Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech::When Walmart’s anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.
I’d get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone’s time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it’s not about preventing theft. It’s about proving a point: that corporations control you.
I’m sorry but I don’t think that makes very much sense.
Retail theft is a real problem for a company’s bottom line. Enough so that Target is pulling out of San Francisco, IIRC. And self-checkout is one of the easiest ways to pull it off.
Why would a corporation frantically seeking quarter over quarter growth spend money to “prove a point” about control?
How about this. If self check out is a problem go back to paying cashiers.
No way. I don’t need someone to frantically scan my items while I barely manage to bag them in time.
Then they need to rehire baggers, too.
So is CEO greed though. And they could choose to use that money to balance their budget, not ruin my experience of being out and about.
Yes, they absolutely could and should. That wasn’t my point. I just don’t think it makes any sense to say that they made the change to their self checkout to “prove a point” about controlling people.
I’ll never understand why people like you care about a mega corporation’s bottom line. The executives are still making billions, while keeping their employees as poor as they can get away with.
Target will survive without San Francisco. Even if they fail, the top dogs will just liquidate and take a fat paycheck home, enough for a 1000+ employees to retire and live off of for the rest of their lives, and they’ll just pocket it all. Fuck 'em.
I don’t give a flying fuck about a megacorporation’s bottom line. Fuck Walmart. Fuck Target. I don’t disagree with a single thing you just said.
I just didn’t think it made any sense to say that they made an expensive change to their self-checkout just to “prove a point” about controlling people.
But apparently no one knows how to read. And once some of you saw downvotes you knew everything you needed to know about what I think.
Enough so that Target is pulling out of San Francisco, IIRC
ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. They’re blaming theft, but that’s not it. Theft might be a part of it, but the stats nearby contradict that. We don’t have access to their internal theft metrics, but the city data doesn’t pan out. When there are stores (mission district) that have higher theft and are staying open, then is it really theft?
Or is it poor retail performance since WFH is the new king and people live in the suburbs more than in the city. When continue to order online more and more instead of shop at a physical store.
Theft is an easy way to blame other people without providing evidence. It’s not the CEO’s failure to adapt to changing market conditions, it’s the poors! It’s their fault! /s
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This.
Both Walmarts in Portland OR closed a few months ago. Good fucking riddance
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I’ll call for their manager and attack the manager specifically. Is there a term for that yet?
The definition is wrong. There’s nothing “self” about them if an employee has to hold your hand throughout the entire process.
Perhaps they should be paying the customer with savings since they’re saving so much money not paying a full-time checkout attendant per register. The customer is now the employee.
Meh, I don’t mind using self-checkout when it’s actually self-checkout. I hate standing in lines and my anxiety doesn’t do me any favors so I’m all in favor if the system actually works.
It’s gone further here… we have shops with scanners so you scan the goods as you go around… in theory speeding up checkout but…
- 25% of the time you end up selected for ‘random check’ so an employee has to come and rescan everything anyway
- If there are any ‘restricted’ items a like painkillers, a different employee has to come over and allow them.
Given the chronic understaffing meaning you’re basically in a queue for attention, it frequently takes longer to get through the ‘rapid’ checkouts than it would if I simply queued up and got someone else to do it. But as far as the supermarket thinks they’re winning as they pay fewer people.
Companies only want to shift to self checkout because they think they’ll make more money.
It’s all about profit.
I was fooled, I thought it was going to be better for me. And it was for awhile, because I can check myself out faster than the average employee.
However, the average customer sucks at checking themselves out. So the line for self checkout sucks. Stores use scales to make sure you’re scanning the right number of things, but that means that I have to put everything down on a tray, and then put it back in my cart after.
Worst of all, I check out so fast that I regularly get stopped because I guess I look like a thief. No, I didn’t steal anything, I just don’t want to waste any more of my precious time in this depressing fluorescent establishment.
You can tell who’s never worked as a cashier because they take fucking forever to check out
My local grocery market solved the problem of customers sucking by just adding more self checkout and it worked I think. I don’t know I go even when it’s super busy and never have to wait and if I do it’s for like 20 seconds. Wegmans for what it’s worth . Overall the quality of Wegmans has gone down though the past few years.
This is the store policy making the experience suck.
Random checks at Kaufland (European supermarket chain) only require the employee to visually inspect your cart to see if you scanned everything and they only need to rescan like four items, to verify the employee actually took the time to check instead of just waving you through, so it’s all very fast.
