this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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I tried it twice at IKEA and it's so fucking shit and they still need to have people there to assist when you have a problem, IT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING JUST SLOWER.
They're not there to assist you. They are there to monitor you so you wouldn't steal more € than the self-checkout is cheaper than the staff it replaces.
In one of my local supermarkets there were 4 normal checkouts but never more than 2 of them were open because they're understaffed. They recently replaced 1 of them by 4 self checkout machines, it's soooo much faster now and lines are a lot shorter when it's shopping rush hour!
No shit. Those people with almost full shopping carts that go to the self checkout, check their items, put them on the loading shelf, pay and then, and only then, put the items in bags one-at-a-time.
Like, jesus christ, you can put the bags down FIRST and then put the items INSIDE THE BAG as ONE step.
How did humanity get to this point.
People have been conditioned. Literally Pavlovian conditioned. We have been made to feel pain in a response to a behavior. That pain?
UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA
When you've been yelled at enough by a machine just for putting your own bags in the "bagging area", eventually it just becomes natural to bag your groceries after you've paid for them. Once the store has your money, they don't care what happens to your items. But up until you've paid the bill, the items may be watched like a hawk. And anything their automated vision system thinks looks a bit funny can get flagged. Sometimes machines are poorly designed or calibrated, and it flags your bags as something suspicious in the bagging area. Then not only do you get yelled at, but the whole system may be locked up for however many minutes it takes to get the self-checkout attendant over there.
There's a button called "USE MY OWN BAG". Press that button and the system will prompt you to put your bags on and will retare appropriately.
Though sometimes I've noticed you don't need to do that, which is maybe why you've never gone looking for that button (?), interpreting it as just a buggy POS POS.
Some places make this stupidly difficult. Probably not an issue with plastic bags (but it might be, because of the stupid AI monitoring they all use now), but definitely an issue with boxes.
Aldi, at least when mine had them, you could put the empty boxes in the checkout area before starting and it would tare the scale. But only if you did it before starting the order. And they couldn't even accept their own gift cards at self checkout.
Costco, of all places, has no way of meaningfully using self checkout with more than a few items. You can't tare the scale at all.
Plastic bags cause problems, too. I've had this problem in several shops, I just don't bother anymore.