Self-Serve Checkouts

The self-serve checkout. I don't get it. Why do they seem to be springing up almost everywhere, and why do people use them? Well, aside from the initial thrill of trying something new, that is. In my experience they do not save time, and the combination of self-scanning and self-bagging means you're doing far more work than you'd be doing normally. I would rather spend an extra minute standing there waiting my turn, and let the person who's being paid to do the scanning and bagging* do all the work. Usually, the only reason I will use one is if there's one empty, there's already several people at the open staffed checkouts and I'm only getting a couple items, but it's a choice I often regret.

Scanning my items is such a slow process. First, I scan one item, then it waits for me to place it in a bag, or at least in the bagging area. Then I have to wait for it to tell me to go ahead and scan the next item. In the time it takes for me to scan my items, I could have already finished paying if I were at a regular checkout. And another reason it takes so long is that I usually have to take the time to look at the item to find where the barcode is to make sure I scan the right part. The professional cashiers do this for a living, so they seem to always know exactly where to scan right away, or at least have mastered the knack of finding the barcode so fast it doesn't really slow things down.

And heaven forbid I should remove anything or set anything else in the bagging area during the process. When I tried the new self-serve checkouts at one store, I took my cloth bag I brought from home out of my pocket and set it down in the bagging area. Makes sense, doesn't it? Put a bag in the place you're going to be using it? But, no, the machine complained about an unexpected object and wouldn't continue until I removed it, and a staff member also came over to see if I was having problems using the checkout. And if I'm just getting one item and don't need a bag, I have to either set it down in the bagging area anyway, or specifically press a button to tell it I'm not going to bag the item.

And then, some scanners are just plain hard to use. During one of my Ikea shopping trips, I noticed that they had new self-checkouts. Since there were fairly long lines for the other checkouts, I thought I'd try it out. At Ikea, they use hand-held scanners because many of the items being purchased there are large, bulky, and/or heavy and impossible to lift up to a stationary scanner. But just as impossible for me, was holding the scanner just right and at the right distance to correctly scan my items. I actually had to get help from one of the staff and even with guidance it still took several tries for me to successfully scan one of the items.

Here's the weird thing. You'd expect that the stores would give some sort of discount to the customer (even if it was just 0.5%), since the customer is the one doing all the work. Plus, the store also saves money with these machines because they only need one staff member overseeing the whole bank of checkouts, rather than one person per checkout.

But maybe self-serve checkouts are just a passing fad, and within the next few years they'll disappear? That actually happened at the local Walmart. They put in a whole bunch of self-serve checkouts, and they took them all away less than a year later. So who knows? I just hope things don't continue down this path and stores start going completely self-serve, or at least not until they find a way to significantly improve the experience.

* I never quite understand why the cashiers don't bag groceries at the Real Canadian Superstore. They could say that it's a cost saving measure and they're passing the savings along to you through their lower prices, but I don't buy that. Even Walmart doesn't make you bag your own stuff. Heck, dollar store cashiers even bag things for you and they're the epitome of cheapness.