Also, all employees can clear restricted items, so that’s fast too. My only gripe is that alcohol-free beer also triggers the age verification, but that’s a minor issue.
I love the hand scanners since thanks to them wonky scales and weight limits are a thing of the past. They really make checkout faster, as long as the store isn’t using them in a boneheaded way.
Non-alcoholic beer still has a little alcohol in it
I don’t understand people that get upset and hostile at employees in these situations. When I go through self checkout I go in with expectations already set that it’s very likely that at some point during the checkout process the machine is going to trigger an alarm and an employee will need to come over and override the alarm. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does my first reaction isn’t to get all pissy and throw things at the cashier.
If you have no patience for this sort of thing, then go through the regular checkout. See if it takes longer going that route.
What regular checkout? Around here they are all closed down and only self checkout is available.
Take all your shit to customer service and check out there.
It’s an asshole move everyone should use until they stop understaffing checkout.
What customer service? That shit’s closed too.
I might uniroically start doing this. Or I would if I thought for a second it’d do anything other than inconvenience the employees…
I would LOVE to go through a regular check out! If only we still actually had more than 2 open in a full supermarket. It’s not about time taken, though, it’s about the sheer level of inconvenience that it’s become. It’s an active pain in the ass to have to do the job that used to be done by employees, with shitty machines that yell at you every few minutes, while actively being recorded and treated like a criminal, and have to go through another checkpoint where they’re going to once again actively treat you like a criminal and look through your receipt. Or I can spend like, 30 minutes in line at one of the two open cashiers.
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We all make decisions like that daily. Just because I’m choosing one slightly more convenient shitty thing over another doesn’t mean the one I’m choosing is good. It just has a utility. It also only has that utility because the other option is being actively neglected.
It also wasn’t too long ago that I worked retail, at Walmart no less. Even after self checkout became popular, we’d have 4-10 cashiers depending on the traffic at any given time. They’d even call employees who worked completely different sections, like myself, to run registers if they got backed up.
I think a lot of it has to do with that last part of your comment. The amount of times I’ve gone to the grocery store to find there’s no register open other than the self checks or that there’s 1-2 open at a huge grocery store with a 6-8 people in line for them and no self check line… People are being forced into self checking when they don’t want to. These people are obviously going to be more easily upset by issues with the self check machines. Walmart in my limited experience (try to never buy anything there if I can avoid it) is the worst offender I’ve seen.
The store has chosen to save money by pushing work onto customers via a buggy robot overlord.
Employees are the only person you can complain to.
Just more billionaires making things shitty for everyone.
Yeah I do agree that complaining to employees is useless, but it’s also a really frustrating situation and it’s not like you can get the CEO on the phone to complain. I wouldn’t personally complain at an employee, but I do get how someone might in the midst of such frustration.
As a consumer, what’s your other option?
Shop elsewhere.
Where? Idk about your area, but in mine all the options are big corporate chains
And even in areas where family owned retail stores still survive, a lot of people can’t afford to shop at them, because they’ll always have higher prices than the big chains, and with the price gouging that’s gone on since 2020, many families are struggling to make ends meet as it is.
Yeah, it sucks for sure. I personally choose to spend a bit more and buy a bit less to go to somewhere that doesn’t suck horribly, but that’s a lot of effort and a privilege that others may not have. I’ll never condemn a person for shopping at walshart, due to that. Still though, shop elsewhere when you can, buy minimal when you can’t. That’s about the only legal recourse we have as consumers.
The only viable legal option is to vote with your wallet. I know elsewhere you said that’s not an option in your area, and that sucks. Still, do what you can to shop at other places, even if you can’t nix walshart entirely.
Edit that was another guy who said that, my bad. Statement still standa tho
Pretty much nothing, hence why I said I get it 🤷🏼♂️
I could justify it if even a fraction of a percent of the savings were actually passed on, or hell, even distributed to the few employees they still have. But no, it lines the fat cats pockets.
That’s the worst part. It has gotten so miserable for both employees and customers and none of the profits made from these changes has gone back to those most affected by them.
