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Yeah it's not the customers at fault here. Nobody asked for the cashiers to be cut down to 1 or 2 (ever) and replaced with self checkouts.

I was at one such shitty grocery store the other day. We'll call it Roger but with the letter 'K' omitted. They have these large self checkouts with conveyors. Up until about 2 weeks ago, you could scan your items at a normal rate like the regular cashiers do. It was convenient, and it was glorious. The older self checkouts were horribly slow and were only meant for a basket's worth of groceries, so this was a welcome, but very temporary, improvement.

An employee told me they "cranked up the security" as he came over for the third time because that ~~self checkout~~ bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur kept calling for backup. You can only scan items once every 3 seconds and have to wait for it every time. I've got a cart full of groceries, and they expect me to scan them at a snail's pace. If you scan too many items (5 apparently?), you have to walk to the end and bag them even though there's plenty of goddamned room on the conveyor. Then walk back and scan a few more. Rinse, repeat. (Until recently, you could scan your whole cart, load it on the conveyor, pay, and then bag everything up at once like a normal person.)

I was absolutely livid, grabbed what few groceries I'd already bagged, put them back in my cart, abandoned the transaction, and waited in line for the one lonely human cashier.

She was confused because some of my stuff was already bagged. Told her why and she just sighed and said yeah. I jokingly said I'd like to give the manager an earfull and she said I should, but it won't do any good. And she was likely right because this reeks of corporate heavy handedness.

Needless to say, I'm never going back to Roger (with a K) anymore. I only went there for the fuel points and because it was close to my workplace, but it's no longer worth it.