Am I the only one who gets to the self checkout and is compelled to finish as soon as humanly possible?
Imagine if there was a speedrun timer on them and a leaderboard
Would make boring everyday life a little more interesting
Shopping Any% speedrun (WR)
That’s just walking out without paying (without getting caught).
A risky skip that makes or brakes any run, especially as it causes a soft lock if you mess it up
Speed runners hate it because it’s so dependent on good RNG
Gotta backhop around the store and trimp off the mobility scooter to jump over the aisles and get to the aisle you need, avoiding the unskippable cutscene of getting stuck behind someone who’s abandoned their trolley in the middle of the aisle
Instructions unclear, speedrun ruined by RNG which put me directly behind a 98 year old lady at the till and subsequently had to endure an unskippable cutscene where she and the cashier are laughing about the things her new Pomeranians are doing.
unstoppable cutscenes of getting stuck behind someone who’s abandoned their trolley in the middle of the aisle
My God that just brought up a wave of nam flashbacks dealing with this bullshit.
Better do it Glitchless if you don’t want to get the permanent, console-locked anti-achievement “misdemeanor conviction.”
There are certain lightweight products which don’t require weighting or putting them in the bagging area at all, like spices or bath sponges. These would be perfect for any% speedrun of Groceries since they don’t ever require an employee to verify discrepancies
The faster you go the more likely you get free things! Win-win.
Protip: On many self-checkouts, if you open the “item by code” menu and keep scanning items with the menu open, the machine will beep with every item you scan, but it won’t actually add it to your total. Loss prevention only listens for beeps.
I won’t get into the minutiae of grocery theft… but that’s not necessarily a great idea. It may prevent LP from catching on initially, but when they do, you may be in a world of hurt… While accidentally missing scans can never be proven as malicious, especially if your goal is to move as fast as possible.
I feel like such a dork hearing about everyone doing this stuff, because then there’s me who actively pressed the help button cause it wouldn’t let me register a second pastry (the first one counted for both because they were in the same bag)
I live in a rural area and there are only two supermarkets I can get to easily so I’d much rather not risk getting caught out and banned and just pay the usually pound or so I would’ve saved by doing this
You won’t get banned for missing a few things, unless they catch you hiding barcodes or swapping prices. Which isn’t worth the extra effort usually anyway.
Although if there independent grocers, I would feel shitty. The saying is if it’s a chain, it’s fair game.
It’s a chain, but as much as I dislike chains I don’t want to steal from them. Supermarkets don’t seem nearly as evil as a lot of other companies to me and they provide a genuinely useful service that smaller companies couldn’t do as well
I’m busier thinking about the people that is being paid to make sure I do the checkouts.
Is your problem that fewer cashiers are being paid or that someone’s being paid to make sure you don’t steal anything?
It feels weird to me, like I feel pressured to do the cashier job on myself while the person that would normally do it watches.
That is what it is, but the person isn’t watching just you, they’re watching 10 at once, which means less queuing
I find I do it much faster than cashiers tend to, it’s not a lot of effort and it takes less time out of my day than if they were to have done it for me
Thats exactly what it is ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s the opposite for me, I feel liberated for not having to make small talk with the cashier. I can scan at my leisure and don’t have to really talk to anyone. I may be being observed but it’s less direct compared to going through the regular checkout.
And they’d do it faster, anyways!
My problem is someone gets paid to double check that I did someone else’s job (for free) properly.
I hate self-check out.
I don’t mind that, I really hate having to wait in queue for 25 minutes while someone checks out their family of 8’s monthly shop in the only open lane when I’ve got a packet of biscuits and a couple tins of soup
Or wait for the cashier who’s fed up with their job to scan things 3x slower than I would, ask me if I’ve got a loyalty card, ask me if I want a receipt etc
I am a rather impatient individual I realise but self checkouts solve those problem for me. I get why people like normal ones but self checkouts seem logical
I’m with you about the cashier. I don’t see how having somebody working an extremely mechanical job is a good thing for them. It must be so depressing.