Hey remember when they gave you free bags, bagged it for you, and rang you up? That was kinda nice. Now the price is three times as high and all that service stuff is gone. The day before Thanksgiving is going to be hell this year at my supermarket
If you are going to go on the day before, I’d recommend doing your shopping at 5:00am and be done by 06:00 am. That’s when the day shift comes in. I wouldn’t bring a cartful of groceries to the check stands before that time though, nite crew will be stressing out.
Notes and thanks
Those free plastic bags deteriorate into toxic materials that are presently all over the inside of your body. You had to wait in a slow line for people to bag the wrong things together and sometimes scan the same thing twice. Now I have my own canvas bags that last forever, I never scan my things twice, and my shit is bagged with the right things together based on where they go in my home.
The irony is that the plastic bags became the norm over the paper bags because they were thought to be more environmentally friendly, over the infinitely recyclable paper that literally grows on trees.
Paper is not infinitely recyclable.
Wow…
I remember when plastic bags became a thing. We were encouraged to use a plastic bag to save a tree.
The manufacture of plastic bags produces much less carbon emissions than paper bags. Consider the costs of logging, transportation of wood, the manufacture process which uses a ton of water, the transportation of paper which is heavier than plastic which means higher fuel costs, etc. And also consider that most trees we cut down from paper come directly from farms which often require irrigation or items like fertilizer (which have carbon costs). Although not every tree farm uses that, some are more “natural growth”
Plastic bags tend to be more durable and re-usable than paper bags. Unfortunately most people don’t re-use either.
Of course, the main issue is the fact that they take hundreds of years to decompose and end up everywhere. Also, plastics come directly from petrochemicals which are a finite resource. There are ways to create plastic from renewable oils, although that raises the carbon emissions significantly.
I think this is an excellent example to give people to illustrate that a lot of times, the choices we make as a society about simple things can be counter-intuitive. Often times, we’re making decisions about what bad thing we want less. Do we want plastic building up in landfills and oceans, or do we want the global temperature to stop rising?
Of course, these aren’t the only two options and it’s not a 1 to 1 linear relationship. But it’s an interesting example.
My body is fine but thank you for your “sincere” concern.
I went on the fast lines, maybe you need help with this. The trick is to look for lines that are shorter not longer. Easy mistake to make.
I never had an issue with the cashier making a mistake and I have never been so freaken insane that I need to have the items in my bag in the reverse order of removal. Maybe they made so many mistakes scanning you because they were distracted by your fugly bag and advice on what order to put things in. You don’t want to waste a single half second of your life putting groceries away. That could add up over an entire lifetime to a whole minute or so!
Like a lot of the crap in your body that is hurting you its not obvious until you get a health issue or cancer later and then noticeable statistically not individually EG you look at two populations and one had more folks with a much higher incidence of cancer or auto immune diseases or what have you. The fact that its not obvious doesn’t make it any less real. Those free bags were closer to free cigarettes.
I used to manage cashiers and handled 10 of thousands of transactions and observed more. Like any human beings they do occasionally make mistakes. If you haven’t noticed anyone EVER making a mistake ringing you up it means you don’t pay attention.
I don’t tell cashiers how they should bag things because that’s obnoxious but I do know that I do a better job of not putting fresh things with meat or things that are liable to be squished with canned food or all the non-food items together.
If you avoid 4 minutes waiting once per week and 2 minutes putting away things over your life you will save over 300 hours. You aren’t liable to be awake for much more than 100 hours a week so that is like 3 weeks of your life.
We are just lying now I see.
Could you just not follow the math. Do you not believe I was an illustrious supervisor of cashiers, or do you just not believe microplastics are bad for you?
I agree with the top level comment but this one reeks of toxicity, so unnecessary
Switching from single use plastic to multi-use plastic has greatly increased carbon emissions of production. You also have to reuse the new plastic bags over 100 times for them to break even, emissions wise. (https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-cotton-bags/)
I agree with you that canvas bags are better overall, but IMO we should move back to paper. It’s WAY easier to reuse paper products, gardeners love the paper bags, and they break down quickly even if they are littered somewhere. There are some tradeoffs, such as transportation costs being higher because they are thicker than single use bags, but if you compare paper to multi-use bags, it’s a fairly moot point.
Also, I’d still rather someone bag my shit for me. I’ve had so many things broken or otherwise damaged by the cashier haphazardly tossing my stuff into the cart just so I can walk 5 foot and take 10 minutes to pack my own stuff. Personal preference, but it should be given as an option imo.
