this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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I'm honestly surprised anyone likes self checkout. It's such a pain in the ass. Almost always have some sort of error that I need to wait to be rescued from.
Maybe it's different where you are from, but where I am from human cashiers are way more efficient.
I like self checkout because i can generally get finished and out of the store sooner than if I go through the cashier. But some grocery checkouts do seem to often have hypersensitive scales and the worst nagging if you're 2 ms slow to get your item into your bag, or God forbid you take a moment to rearrange things and mess up the calibration. I imagine they have a terrible urge to prevent people from stealing a grape.
The ones that need to match the weight of the product are absolutely horrible and full of errors.
The ones that only need to scan barcodes are ok-ish. Sometimes you can run into weird situations, like I managed to find a product that had two barcodes for some reason, and I scanned the "wrong" one and it confused the machines. Or there was a product that printed their barcode so tiny that the machine couldn't scan it. But those are rare.
The fun part is when you try to buy any alcohol because over here they need to call a human to confirm you're an adult.
Totally depends on the store you're shopping at, foremost. Then secondarily what products you're buying.
Where I live, self checkout is usually faster but I'll still go through a regular line periodically. Frankly though I'm just picking up groceries most of the time at this point. It's easy and if the people grabbing you things have a touch of empathy you get fine looking produce and meats too.
Anyways, you're right it is definitely heavily dependent on where you live. Hell some places, especially in upper middle class areas, have a lot of the detection shit turned off (like you can actively put wrong weight stuff in or bypass the scans entirely - there's a chance you may still get flagged but it'll let you finish the order up before someone comes to put a code in to override it).
I guess if you're going to commit petty theft I'd suggest you buy a decent outfit from a second hand store and go to a nicer grocery store self checkout.
It depends on the technology. In Holland it's great. In Belgium it sucks ass. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