I understand that people need to earn a living, but using people to be robots is a waste of their potential. At least with self checkout it’s a bit more dynamic for that one person monitoring several checkouts.
All of these issues are trivially solved by the supermarket being less of a dick. Pay your employees better, hire more people to shoulder the load - self checkout only seems logical because stores make the regular checkout process as shitty as possible.
They’re always going to be able to have more self checkouts than manned checkouts, the more of them there are the more throughput so the faster you get in
Only benefit of self-checkout is buying steaks at bulk onion prices.
I like it a lot. It’s way quicker. Self check out greatly increase efficiency. One person can handle at least a few checkouts. Self checkouts also use way less space so there can be more checkouts than otherwise.
Here we also often have the option of carrying around a portable scanner when shopping so when it comes to paying you just dock the scanner, pay, walk out with your prepackaged bags.
Occasionally someone will check that you actually scanned everything but that’s pretty rare and self checkouts still saves a lot of time.
Cool.
The ones here are clunky buggy pieces of shit and I’d rather deal with a human with a job instead.
But I’m all for choices so I have nothing against other people using self-checkouts.
Over here they tend to work pretty well depending on which store you’re in
In Lidl you have to slow yourself down a bit because the weight system gets confused if you do it too fast
unexpected cumfart in bagging area
I hate when that happens.
I try to be quick because I want to hurry and get out of there.
Its amazing to me how many people use them without a fucking clue what theyre doing and just hold up the line.
Fortunately there are usually loads of them
But yeah it’s kinda annoying to see someone take 20 minutes with one
There’s usually a wave when all the old people in my area all decide they want to go shopping at once, though fortunately they tend to ignore the self checkout
I’m one of the old people. I WAS a speed runner. About 40 years ago, I got a union job as a cashier. The customer put their items on the belt, the cashier scanned the items, and the bagger sorted the items and put them in paper or plastic bags. Cashiers were required to memorize the produce codes and process at MINIMUM 30 items per minute. The timer ran from the moment you unlocked your register to the moment you relocked it or opened the drawer. You would leave your register locked while the customer started putting things on the belt. You greet them and make a mental note of what sort of items are where while the belt brings the load to you. Once the belt is at least half full, you’d unlock the register and start grabbing and scanning items in a fluid motion that passed them over the scanner and on towards the bagger – sorting as best you could as you went. As soon as you were done, you’d hit ‘total’ and lock the register until the customer was ready to pay. You’d help the bagger and chat while this happened. Then the customer would hand over cash or check (they were just starting to do credit and debit in grocercy stores so those weren’t common), so you’d unlock the register, take their payment, open the register and get change. Your best speeds were always going to be for express checkout (10 items or less), but there is a cruel loop in that because managers schedule fast people for express, but you won’t be as fast unless you get scheduled there.
As I recall, we didn’t get to see our items-per-minute until the end of the day – not per-transaction, but it was still fun to see who had the best scores.
As a customer, I NEVER use self-checkout because: 1) I’m not working if you aren’t paying me, and 2) every time I’ve tried to use self-checkout, the machines could never, ever keep up with me. Sometimes the issue was the bagging area was trying to weigh things, sometimes the scanners themselves were bad/slow, and sometimes … I don’t know, the dang machines are just barely working? Anyway, it is never worth it for me. Additionally, I find it better to do my own bagging than to allow anyone else to do it.
Side note: The typical bagger can not bag as fast as a cashier can scan because they have to wait for: cans on the bottom/bread on the top, frozen in one bag/lettuce no where near frozen, detergents and chemicals by themselves/pet foods also by themselves.
Fair enough if you’ve had to do it as a job and don’t want to, personally I value my time higher than effort expended and in general self checkout is much faster than normal checkout
It depends on the machine, though for me usually I’m just trying to get it to go as fast as the machine can do
But conversely, would you be OK with having the attendant at a fuel station pumping your gas, like in Oregon and New Jersey? Or would you rather pump your own gas?