Multi use plastic bags are a moronic half measure agreed. What some places are doing is using paper for disposable bags and selling actually long term re-usable bags for a little more like a 2-5 bucks a bag mostly.
Yeah the idea that people buying a dozen polyester bags made of substantially more plastic that still gets thrown away by people on average is not great. Our fast scramble approach to solving issues is often awful like that though. Look at the waste that the turn from plastic straws caused all because of a school report about turtles.
Don’t get me started on fucking paper straws…
And cats! Cats love paper bags!
And cats! Cats love paper bags!
I don’t understand. You’ve had cashiers break your shit, and therefore you prefer they do the bagging?
Bring your own bags => cashiers toss stuff into cart and break things, because you have to bag your own stuff.
Cashiers bag stuff => less things break, because stuff is bagged then put in the cart.
Here, everything goes out on a belt where you have to bag it yourself. The cashier never touches your cart or items apart from scanning them.
Costco recently came to my country and it feels so incredibly weird to wait for someone to first unpack your stuff and for someone else to scan it, and then someone else packs it again.
I am not sure how to put it, but I almost feel humiliating in a way.
It’s also pretty common in grocery stores to walk around with a handheld scanner which you dock when done so you can pay. The great thing about this is that you bag your stuff while shopping and when you pay, it’s already bagged.
What country is this if you don’t mind me asking. If uncomfortable with answering , no pronlem. Also, they have hand scanners for everyone?
Yes, anyone that is a (free) store Member can use the scanners.
Note that not every store has those, only bigger grocery stores do.
Yeah. Piling stuff on another belt so we can bag it ourselves is the norm here as well. I find it fascinating that I will simply pile everything into a haphazard pile on my side of the cashier, but when the cashier scans it, he/she usually piles it up into a very nice and tidy organized group.
I see, that explains the confusion.
Costco recently came to my country and it feels so incredibly weird to wait for someone to first unpack your stuff and for someone else to scan it, and then someone else packs it again.
I’m in the states, but I still kind of feel weird having them do this. That said, they’re much faster at it than me and lines are always huge, so they probably prefer it this way.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. In the olden times, a bagger (or the cashier) nicely packed the stuff into bags making sure not to break shit. All the stores around me now just yeet shit back into the cart after scanning it with no regard to what it lands on or if it breaks.
I can’t remember the last time I let someone ring me up at Walmart. Self checkout was always faster because most of the attended registers were closed. Most of my adult life I’ve bagged myself and idk if I’d want to go back tbh. The tech is annoying to deal with though
Trust me it was nice. Value adds keep going down and prices keep going up. Keep hearing how everyone is unemployed and how CEO pay keeps rising. Biggest shareholder of Walmart has a mega yacht, maybe could have spent some of that money hiring people at the register.
Whatever, enshitification continues. Now if you excuse me I want to watch a fifteen second yt vid and will have to watch a 30 second ad first from some alt-right “news” service that hates trans people.
Ahh yes the value of getting something for free for almost 2 decades goes down the moment they actually want people to watch the ads or ask people to pay.
I can’t even count the number of Epoch Times ads I have gotten telling me how the media invented trans people. I keep blocking them but they keep coming back. Do you support that ad as well? How about the Prague-U ones where a woman explains how the Southern Strategy is a myth? This morning I got one about the Turtle Twins, the author explained how slavery wasn’t really all that bad.
They even used to bring your groceries out to your car, put them in your trunk, and return the cart for you.
Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice “pay by cash” without a “back” button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.
normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned
Lol, that meat had a serial number.
Yes, if I get if from the butcher inside the supermarket, it has a “local” EAN13 barcode that “costs” the total of all parts I got.
Sounds like a badly configured system IMO. It shouldn’t take things out of stock or prevent rescanning until the sale was actually made (the customer paid).
Meat heist is unironically a real thing
We hang cattle rustlers round here…
Dang, from one ‘local’ establishment to the next.
And I bet you’re paying more, too.
This post has reminded me that I should go steal from Walmart soon.
I get this is was said playfully. However, you really should not. They always press charges and will advocate for jail time. In some states, that’s a month of jail over something as small as a candy bar.
Lol nah, if you get caught you were making it look too obvious. There’s a fine and subtle art to stealing from Walmart.
Have fun getting arrested 3 years later with the facial recognition technology
Not if you keep it under the felony limit, or just have the common sense to not piss off the employees.
