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I would LOVE to use the self checkouts since the grocery chain near me has been replacing all the human cashiers. But the damn things treat you like a thief, make you wait 2-3 seconds between scans, you can't scan your whole cart of groceries without going down and bagging them when the conveyor gets more than half full, etc.
They're horrible. I just wait in line for one of the human cashiers every time.
I mean they work fantastic where I live. They don't have to be horrible
Lol, yeah, they definitely don't have to suck. When they first put those in, they were actually pretty fantastic. But Kroger Corporate said "not on my watch" and cranked up the security to obscene levels and made them horrible. There's just not another decent grocery story close to me, so I'm stuck. Yay food deserts 🫠
Even better was for a while in NZ we had an app for scanning your groceries on your phone then you just scan a qr code on your phone at the checkout and pay. Not quite as amazing as the amazon "ai" (anonymous Indian) powered one, but still pretty great and didn't require a team of actual humans to manually run it(apart from the customer). Too bad they had to cancel it for theft prevention shortly after they jacked up the prices of everything by about 250% in what seemed like one week...
I just scan my shit and go, it’s the most pain free experience ever. I don’t get how you are having such difficulty with it.
It can vary depending on how the store sets the machines up. I'm on the wrong continent to use Walmart ones, but there's definitely variation in how paranoid and slow they are set here.
I feel it's one of those cases where if you're familiar with them and can think like the person who designed/programmed them, it can work pretty well. If you get confused by unfamiliar card terminals or a phone doing an update, you're in trouble.
E.g. it uses an expected weight and tolerance for products going into the scales. If this is produce you've just weighed, it's going to be pretty precise. Same goes for something really light like a toothbrush; a 50% margin on tens of grams is still not much. If it's a prepacked bag of oranges, then the weight could be way off (add a whole orange over the expected weight) so it won't alarm on e.g. you putting a reusable shopping bag on the scale with the oranges. This lets you skip the annoying use-your-own-bag process.
Knowing and remembering which is the next button to hit helps a lot.
I find they're fine for <5 items especially if the store is busy, but for a full trolley, you're better off with a lane just for staging reasons.
I used to treat them like the 15 item or less lane, but over the last year they have gotten worse as in you're forced to scan more slowly than before, scales are even more sensitive, can't pull the whole drop your reusable bag with the first scanned item anymore or it starts screaming about unexpecteditem in bagging area. It's like they've gone full blown over the top anti theft settings to the point that it's so frustrating to use them now that I hardly ever do anymore.
That sounds entirely like a store configuration thing.
UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA!!!
Yeah the CVS self checkout software is horrible. The Target version is great.
One time, i triggered some sort of shoplifting detection when I put my credit card up in my purse after paying. I guess the camera thought I did it in a sketchy way?
The experience depends entirely on which shop you go to, how much space there is for your trolley, which model of self-checkout you encounter, how well the touch screen is calibrated and cleaned, which software version is installed and when the last time was that maintenance was done on it, not to mention what state the previous user left it
In other words, it's a stressful and moving feast that many, myself included, absolutely detest.
Different countries, different areas and even different shops have different machines and different systems in place.
Why not use the 2-3 seconds to put your item in the bag? Solves your conveyor problem and your waiting problem.
Because the bagging area is like 9 feet away at the end of the conveyor.
They're basically reversed from what the cashiers use where you load your items onto the conveyor to be scanned. On these, the scanning platform is a little, tiny table on one end where you scan your items and then you put it on the conveyor that takes it to the bagging area.
When the belt gets a little less than half full, the machine makes you go bag some stuff.
All the while, my groceries are melting lol.
Edit: Like this
The other style where you can bag as you go (pictured below) also make you wait 2-3 seconds, but if you're scanning a lot of little items (seasoning packets, yeast, those little water flavor enhancer things, etc), they don't trigger the scale and you have to wait for it to realize you're not stealing or something. Either way, they're not suitable to scan a whole cart of groceries. Like, if you fill up the carousel and try to set some bags down until you can put them in your cart, it'll call for backup and you have to wait for the single cashier that's attending to 12-15 of these abominations to come and verify you're not trying to steal.
The one I know from here in Germany looks the same, but instead of the conveyor, it's the same arm as the one you put your groceries on, before scanning.
So you don't have to move at all, just move your groceries from the left to the right.
Edit - like this:
The one in your pic must be a struggle
It absolutely is. Almost like it was designed to be as frustrating as possible for some kind of social experiment.
God damn that conveyor thing is a stupid idea. The ones in my local have a small bagging platform or a large platform depending on how much you've got to deal with. Or you can use the handheld scanner or phone app while you walk around the store and just pay at the end without the faff.