It depends on the weather and the cost. I remember when gas stations offered “full service” or “self service”. Full service cost more per gallon, but in addiction to pumping gas, they cleaned your windshield, checked your oil and wiper fluid levels, and might even put air in your tires if they were obviously low. If you wanted it done for you, you paid more. Seemed fair. These days, gas is cheaper in New Jersey than surrounding states, so you pay LESS to have someone else take care of you.
Clicking through 90 fucking prompts if I wanna donate to charity or learn about their credit card offerings or if I want to sign up for their rewards program or if I want to give them my email so they’ll email me a receipt?
Nah, everyone deals with that.
I mean the people that cant figure out how to use the self checkouts at all. They forget to scan items, dont understand how to search for bulk items or produce that dont have codes, or people that cant figure out they need to scan stuff before bagging it, etc.
I try to be as efficient as possible. I don’t think most people even think about it.
I do scan as you shop. So when I get to the checkout, answer a question about whether everything scanned OK and then pay. But today we had 70+ items in our shop and got flagged for random spot check. Some exasperated cashier, frustrated she actually had to do some work and couldn’t just sit there having excess calories around her waist weighing her down heavily breathed “I need to check 40+ of these”. So that took forever.
There’s some real vitriol packed up in this comment. Try not to take it out on the cashiers :)
I didn’t, never do, but saw her the shop before shouting at a colleague who was overwhelmed and asking for help. She genuinely seemed to be allergic to work.
You seem like a nice person.
That would stress me out too much. I shop for people for a living and I’m constantly timed. The bosses are obsessed with my metrics. Even if I have to stop to tell a customer or to guard a spill per company policy, all they care about is that I’m not getting 100 items per hour.
If I was being timed for my personal shopping, I’d just start screaming and never stop.
Amazon Go’s (“just walk out”) self checkout gives you an elapsed time on your receipt. There was one next door to my old pre-pandemic office. My coworkers and I would complete to see who could get in and out the fastest. My record was 6 seconds buying a single bottled tea.
Apparently those are being phased out now because they weren’t really automatic, just outsourced to people in india
Yeah, it appears that the system was computer-assisted, not computer-controlled. Amazon tried to “fake it till you make it”, but never made it.
Another L for AI.
Nothing wrong with AI, it’s a tool that’s very good at specific problems
Tech companies just don’t know what is and isn’t a good use case yet
Honestly “track this person’s movements and figure out what they picked up using this huge amount of sensor and camera data” should be a pretty good ML use case, but Amazon doesn’t really have the right technical talent to make that work.
True, you’d think Amazon would have the talent to do it though if they wanted to
Was it really AI powered? I’ve never used one (we’ve not had them in the UK) so I’m genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.
we’ve not had them in the UK
I shopped at an automated Amazon Fresh in Bankside London yesterday…
Oh. Ok then, we don’t have them in the UK in the city where I live.
Don’t know about how it is in the US, but in the UK the idea of people rushing to finish their transaction fills me with dread. I’ve worked in a supermarket with self service and the general public really struggles with them.
I’m in the UK, young people don’t tend to struggle with them as far as I’ve seen. Mostly late gen Xers and older that seem to struggle
That’s a great idea. Imagine how much money the store could save gamifying checkout so that they need less checkout machines. Let’s all do our part to make the rich richer!
Man the post is a joke not everything needs to be about how fucked the world is
The shop near me has handheld scanners so you scan as you pick stuff off the shelf. Then at the checkout scan a QR code on the screen and pay. Makes it super quick.
Sainsbury’s has an app that lets you do that with your phone, I found it was slower faffing around with that than just going through the self checkout
Bearing in mind I also tend to buy 2-3 items at a time max and either way you’ve got to use the machine at the end
Glitches allowed?
All the best runs are