Not true. I have unfortunately met people who were arrested for candy bars, a snickers specifically. Now with AI, they will track your face, find your address, and issue a warrant automatically. It doesn’t take any effort, because once the software is written, it just runs. I’m not anti-shoplifting. I am pro being informed before doing things.
Yeah no, that’s not happening at any Walmart anywhere, your claim is entirely baseless and without evidence.
Your friend probably did something to piss off the workers and it wasn’t stealing. It possibly could have been racism. Maybe even bad luck. But it is an exception that proves the rule.
Walmart doesn’t have or use AI like that. No one has been arrested for stealing from Walmart on the order of an AI. Unless you have evidence, this claim is dismissed.
I’ve personally witnessed it but fuck me right
Security is a cat and mouse game. There’s always a way to steal from anyone, especially a convenience-oriented business.
i’m not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that they make a big deal out of it even if the item is small, and it’s important to know your risk if you’re going to do something risky.
It’s funny, my local Walmart ditched the weight checking part of the self checkout so it’s quick and easy, yet every time I go at least one person has managed to fuck up badly enough to need to call help over
Meanwhile I’m getting a decent discount on my purchase, which is nice
You’re stealing?
Unexpected item in bagging area?
Fuck you buggy robot, keep up. I’m moving on to the next one.
Didn’t get scanned? The store is getting the quality of checkout that it paid for.
Ah so stealing. Got it.
Morally maybe, but legally no. Theft requires criminal intent. If the person is honestly attempting to pay for the goods and errors in the payment method cause an over or underpayment, that’s not theft.
It’s theft if you know that the item didn’t scan and you just bag it anyway. You can ask for help. But no keep stealing and trying to justify it.
It’s not theft if it’s from Walmart 😉
It’s not theft if there’s no criminal intent. If the lack of scanning was caused by equipment malfunction then there’s no reason to think that they intended to steal.
It’s simply the customer getting paid for the labor of being a cashier. If someone does labor for a company, the company pays them.
I refuse to do the unpaid labor of fixing their shitty robot.
If bad business decisions cause accidental shrinkage, oh well.
Lot of mental hoops your jumping through to justify stealing.
Why are u defending a corporation that’s making you do a job for free that people used to get paid to do.
Because we live in a society where stealing is wrong. Sorry you don’t like self checkouts, but that doesn’t give you the right to steal. I don’t like speed limits, but I still follow them.
Here’s an idea; if you don’t like self checkouts, don’t use them.
I’ll go there. Robot fucks up, I’m stealing.
I tried to pay. Fuck em.
The store is stealing labor from you.
Stealing from Walmart is a community service.
Fucking Kroger’s (grocery store in the US) self checkouts yell at you if you have more than like 6 to 8 items, so you have to wave down an employee to continue scanning.
Then it complains for more than 15 and you have to wait for the employee again.
What’s the point? How often do people go to a grocery store to get less than 15 things? It’s just frustrating.
They also have random items that will ALLWAYS trigger the “You need to get an employee” alarm.
Like goddamn, I just want some fucking oatmilk.
Bitch! You aren’t old enough for that oatmilk!!!
That has to be a location specific thing, because I’ve gone to dozens of different Krogers and I’ve never had that issue with the self checkouts. The worst that happens to me is the scales will get twitchy sometimes and think I doubled up on something, and won’t let me continue scanning till an employee resets it. But even that’s a pretty rare occurrence.
They’ve just recently replaced all their self checkout stations with new ones that do that, so maybe the ones near you are still the old ones.
They actually just installed a bunch of new stations in the Kroger closest to me, so I’m reasonably certain they aren’t old. The ones they installed don’t do what you’re talking about though.
I’ve only seen that pop up when I go to pay. Never when just scanning. What’s weird is it’s not consistent, even at the store I frequent. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t. Last time they had canned soup on sale I bought like 30 and didn’t get any messages.
Maybe they should keep some non-self check registers open then. I was a grocery store cashier in high school and college and I got $20/hour for doing it (adjusted for inflation). Right now if I see a store only has self-check open I will walk out, what I want to do is start tracking my time then mailing in a 1099 and an invoice for my time.
Ever since the pandemic, curbside pickup has been the norm at our house for groceries.
We use Kroger, not Walmart, but I had a recent experience relevant to share.
