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Good. I fucking hate them.
Do the work yourself and then wait ages while the one checkout assistant deals with everyone else's issues because your checkout is happily accusing you of theft. Bullshit cost saving at the expense of the customer experience.
Don't even get me started on Asda's dystopian AI security gates. Want to take your young child for a piss? ACCESS DENIED! Try to open the gate manually? ALARM! ALARM! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO ASSERT THEIR HUMANITY!
It's always a clumsy experience for me. In some stores I just walk in, get a drink, scan, pay, and be out in less than a minute. But for my actual shopping? Way too much stuff on that little terminal thing.
Ok, now will they actually staff the registers? Because every time I’m in the store there’s only one checkout lane open, and before 10am or so, the self-checkout is closed.
The thing I hate the most about supermarket self-checkout is they put the bag dispensers right against the scale where you need to put your bagged stuff. This leaves so little room the bag will fall over, etc so I have to put it on the floor. Then the register complains that I have removed it without paying, etc. FFS.
As someone that absolutely despises self-checkout I'd be happy if this was the case, but I don't believe this. I've had stores open up near me this year that only have self-checkout options.
I'm not doing labour for a company where I'm not getting a discount for it. I'd rather wait longer in line for a person to do it than to go through self-checkout out of principle. Plus all self-checkouts I've ever used are designed end up pissing me off because they are designed to be user hostile.
There are actual GOOD ways to implement self checkout though....
BAD: Me scanning individual items at a grocery store, LARP'ing as a cashier... terrible experience for all... i'm literally doing someone else's job for free...
GOOD: me throwing my entire basket of purchases into some kind of RFID scanning bin (not sure the exact technology behind it), the screen instantly shows me the list of items and total, and i tap and pay and leave. Actual time saver, and i dont feel like i'm doing a cashier job.
In both cases, it results in a loss of jobs, which sucks... but at least #2 isnt infuriating from a customer POV
