548
Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
548 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59594 readers
2920 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is this an American thing? We had these things in Europe for years, and I never heard of anyone having problems.
Older people still prefer regular checkout, scary computers and that sort of deal.
In my nearest supermarket (europe) it is a pain. You go through self checkout cause it should be faster, but it works like shit, and you have to wait a lot until someone comes to fix the problem. We are civilized, though, we don't cause problems to the shopkeepers. Still a pain, though
I'm in europe and the issues I've had are getting an alert that an employee needs to come to check and sometimes that can take awhile.
One store also has a scanner so you self scan as you go BUT the paying part is at an actual employee instead of a machine. Every damn time they are alerted to randomly pick some items from your cart to check if any weren't scanned. And every damn time they pick the items at the bottom of my basket and damage stuff because of it. Or sometimes there is no one at the checkout so i stand there with my basket/cart and scanner like an idiot for 3-5 minutes for an employee to show up. That might not seem like a long time but it sure feels like it...
Yep this is exactly why I refuse to do the scan as you go, it ends up seriously frustrating. Self scan at checkout is fine if you don't have paracetamol or alcohol, otherwise you're waiting ages for assistance.
It's definitely an overall worse experience
Kinda funny how much faster Europe has adopted retail tech lately. Last time I was there 7 years ago they were still mostly using cash for transactions, but now the cashiers get a little buttmad if I don't tap my phone to the scanner immediately. I hardly see anyone using phone payments in the US and I don't understand why it hasn't caught on. At least not where I live. It's about as fast and convenient as it gets.
Or maybe it's just because I'm in a major city right now and kit everywhere in Europe is like this.
Pretty much in any major town in my tiny country, this is the case also.
Yes. The technology options for self checkout in the US are terrible, so the user experience is terrible. All the horror stories in this thread are true. The stores are terrified of theft but refuse to hire checkers. There's also way too many grocery stores, so there's little money to put into technology upgrades and appropriate levels of staffing. For example, I am less than 5 minutes drive from 9 grocery stores. Extend that to 10 minutes and I've got over 20. Silly.
That's crazy. We have a designated checker for each self checkout.
We have about 1 employee per 12 self checkout stations.
Kinda what I meant, too.
In more modern places, they have little machines that they can solve any issue without having to stand up.
In older places, they have to walk around, and they are assigned to like 6-10 machines.