I was out running an errand and my spouse asked me to go grab a couple items from Kroger since it was nearby.
I hadn’t been inside the store in like a year, so I was surprised to see gates at the door that opened and closed upon approach and walking away.
Also, while shopping, at some point suddenly the wheels on the cart locked up, causing me to bang the ever loving shit out of my shins on the cart frame. That’s when I got to learn about the new “anti-theft” wheel lock tech being used on all carts now.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to flip the goddamn cart over and kick the absolute shit out of it… but I knew that wouldn’t help.
…But if I read a story about someone going and drilling holes in every single one of those cart wheels, or setting fire to them all, or breaking the gates, I would laugh.
I imagine as soon as someone gets something worse than bruised shins and brings a lawsuit against these stupid companies, we will see these stupid things go away… but until then, I’m not fucking stepping foot inside any store that has that bullshit.
I’ve had too many incidents with spoiled or opened food to ever use curbside pickup.
My wife once ordered some dried basil or similar herb, they said they were out of stock and substituted it with an actual live potted basil plant. We both thought it was hilarious, but also annoying.
The grocery store in my city became straight dystopian. It was always a sort of sketchy area but nothing that bad. After the pandemic, they added a second armed, vested private security in black, one-way turnstiles going in and out, increased cameras with screens on every aisle that showed you with the words “RECORDING IN PROGRESS”. They even added locks to the frozen section, so you had to get an employee to help you buy ice cream. The police and security would tackle clearly unwell people who were shoplifting food, face pushed into the concrete type of thing.
Jesus Christ that all sounded (unfortunately) normal until the locked freezers. That’s a step too far. I mean, all of it is, but that’s actually a ridiculous concept lmao
It’s pretty funny to think, living in the US, nothing is odd about a privately employed person with a gun guarding groceries or people being violently arrested when they steal said groceries out of necessity.
I wonder if that’s a response to that stupid internet trend of opening ice cream containers to lick it and then put it back.
The WHAT NOW?
Luckily it’s not trending anymore, but that was a thing.
The “bad” grocery store near me has taken to posting security cam pictures of people they catch stealing which is a terrible, awful, extrajudicial thing to do, but I would be lying if I said it does not make for some hilarious pictures. It’s a big wall of shame right as you enter the store.
The police and security would tackle clearly unwell people who were shoplifting food, face pushed into the concrete type of thing.Cops can generally get away with that. Store security guards assaulting customers open the store up to a lawsuit.
True, the store security usually didn’t actually do anything, the police would be doing that while the security talks to them, but on two occasions I did see the security tackle a person.
My wife’s creepy racist incel uncle had a fit once when we went into a store and he saw himself on the security camera. He said he doesn’t like seeing himself. My sister had the same reaction to seeing herself pre transition and apparently it’s a common theme among trans people who haven’t realized it yet.
I know it’s a bit of a tangent, but he’s rabidly transphobic up to the point just short of being blatantly hateful. He’s obsessed with my sister and other trans people and made a lot of obsessive and creepy jokes about dating them.
This post triggered my PTSD.
Yikes, I hope you don’t have to deal with him anymore.
That’s more a body dysmorphia thing than specifically a trans thing. For instance, I hate seeing myself too, and I’m just fat, not trans. I disapprove of the appearance I have, and dislike being reminded of that. Yes, I’m working on it.
He’s a completely out of shape incel, so that’s a possibility. Considering everything else, he seems deep in the closet. He started mentioning trans stuff all the time before he found out that my sister is trans, which caused him to have an existential crisis, because he was obsessed with her and trying to get her to date him. He also has a creepy latent obsession with Russian women. He constantly talked about other trans women and joked about dating them and went through an entire hypothetical situation of introducing a specific trans woman he was obsessed with to his family.
Hackers messing with those anti-theft wheels: https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=fBICDODmCPI
I’m surprised it locked up like that. About 15 years ago I was a frequent customer in a store that had these and I never encountered any problem with it, nor did I hear of anyone else encountering a malfunction while using them.
That store implemented those locks because they were the closest supermarket to a college campus. Some students were taking the carts back to their dorms and chaining them up to a tree with bicycle chains. They would also use those carts to go shopping in a nearby supermarket of another store chain.
Different continent though, so it’s probably not entirely the same technology. People like reinventing the wheel.
People like reinventing the wheel.
I see what you did there.
