this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Learning on the job (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 11 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

I avoid self checkout for different reasons.

  1. I'm not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.

  2. I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.

[–] BowtiesAreCool@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago (3 children)
  1. It’s often very time saving to go through checkout. It is really that much hassle to scan your own items? If you’re using a card you typically handle that yourself anyway and many places already have you bag your own goods.
  2. you’re not going to get in any real trouble if you forget one item. If they happen to check and you did, simply go pay for it, or say “oops, missed that, here take it back I’ll get it next time” if it’s not needed.
[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

number 2 works less well if you are off white

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 4 points 8 hours ago

🎶 the land of the freeeeeeeee 🎶

🙄

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

About the second point, this is copy pasted from a Dutch magazine that looked it up (auto translated)

Forgot to pay for something? That can have serious consequences.

Forgetting to pay for something doesn't automatically constitute theft. The shopkeeper will have to prove that you intentionally left something unpaid. However, if the shopkeeper believes it was a case of theft, they can call the police. Is this your first time? Then you'll receive a reprimand, a kind of warning. However, you will have to admit to the theft. This won't result in a criminal record, but it will be registered in the police system.

Another possibility is that theft will be reported to the police. In that case, you may even have to appear in court. The police will then have to prove that it was intentional – and therefore theft. The shopkeeper can also handle the matter themselves. In these cases, offenders must pay €181 in damages. In some cases, a ban from the shop will also follow. Last year, tens of thousands of shoplifting cases were handled this way.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (3 children)

Further:

  • Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you're packaging a week worth of purchases.
  • You still need an employee to come over and certify that you're over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there's usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
  • I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it's just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
  • They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
  • They're non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
  • They often don't take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it's just a number on a screen).
[–] _core@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.

If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.

You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you're not being tracked b/c you used cash.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago

They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.

Your "argument" is akin to a claim that people shouldn't worry about having a good lock on their door because it's always possible to break the door down with explosives.

"Don't be the low hanging fruit" is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.

But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I'm happy to see someone who dislikes them as much as me.

I recently went to the self checkout because I was in a hurry and only had 5 items (one of them ice cream).

One item (croissant) didn't have a bar code, I accidentally selected chocolate croissant. When I wanted to correct this, I had to click 3 menus just to delete an item. After I deleted it, the counter locked. It told me to wait for assistance. After a while I just picked up my 5 items and went to a different self checkout counter. Still nobody came to unlock the other machine.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 59 minutes ago)

There's a good argument to be made from the point of view of customer convenience and expediency for using self-checkouts to pay for a small number of items, but even then most existing implementations of that concept are so fucking bad that there are all sorts of stupid problems, like my case of the thing not working unless I had a bag (it literally had no button to just skip it) and yours were a normal human mistake is complex to correct even though the users are amateurs and hence naturally more likely to make mistakes hence the thing should have been designed differently.

I've actually worked with UX/UI designer at several points in my career, and one thing that pisses me off about most self-checkouts is just how bad their UX/UI design is.

That so many self-checkout implementations are like that is probably explained by, having moved the costs of wasting time to the side of client, those businesses are not financially incentivized to make the self-checkouts efficient to use, which probably also explains all manner of weird choices in everything from their shape to even the order of their menus - in a manned checkout it's their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it's bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it's not their problem so they don't care.

This is also another reason for me to be against self-checkouts: the financial dynamics are different with self-checkouts than with manned checkouts since the costs of inefficiency on the former are on the customer, whilst with the latter the costs are on the store (which has to pay a salary for somebody who is less productive than they could be), so stores have less (and more indirect, hence harder to measure, hence often ignored by MBAs) financial pressure to make self-checkouts efficient to use than they do with manned checkouts.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout

The store I go to most often has those rotating plastic bag holders at the end of the belts which makes it effectively impossible to put stuff into your own bags. And they have the fucking gall to put up signs asking you to bring your own bags! I do self-checkout there no matter how much shit I have in the cart.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 5 points 8 hours ago

My number one reason for avoiding self checkout is that I want people to have jobs.

If fewer and fewer people use the manned cashier lines, there will be fewer manned cashier lines.

If it's busy, and I'm just grabbing a few things, sure, I'll divert to the self checkout, but if there's nobody in line, or just a few people in line, I'll avoid self checkout. I'm not going to be the reason someone lost shifts.