I don’t live in America but judging from what I heard, what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum? Like, I heard so many complaints of self-service checkouts having no one staff looking after them, which leads to customers going to manned tills instead, because they couldn’t deal with technical issues especially for the seniors. Then when a senior is asked if they want to use automated checkouts instead, they reply with the snarky response “I don’t work here.” You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help! Where I live, there is always a staff looking after the self-service checkouts because of the inevitable technical issues or customers not knowing how to use them.
My guess for this poor implementation of technology is because bosses think machines are meant to replace humans as workers, when realistically machines should help people with work. We don’t live in yet in a world where there are robots with the artifical intelligence as good as the human intelligence. And we are still way far from having robots with good dexterity skills as humans to completely replace us.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum
Before covid, they were just starving support staff slowly. A few automated checkouts, less hands on the floor than in the 90’s and the 00’s. You’d often have someone re-folding, re-organizing, and restocking at all times. in the 10’s it became more like staff during busy periods only.
When covid hit, the stores went to absolute operation bare minimum or even less. They figured out that they could literally put no one on the floor, stock and refill at night and profits boom. We’re seeing that across almost all industries. It’s like someone said, hey, have you tried just not providing any service at all AND raising prices. (e.g. health insurance) We should all be in the streets for blood, but we’re not. The idiots are bringing back the right wing, expecting them to care at all about their plight.
We are in a rather self-destructive area of capitalism. The top is expanding as fast and hard as they can. They are bleeding the lower and middle classes harder than they ever have before. I give it a year top before everything crashes and inflation puts us about on par with the lesser economies.
Self-service stuff is utter crap for any number of reasons. I had to call staff multiple times (thankfully they are staffed where I live) on some trips. It is fucking stupid. They don’t make things faster or easier. They just make them annoying.
Well Kmart when they were still open, was doing this to drive the company into the ground so the CEO, who owned all the debt the company had personally, could sell the company for all the pieces, land ownership, brand ownership, production and shipping elements. Why other companies do it I can’t imagine why. You’d think all of them aren’t trying to do the exact same thing.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum?
It all comes back to money > humans in this fucked up country.
The business leaders don’t care about their customers. They will sell out the people they depend on if it makes the numbers 1% better. And then COVID taught them how they could make things even worse.
But then the rest of the people don’t have enough respect for the employees, other customers, or themselves to demand better.
You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help!
Much like with the locks on the storefronts, self-checkout is obnoxious in large part because the store owners don’t really trust you to swipe your own merchandise. The machines are constantly yelling at you for putting things on the wrong side of the machine or putting stuff in your basket before you finished checkout. And if you do anything wrong, the machine locks itself down so you can’t finish paying.
Why should you need help at a self-checkout? Its contrary to the very premise of the system.
My local market was the WORST. They still use the scale version. They’ve shut down all but one register. So if you get a full cart and try to use the self-system, it craps out around 25 lbs. The person has to come over every 25 lbs and authorize the reset while you pack into a second cart.
Of course, you can go through the register line with 27 older people trying to buy four items each.
It’s a shame, the market is huge, great selection, the bakery is great, but everyone in the checkout is mad as hell.
I don’t typically have this issue at Walmart at least. Their self checkout is smooth and effective these days.
That said I still don’t use it, because it’s still shifting work to me without giving me compensation for it. If I got a discount for using the self checkout, sure, but I don’t. So I’ll keep using manned registers.
This is such a weird mentality to me. You don’t get compensated for waiting in line either. Would you really rather stand in line than do self-checkout? Even if it were faster? Doesn’t everyone always say “time is money?” Then you’d be robbing yourself if you don’t pick the fastest option.
Edit: I always pick the fastest option. The less time spent shopping, the better. But then, I’ve never really had bad experiences with self-checkout, so I’m sure I’m a bit biased.
I will say one time I placed a big box to the right of the scanner then scanned it, but the machine vision system had already decided I was trying to sneak that box past the scanning area and flagged me as a potential shoplifter, despite having scanned the item before the vision based anti-theft flagged things and shut down the isle. So Walmart’s anti-theft still does flip out on occasion.
Certainly better than the days when every other item would do “unexpected item in bagging area”, but still can be obnoxious and the employee acts so suspicious when you trigger it.
Between having about 10x self checkout as manned checkouts, and some bad bagging experiences, I strongly lean toward self checkout, at least if I have a reasonably small amount of stuff. Larger orders I do the “load my car” which is supreme laziness for me and most work from the employees, but don’t trust them with perishables and produce.
