Technology

You force me to check out my own groceries. Fine.

But don’t get pissed when I have a lot of groceries and have to move my bags because you gave me one square foot of space to bag everything. That’s often my biggest frustration. The robot thinks I’m trying to do some shady stuff, and I’m not.

Remember everyone. If you see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no you didn't.

Fuck Walmart

Ever since the pandemic, curbside pickup has been the norm at our house for groceries.

We use Kroger, not Walmart, but I had a recent experience relevant to share.

I was out running an errand and my spouse asked me to go grab a couple items from Kroger since it was nearby.

I hadn’t been inside the store in like a year, so I was surprised to see gates at the door that opened and closed upon approach and walking away.

Also, while shopping, at some point suddenly the wheels on the cart locked up, causing me to bang the ever loving shit out of my shins on the cart frame. That’s when I got to learn about the new “anti-theft” wheel lock tech being used on all carts now.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to flip the goddamn cart over and kick the absolute shit out of it… but I knew that wouldn’t help.

…But if I read a story about someone going and drilling holes in every single one of those cart wheels, or setting fire to them all, or breaking the gates, I would laugh.

I imagine as soon as someone gets something worse than bruised shins and brings a lawsuit against these stupid companies, we will see these stupid things go away… but until then, I’m not fucking stepping foot inside any store that has that bullshit.

Some loss is the expected result of replacing workers with customers. Even cashiers who are paid and trained to check out customers have a failure rate of about 1%. Walmart treating their customers like criminals for things that routinely happen to even their own trained and incentived employees is ridiculous.

I'd get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone's time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it's not about preventing theft. It's about proving a point: that corporations control you.

Hey remember when they gave you free bags, bagged it for you, and rang you up? That was kinda nice. Now the price is three times as high and all that service stuff is gone. The day before Thanksgiving is going to be hell this year at my supermarket

Maybe they should keep some non-self check registers open then. I was a grocery store cashier in high school and college and I got $20/hour for doing it (adjusted for inflation). Right now if I see a store only has self-check open I will walk out, what I want to do is start tracking my time then mailing in a 1099 and an invoice for my time.

The last few times I've walked into a Walmart, the place has been a disaster.

Shelves empty and in disarray, no evidence that they ever did carry the product I was after, the building in an increasing state of disrepair.

I'm done with this company.

I'd never think to harass the poor employee who has nothing to do with the store managenent's decisions...

However, when I'm pissed or tired I'll sometimes be rough or sloppy with the machine, and I get pissed if they have too few manned checkouts for how crowded a store is. Banging items against the scanner glass, tap selections on the touch screen forcefully with my ring etc.

To keep the self-checkout machines company, I'll act like a machine too. If I unsuccessfully attempt to scan something, after 5 tries I "timeout" and move onto the next item.

It's gone further here.. we have shops with scanners so you scan the goods as you go around.. in theory speeding up checkout but..

1. 25% of the time you end up selected for 'random check' so an employee has to come and rescan everything anyway
2. If there are any 'restricted' items a like painkillers, a different employee has to come over and allow them.

Given the chronic understaffing meaning you're basically in a queue for attention, it frequently takes longer to get through the 'rapid' checkouts than it would if I simply queued up and got someone else to do it. But as far as the supermarket thinks they're winning as they pay fewer people.

It's not the system that bugs me. It's the amount of time it takes for the employees to actually come and get the shit going smoothly again. Even when it's pretty dead in the store, it can take an extraordinary long time before one of the employees watching the area actually comes over when the light is flashing red and I'm trying to get their attention.

I don't know about you, but I get annoyed that I still can't use NFC at checkout. It's 2023, tap to pay has been around in the US since 2016 and much longer in Europe.

All the retail shops that were built 20+ years ago have a ton of un-peopled check-out stands. My local grocery store. My bank branches. The hardware store.

Companies have reduced their staffing to two or three checkers and a self-checkout line.

We're doing the work for them. They're hoarding the profits. It's a mess.

My local BofA branch has twelve or thirteen checker stations and I've never seen more than two people at the counter. I don't know when the branch was built, but it was clearly at a time when the semblance of customer service existed. Now, long lines and poor service are normalized and the idea that you'd shop around for a better experience is non-existent.

One time I went to wal-mart and at self-checkout there was a security guy (with a bulletproof vest...) with the employee. I don't know if he was there to look intimidating to potential thieves or to protect the employee from violent customers, but I did not like the feeling of him watching me scanning my items. Am I a customer or a potential profit-loss theft for wal-mart? I fucking hate that company...

Of course. Sometimes it doesn't work. Often times it's an honest mistake that a cashier themselves may have made. And now WalMart is treating you, a paying customer like a criminal.

I bought jelly and the age restriction went off. The clerk came and I had my ID out to check. We both had a laugh

customers should get a discount for using an SCO.

If we shop at chain grocery stores we're self-checking (and destroying local businesses). If we buy from Amazon we're supporting billionaires and destroying local businesses. If we shop at mom&pop stores we're paying too much for less in an age of inflation. Good luck getting everything you need from side-of-the-road vegetable stands (who skirt tax and have no liability). We can't win.

It's funny, my local Walmart ditched the weight checking part of the self checkout so it's quick and easy, yet every time I go at least one person has managed to fuck up badly enough to need to call help over

Meanwhile I'm getting a decent discount on my purchase, which is nice

Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice "pay by cash" without a "back" button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.

Fucking Kroger's (grocery store in the US) self checkouts yell at you if you have more than like 6 to 8 items, so you have to wave down an employee to continue scanning.

Then it complains for more than 15 and you have to wait for the employee again.

What's the point? How often do people go to a grocery store to get less than 15 things? It's just frustrating.

Normalize leaving your groceries in the cart and leaving the store, and finding another store that doesnt make you bend over backwards to pay for your shit.

When their AI is well trained on social behaviours, they'll start sending Minority reports