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that's why one line for multiple checkouts is better

Not only the self checkout. I usually end up behind someone who's new to the concept of exchanging goods for legal tender and needs an introduction to it.

This is of course after they have told the story about why they're in the store, starting with the new testament and moving on from there...

I spend a lot of time thinking about how it's not my place to judge these people, but I think very few of them would manage to sit the right way on the toilet without outside assistance.

Oh man! I'm a city bus driver, and the amount of people that struggle with getting fare in the box is too damn high! I don't understand how you could make a bus full of people wait for you to dig through your pockets at a pace that would make glaciers impatient. You're standing at the bus stop, you know you're getting on the bus, know you'll need fare, yet here we are.

I want to get a documentary crew to follow some of these people around for a while just to see what they do with their days. I genuinely wonder how some people function.

Have you seen the couple that both get out of the car at the gas station and have to collaborate way too much to work the pumps?

Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don't use self-checkout despite it potentially saving a lot of time. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.

There are an unusual number of people in this world who gawk at the self-checkout as if they found themselves at the controls of an alien spaceship.

I always notice people are super cocky about this kind of thing. Yet self-checkouts are so fucking terrible it basically everyone runs into problems at them eventually. So just tempting fate from everyone in this thread really.

And so you blame the person whose thrown into having to use a self checkout with little to no instruction having to figure it out instead of the corpo execs who wanted to siphon a few local jobs into their new yachts?

Whoever designed these machines had never used checkouts, touchscreens, or money before.

Early Wal-Mart models were the touchiest, naggiest goddamn things, like whoever invented PRESS X TO NOT DIE got fired from Capcom and went straight into commercial UX. You will bend over two times for every item, you may not swipe the same item twice for duplicates, and that half-ounce blister-pack better register on the bag-side scale or else the idiot alarm will go off anyway. As it will if you spend more than two seconds figuring out a screen that just jabbed your ears with a shrill beep to demand instant responses to a modal choice for no discernible reason.

Recently CVS had one that's ATM-shaped, with an itty-bitty platform for your stuff. The cash slot is at knee height. The lower half of the machine is angled toward the ground. You can't fucking see it, while it's still demanding immediate responses to modal options, like you're playing a game and have no sane reason to look away from the screen. Hi! Press button to begin. Are you buying something today? Press button to buy. Do you speak English? Press button for English. Will you be scanning things? Press button to scan. Okay, begin scanning things. Press button to scan something else. Press button to not scan something else. Press button to check out. Press button to pay your bill. Press button for how you'll be paying your bill. Press button to activate the cash siphon conveniently located upside-down and backwards two feet off the floor, for use with popular brands of shin-mounted wallets, because the cocaine-chewing lizard person who designed this object has never seen a goddamn vending machine.

It was fine ten years ago! For like a decade, you got a shelf with a scanner in the middle, like a goddamn checkout counter, and you did the thing you've watched register-jockeys do since you got to sit in the cart. They didn't model human customers as idiot robots who'll instinctively stare at a screen and blindly follow instructions as quickly as possible. They acted like you had expectations, and were perhaps engaged in some manual activity involving a cart, a scanner, and three dozen disparate objects.

OMG this.

Person in front checking out:

BEEP

Lays item on the scale, but is leaning on the scale.

PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE

Picks item up

Please put item on the scale

puts item on the scale but has their hand on the scale still

PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE

HELP IS ON THE WAY

(help was not on the way)

Them: These things NEVER WORK!!!!

30 seconds later the POS resets and lets them try again.

me: Stop touching the scale, just leave you item there and back off

it works

They scan the next item and place it on the scale and leave their hand on the scale.

PLEASE REMOVE ITEM FROM THE SCALE

Every single item, they never learned. I eventually went to stand in the single manned line that had 15 people in it.

If every self checkout was similar to others, but each of them want to make things different.

To be fair it is so much better than it was when they came out.

I remember self checkout arriving in 2008 when I was living in the arse-end of Ireland. Took quite a few years for it to arrive anywhere in France, I guess because we could clearly see it was gonna kill more jobs... anyway, they didn't take over but for little old me who is used to it, it's a godsend when I'm faced with families doing their weekly shopping or, worse, pensioners...

And yet, somehow, after all these years, I regularly meet people who indeed seem to have never faced one. No hate on them, I just find it amazing! And I always wonder what suddenly pushed them over, made them decide "today is the day I face my fear and confront the Beast!"

Lately I've seen people get stuck at the pament step. The screen is begging them to pick a payment option and they just stare at it, clueless, until a staff member comes over.

Burn down the self chechouts

Everyday driving to work is almost the same experience for me. Not too sure they are even sober.

No matter what line I pick at the supermarket, that’s the line that will have a technical issue, a grandma with 200 coupons, a guy who wants to scan 50 lottery tickets, and a price check that takes 10 minutes.

Also no matter what spot I pick in line, that’s the spot where people decide to pass through

Either that, or I have to wait for an employee myself for the stupidest reason, i.e. that I've brought a canvas bag that they have to verify I didn't steal.

If you’re there for a bag of brown sugar or a carton of half and half self checkout makes sense.

I’ve used scanners outside of this retail environment and I know how to pack both a vehicle and a box well. But the awkward height, shape, configuration of self checkout and its bags or lack thereof turns me into a fingerless, blind man trying to use a calculator.

I think that's just called stealing