Self Service Checkouts

Grocery shopping is a fact of life, there is not much enjoyment in the weekly shop (apart from spending quality time with your significant other).

For me, the least enjoyable phase of the weekly shop, is getting to the checkout, not because I cringe at handing over significant amounts of cash for freeze dried fresh food that goes off in 2 days, or because I dread the interaction with the checkout staff who invariable pack your toilet cleaning chemicals with your $15/kg banana, but because the process seems so inefficient (and I dislike wasting time).

During my weekly shop I spend more time at the checkout than I do running the supermarket sweep around the aisles. Some bright supermarket marketing executive must have shared my view, and realised that time spent at the checkout was time not spent filling your trolley with overpriced groceries. I'm sure this is where the idea of self service checkouts was born, these are now commonplace in stores that begin with a 'W' in Australia, unless forced, I refuse to use them.

A store local to me, practically removes all staff after 7pm at night, so they can face shelves, this leaves the shopper with the self service checkout as the only option, I like choices, and in this situation I'd rather not make a purchase than feed my hard earned to a robot.

These things never work properly, they incorporate some kind of 'smarts' in an attempt to outwit potential thieves, and goes along the lines of comparing the basket weight and bag weight during the scanning process, the slightest delay in packing your bag, and the 'unexpected item in the bagging area' message shows and the subsequent 'here's the theif' red light starts to flash, alerting all to your dislike of robots.

The line to use them (normally in a bank of 6 robots) is always slower than the line for a single checkout, you can see the look of the inevitable in the eyes of these poor souls as they hope to dodge the red light of shame.

If you pay with a credit card and decide to sign for your transaction, a member of staff has to verify your signature, this slows down the process, as the member of staff on duty is normally trying to fix one of the self service checkouts, as its a given that at least one will be out of order at any one time.

Though, what really bothers me, is that this is taking folk out of the work force, a bank of 6 checkouts is operated by 1 member of staff, that's like taking 5 members of staff out of the store. Now, I'm realistic and I know that its inevitable that automation replaces repetitive work of humans, and this is fine, but when this happens you would expect their to be a cost saving for the end user, not in this case. Firstly, this is not automation, as the end user is providing the labour for the store, and there is no cost saving to the end user as the shopping still costs the same, its the just the store owner that makes even more money.

I will continue my boycott of these robots.