this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Common Kroger L.

They just got done being bullied into dropping plans to go to 100% self-checkout, too.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I never really got the (E: thanks froztbyte, I meant user complaints here, there certainly are job complaints re self-checkout see reply below) complaints of self checkout, works great in most places in .nl I tried it.

And then the local Lidl got a self checkout. I now get why people hate those things, somebody really designed it with the idea of 'people in our stores are criminals we must catch' in mind. Turns out those styles of self checkouts are more common in EE as well. A small example of a problem with it. The part where you in other self checkouts would put your bag to put your stuff into was a scale, and because of that I couldn't put my bag there as I thought I was trying to sneak products through, and every item had to be placed there on the scale after weighing. (And then it didn't always work correctly). You could almost smell the security person who designed it going 'im gonna catch all those baddies!' (that could have also been me, I need to remember to wash my clothes). The machine also felt cheap, and the way the employees had to interact with it (they had to physically touch the machine with some key, and not use a tablet like all the other self checkouts (I had gotten something with alcohol in it)) didn't help this feeling.

Moral of the story, there are ways to do self checkout better than others.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

there's that (the high-trust vs low-trust designs), but also there's another dimension of it: cashier (and similar jobs) are one of the few low-end open to a lot of people in the US, which means this would kill yet another avenue of earning for many of them

(to which the fix is not a simple yes or no to whether self-checkout should be an option)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah I should have mentioned that, I do get those complaints. But most people I see complaining about self-checkout dont take that angle. Sorry I should have used my brain, realized where I was typing and not forgotten that people here tend to be more class aware.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I run into this process every time I visit Poland (mostly because I visit so rarely that I forget) and every time I'm astonished how seriously fucked up it is.

The most annoying part is having to scan a receipt in order to exit the self checkout area.

In the stark contrast to the above self checkout process in Switzerland works so smoothly. Mostly because nobody is subjected to the bullshit described above. There's even an option to grab a scanner, scan everything on the go and just pay at exit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@mlen @Soyweiser And yes, they do random checks (sorry, Stichproben :) ) but they mostly consist of a person scanning the first few items they grab out of the bag and if they were all scanned previously then you’re good to go. Takes about 10 seconds.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

'Steekproef/steekproeven/Steekproefsgewijs' Here.

Do note that I have some suspicions that these random checks are not random and are in fact tied to some ML algorithm combined with all the new cameras that are in supermarkets now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I got flashbacks from reading this.

You have to imagine that the future roadmap includes robot dog enforcers for capturing shoplifters.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Laundry Files curse strikes again

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

fr! BTW, speaking of class consciousness, I once got myself in big trouble with one of these things.

My SO and I had just finished reading Kraken by China Mieville when we went into Krogers to pick up a few things.

spoilerOne of our favorite characters, Wati, managed to overthrow the reigning order in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife after thousands of years of servitude by unionizing all of the magical assistants. Dude rocked. He is tragically lost in the final chapters of the book, and we both kind of had a grown-up cry over it.

The one open checkout line was 40 miles long (as is tradition), so she ducked into the self-checkout, and I said, "Wew, Wati would hate that we're doing this."

She didn't talk to me for the rest of the day, which was 100% fair.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

ah heh, that would’ve been the other leg of this plan, I imagine

“sorry about the unfortunate pricing” says the dead-ending support flow, which doesn’t have the ability to contact an actual human anywhere in the tree