In Deutschland noch schlimmer. π€
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that's why one line for multiple checkouts is better
Is it not the standard? Every store with self-checkout I've been to has a single line for all machines. I've even seen some stores with a single line for regular checkout.
Not standard here, but it's a mix. Same applies to other checkouts: so many people are doing the devil may know what, I'm terrible at picking the fastest queue.
Where I live the grocery stores all have groups of 6+ self checkouts that are reliable enough that only one or two might be out at the same time but generally work, all of the 'too many items' issues have been sorted out, and they are in places where people just naturally form lines and take the next free one. It works great and is so much better than checkout lines ever were as one person going slow doesn't hold up everyone else.
Went on a work trip to a larger city and holy hell I understand why people there would hate self checkout. Forced lines, machines that constantly required human assistance, etc. That would suck to interact with regularly.
Not only the self checkout. I usually end up behind someone who's new to the concept of exchanging goods for legal tender and needs an introduction to it.
This is of course after they have told the story about why they're in the store, starting with the new testament and moving on from there...
I spend a lot of time thinking about how it's not my place to judge these people, but I think very few of them would manage to sit the right way on the toilet without outside assistance.
People on their cell phone who act surprised and annoyed that the act of checking out requires a brief moment of their attention.
"Can I go ahead of you in line? My kid is acting up. Great thanks. (To cashier) I'd like to buy this alcohol and cigarettes with these food stamps that I acquired totally legally. No? Let's take several minutes to discuss if there's any way around the law. Now that that's over, I'll pay with a check. Oh, also, can I get 20 scratch off tickets? I just want to scratch them off while you wait. Here, I have a giant roll of cash that I will use, but don't worry, I wasn't doing this to make things go faster. Now is my chance to try to do a cash-changing scam on you."
Oh man! I'm a city bus driver, and the amount of people that struggle with getting fare in the box is too damn high! I don't understand how you could make a bus full of people wait for you to dig through your pockets at a pace that would make glaciers impatient. You're standing at the bus stop, you know you're getting on the bus, know you'll need fare, yet here we are.
I want to get a documentary crew to follow some of these people around for a while just to see what they do with their days. I genuinely wonder how some people function.
Have you seen the couple that both get out of the car at the gas station and have to collaborate way too much to work the pumps?
How do these people function in society? The machine is extremely simple to use. Insert card, type code, remove card, pick gas type.
Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don't use self-checkout despite it potentially saving a lot of time. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.
I avoid self checkout for different reasons.
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I'm not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.
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I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.
Super fun fact, the people who aren't idiots at the self checkout, are not notable and therefore are not noted. It's the morons who stand out.
Just like with driving. The guy in front is always too slow, and the guy behind is always going too fast. Because you don't notice when the inverse is true.
There are an unusual number of people in this world who gawk at the self-checkout as if they found themselves at the controls of an alien spaceship.
I always notice people are super cocky about this kind of thing. Yet self-checkouts are so fucking terrible it basically everyone runs into problems at them eventually. So just tempting fate from everyone in this thread really.
Whoever designed these machines had never used checkouts, touchscreens, or money before.
Early Wal-Mart models were the touchiest, naggiest goddamn things, like whoever invented PRESS X TO NOT DIE got fired from Capcom and went straight into commercial UX. You will bend over two times for every item, you may not swipe the same item twice for duplicates, and that half-ounce blister-pack better register on the bag-side scale or else the idiot alarm will go off anyway. As it will if you spend more than two seconds figuring out a screen that just jabbed your ears with a shrill beep to demand instant responses to a modal choice for no discernible reason.
Recently CVS had one that's ATM-shaped, with an itty-bitty platform for your stuff. The cash slot is at knee height. The lower half of the machine is angled toward the ground. You can't fucking see it, while it's still demanding immediate responses to modal options, like you're playing a game and have no sane reason to look away from the screen. Hi! Press button to begin. Are you buying something today? Press button to buy. Do you speak English? Press button for English. Will you be scanning things? Press button to scan. Okay, begin scanning things. Press button to scan something else. Press button to not scan something else. Press button to check out. Press button to pay your bill. Press button for how you'll be paying your bill. Press button to activate the cash siphon conveniently located upside-down and backwards two feet off the floor, for use with popular brands of shin-mounted wallets, because the cocaine-chewing lizard person who designed this object has never seen a goddamn vending machine.
It was fine ten years ago! For like a decade, you got a shelf with a scanner in the middle, like a goddamn checkout counter, and you did the thing you've watched register-jockeys do since you got to sit in the cart. They didn't model human customers as idiot robots who'll instinctively stare at a screen and blindly follow instructions as quickly as possible. They acted like you had expectations, and were perhaps engaged in some manual activity involving a cart, a scanner, and three dozen disparate objects.
And so you blame the person whose thrown into having to use a self checkout with little to no instruction having to figure it out instead of the corpo execs who wanted to siphon a few local jobs into their new yachts?
If that person can't even read a screen or do a minimum of reasoning, yes.
OMG this.
Person in front checking out:
BEEP
Lays item on the scale, but is leaning on the scale.
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
Picks item up
Please put item on the scale
puts item on the scale but has their hand on the scale still
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
HELP IS ON THE WAY
(help was not on the way)
Them: These things NEVER WORK!!!!
30 seconds later the POS resets and lets them try again.
me: Stop touching the scale, just leave you item there and back off
it works
They scan the next item and place it on the scale and leave their hand on the scale.
PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE
Every single item, they never learned. I eventually went to stand in the single manned line that had 15 people in it.
I learned after a software update my local store now glitched if you put down a bag before you start scanning, it wonβt let you proceed past the first item bagging without override. So now I wait and put the bag down with the first item so it wonβt notice the specific bag weight and wonβt force the person to help.
I remember self checkout arriving in 2008 when I was living in the arse-end of Ireland. Took quite a few years for it to arrive anywhere in France, I guess because we could clearly see it was gonna kill more jobs... anyway, they didn't take over but for little old me who is used to it, it's a godsend when I'm faced with families doing their weekly shopping or, worse, pensioners...
And yet, somehow, after all these years, I regularly meet people who indeed seem to have never faced one. No hate on them, I just find it amazing! And I always wonder what suddenly pushed them over, made them decide "today is the day I face my fear and confront the Beast!"
If every self checkout was similar to others, but each of them want to make things different.
Different and worse. How do designers keep seeing other checkout system and think: "You know, I think I see a way that we could make this process slower and more complicated...."
Lately I've seen people get stuck at the pament step. The screen is begging them to pick a payment option and they just stare at it, clueless, until a staff member comes over.
Either that, or I have to wait for an employee myself for the stupidest reason, i.e. that I've brought a canvas bag that they have to verify I didn't steal.
No matter what line I pick at the supermarket, thatβs the line that will have a technical issue, a grandma with 200 coupons, a guy who wants to scan 50 lottery tickets, and a price check that takes 10 minutes.
Also no matter what spot I pick in line, thatβs the spot where people decide to pass through
Everyday driving to work is almost the same experience for me. Not too sure they are even sober.
If youβre there for a bag of brown sugar or a carton of half and half self checkout makes sense.
Iβve used scanners outside of this retail environment and I know how to pack both a vehicle and a box well. But the awkward height, shape, configuration of self checkout and its bags or lack thereof turns me into a fingerless, blind man trying to use a calculator.
I think that's just called stealing