I have to give credit where credit is due. Whoever thought up of this idea is a genius if you really think about it. Let’s take the average consumer and convince them that is it a great idea to do a job that we used to do for them! You go through your local grocery store picking up your favorite food items of the week. You notice that you do not have that many processed food fun, so you head to this glorious area known as the self checkout line. In this marvelous area, you get to play checkout clerk! You know…that hourly wage, high school job that you always wanted but never had. So you go up and wait in line at this fantastic source of personal fulfillment and realize that there are others…just like you…that want to partake in the joy of doing a job that you have zero experience in!
In front of you…you have…Mr. I Am Impatient. He came to this do your own work area with a full cart of a months worth of groceries! He truly believes that checking his own items out is much faster than waiting behind two people in line. Of course it is..with his unbelievable scanning and bagging speed of 2 items a minute. He would be already on his quest for the scanning and bagging championship, but he is still waiting on the “I don’t know how to use a touch screen” lady who is stuck on the payment screen with no idea how to get past it.
And there you are…with 5 small food items just trying to get out of the store, so what do you do? You switch over to another line hoping that you have some kind of bagging expert that will get done fast enough so that you can get home to watch The Family Guy. As you switch into another line, you just get more annoyed to find out that the mom in front of you thinks that it would be a fun game to let the 5 year old son check out her groceries! Fantastic! Isn’t child labor outlawed in the United States?!
Finally…you make it up to the checkout center and you start scanning your delicious food items. You scan “BEEP” and you set it in the bag. Wait…can’t move onto the next piece of taste bud bliss…the weight pad didn’t recognize your last piece of culinary art! Here comes the self checkout helper employee with their super annoyed “can you really not scan and place?” face on ready to scan their card and override your gigantic food scanning mistake.
After all of this…you finally get your receipt and head out the door 10 minutes later than you would have been if you had just gotten in line and enjoyed some small talk with a checkout cashier. What do you get for doing your own work? Nothing! No 5% off for working at Publix for 15 minutes…no “thank you” for contributing to the cost reduction for the company…all you get is the extreme annoyance of going to work when you want to purchase something!
I want to enact a 10% discount to all self checkouters who get out in an efficient manner. I believe its earned since you were actually put to work!
That “genius” invention as you called it was invented in Dayton
I love the self checkout and I am good at it! Definitely faster than the regular people…then again, I shop at weird hours when the checkout people seem to be sleeping so when I wake them up there are a little slower on the scanning
Plus, I don’t have to argue with the people who insist on giving me a bag when I only have one item…that I just carried around the store for 10 mins so I am pretty sure I can make it to my car without my arms giving out…..just saying.
Dude. I can so relate to this. Those couples that try to do it together always end up taking forever because you can’t be lifting, scanning and bagging with 4 hands without upsetting the system. So they end up having to have the employee clear out their screen like twenty times and they look all annoyed like it’s the machine that is broken. No you dumbasses there is method to doing a self checkout and you are effing it up!
There should be a law that if you can’t carry your groceries in your hand or in a hand-held basket that you don’t get to use self checkout.
Well, they were just going to have that one person who monitors the self-checkout working a regular lane anyway. This gives them 3 more lanes when they were going to have only 2-3 really slow lanes anyway.
That’s REALLY true at hardware stores. 5 zillion acres of floor space, 7 people in blue or orange aprons, and one person on checkouts. It’s almost not worth trying to buy anything. The simple fact that I can just punch myself out and run nearly makes it worth it.
Rob;
Thank you so much for writing this. You took the words right out of my mouth and I have not laughed this hard in a long time.
What I am afraid of is will they be like banks and ATM’s – Start charging extra to use the regular lanes… shift everyone to the self checkout lanes then start charging for their use… FN banks
Yes, that’s scary.
I’m so with you! In fact, I’m posting a video as we speak!:)
omg that was so funny. all of those thing have happen to me.
Couldn’t have said it better, Robb.
I still remember Mr. I Am Impatient… haha…
And the 5-year-old who can’t scan… lol.