haven’t even scanned yet, some have a stupid conveyor belt after you scan and if you let like ten items get on it the damned machines locks you out until a worker comes by and unlocks it after the belt has been cleared off. Total piece of junk, but there’s now usually only 1 real person.