I always try and smash my cart into the gates extra hard every time I go through
Is this an American thing? We had these things in Europe for years, and I never heard of anyone having problems.
Older people still prefer regular checkout, scary computers and that sort of deal.
I’m in europe and the issues I’ve had are getting an alert that an employee needs to come to check and sometimes that can take awhile.
One store also has a scanner so you self scan as you go BUT the paying part is at an actual employee instead of a machine. Every damn time they are alerted to randomly pick some items from your cart to check if any weren’t scanned. And every damn time they pick the items at the bottom of my basket and damage stuff because of it. Or sometimes there is no one at the checkout so i stand there with my basket/cart and scanner like an idiot for 3-5 minutes for an employee to show up. That might not seem like a long time but it sure feels like it…
Yep this is exactly why I refuse to do the scan as you go, it ends up seriously frustrating. Self scan at checkout is fine if you don’t have paracetamol or alcohol, otherwise you’re waiting ages for assistance.
It’s definitely an overall worse experience
Yes. The technology options for self checkout in the US are terrible, so the user experience is terrible. All the horror stories in this thread are true. The stores are terrified of theft but refuse to hire checkers. There’s also way too many grocery stores, so there’s little money to put into technology upgrades and appropriate levels of staffing. For example, I am less than 5 minutes drive from 9 grocery stores. Extend that to 10 minutes and I’ve got over 20. Silly.
That’s crazy. We have a designated checker for each self checkout.
We have about 1 employee per 12 self checkout stations.
Kinda what I meant, too.
In more modern places, they have little machines that they can solve any issue without having to stand up.
In older places, they have to walk around, and they are assigned to like 6-10 machines.
Kinda funny how much faster Europe has adopted retail tech lately. Last time I was there 7 years ago they were still mostly using cash for transactions, but now the cashiers get a little buttmad if I don’t tap my phone to the scanner immediately. I hardly see anyone using phone payments in the US and I don’t understand why it hasn’t caught on. At least not where I live. It’s about as fast and convenient as it gets.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m in a major city right now and kit everywhere in Europe is like this.
Pretty much in any major town in my tiny country, this is the case also.
In my nearest supermarket (europe) it is a pain. You go through self checkout cause it should be faster, but it works like shit, and you have to wait a lot until someone comes to fix the problem. We are civilized, though, we don’t cause problems to the shopkeepers. Still a pain, though
It’s not the system that bugs me. It’s the amount of time it takes for the employees to actually come and get the shit going smoothly again. Even when it’s pretty dead in the store, it can take an extraordinary long time before one of the employees watching the area actually comes over when the light is flashing red and I’m trying to get their attention.
I ran 8 of the damn things a decade or so ago and I was damn fast. I feel really let down every time I check out with one both with how none of the problems have been resolved and also with how the operators seem to be sleeping with their eyes open.
Yeah in most places I’ve shopped they don’t even have staff covering the self checkouts so they obviously don’t care that much.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Retailers broadly are facing increasing theft and have responded by locking up merchandise, warning investors of major losses, and implementing new technology to help combat the issue.
In 2019, Walmart introduced computer-vision technology at its registers to reduce inventory shrink, a term retailers use to describe merchandise losses from theft, fraud, error, and other causes.
Employees overseeing the self-checkout stations can monitor the registers from mobile phones and, in the case of issues, pause the machines to prevent customers from checking out.
The employee, who has worked at Walmart locations for over two years, said the self-checkout technology caught many customers off guard — particularly when they saw that the registers flagged them and then played back a video on the machine’s screen showing them scanning items.
“It was personally uncomfortable for me to notice somebody purposefully not scanning an item,” said Dominick Haar, 20, a recent newly former Walmart employee who worked self-checkout in a store in Southern Illinois.
“I think it created a lot more stress for the employees, not to mention customers that just want one-on-one personal conversation when they go to the store,” Leroy told Insider, referring to the self-checkout machines.
The original article contains 923 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
customers should get a discount for using an SCO.
I need to know the reasoning the person who downvoted you uses…
“Raise the price for everyone who doesn’t use self-checkout? Sure thing!”
They have to pay an employee to scan and bag your items. By using self checkout they are saving money. It makes sense to charge less for a service that costs them less.
This is essentially “trickle down theory” and also explains why businesses and rich fuckers don’t do it. You already used to paying the price, so what reason they’re in? Do they have to lower the price? None