I don’t live in America but judging from what I heard, what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum? Like, I heard so many complaints of self-service checkouts having no one staff looking after them, which leads to customers going to manned tills instead, because they couldn’t deal with technical issues especially for the seniors. Then when a senior is asked if they want to use automated checkouts instead, they reply with the snarky response “I don’t work here.” You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help! Where I live, there is always a staff looking after the self-service checkouts because of the inevitable technical issues or customers not knowing how to use them.
My guess for this poor implementation of technology is because bosses think machines are meant to replace humans as workers, when realistically machines should help people with work. We don’t live in yet in a world where there are robots with the artifical intelligence as good as the human intelligence. And we are still way far from having robots with good dexterity skills as humans to completely replace us.
Before covid, they were just starving support staff slowly. A few automated checkouts, less hands on the floor than in the 90’s and the 00’s. You’d often have someone re-folding, re-organizing, and restocking at all times. in the 10’s it became more like staff during busy periods only.
When covid hit, the stores went to absolute operation bare minimum or even less. They figured out that they could literally put no one on the floor, stock and refill at night and profits boom. We’re seeing that across almost all industries. It’s like someone said, hey, have you tried just not providing any service at all AND raising prices. (e.g. health insurance) We should all be in the streets for blood, but we’re not. The idiots are bringing back the right wing, expecting them to care at all about their plight.
We are in a rather self-destructive area of capitalism. The top is expanding as fast and hard as they can. They are bleeding the lower and middle classes harder than they ever have before. I give it a year top before everything crashes and inflation puts us about on par with the lesser economies.
Self-service stuff is utter crap for any number of reasons. I had to call staff multiple times (thankfully they are staffed where I live) on some trips. It is fucking stupid. They don’t make things faster or easier. They just make them annoying.
Well Kmart when they were still open, was doing this to drive the company into the ground so the CEO, who owned all the debt the company had personally, could sell the company for all the pieces, land ownership, brand ownership, production and shipping elements. Why other companies do it I can’t imagine why. You’d think all of them aren’t trying to do the exact same thing.
It all comes back to money > humans in this fucked up country.
The business leaders don’t care about their customers. They will sell out the people they depend on if it makes the numbers 1% better. And then COVID taught them how they could make things even worse.
But then the rest of the people don’t have enough respect for the employees, other customers, or themselves to demand better.
Much like with the locks on the storefronts, self-checkout is obnoxious in large part because the store owners don’t really trust you to swipe your own merchandise. The machines are constantly yelling at you for putting things on the wrong side of the machine or putting stuff in your basket before you finished checkout. And if you do anything wrong, the machine locks itself down so you can’t finish paying.
Why should you need help at a self-checkout? Its contrary to the very premise of the system.
My local market was the WORST. They still use the scale version. They’ve shut down all but one register. So if you get a full cart and try to use the self-system, it craps out around 25 lbs. The person has to come over every 25 lbs and authorize the reset while you pack into a second cart.
Of course, you can go through the register line with 27 older people trying to buy four items each.
It’s a shame, the market is huge, great selection, the bakery is great, but everyone in the checkout is mad as hell.
I don’t typically have this issue at Walmart at least. Their self checkout is smooth and effective these days.
That said I still don’t use it, because it’s still shifting work to me without giving me compensation for it. If I got a discount for using the self checkout, sure, but I don’t. So I’ll keep using manned registers.
Walmart usually has enough human cashiers such that you don’t have to use those infernal self-checkout kiosks
This is such a weird mentality to me. You don’t get compensated for waiting in line either. Would you really rather stand in line than do self-checkout? Even if it were faster? Doesn’t everyone always say “time is money?” Then you’d be robbing yourself if you don’t pick the fastest option.
Edit: I always pick the fastest option. The less time spent shopping, the better. But then, I’ve never really had bad experiences with self-checkout, so I’m sure I’m a bit biased.
I will say one time I placed a big box to the right of the scanner then scanned it, but the machine vision system had already decided I was trying to sneak that box past the scanning area and flagged me as a potential shoplifter, despite having scanned the item before the vision based anti-theft flagged things and shut down the isle. So Walmart’s anti-theft still does flip out on occasion.
Certainly better than the days when every other item would do “unexpected item in bagging area”, but still can be obnoxious and the employee acts so suspicious when you trigger it.
Between having about 10x self checkout as manned checkouts, and some bad bagging experiences, I strongly lean toward self checkout, at least if I have a reasonably small amount of stuff. Larger orders I do the “load my car” which is supreme laziness for me and most work from the employees, but don’t trust them with perishables and produce.