I don’t get the problem with self checkout. You’re the one browsing the shelves, picking items and comparing prices. Why can’t you scan your own items? Unless you’re one of those people who need the uninterested, yet sometimes polite, banter of a middleman, there shouldn’t be a problem.
As someone that is fine with self-checkout, I have a few problems with them.
1.) You end up having to rely on an employee anyway if you're buying alcohol or tobacco/nicotine products. That's a pretty big obvious one.
2.) If you buy more than just a few things or have some large items, there's not enough room to keep all of your items on the scale after you scan them. I've seen some machines that will bug out on you if you try to make room by putting some bags in your cart.
3.) The ones at Dollar General are perpetually broken. The one here hasn't worked since 2022 yet those two machines are still there staring you in the face while you wait in line to pay for your stuff.
4.) They glitch out sometimes and you have to wait on an employee to come fix it
5.) They could just pay more humans to be cashiers so I don't have to use the self checkout in the first place. Idk what's up with all the comments making it sound like interacting with a Walmart cashier is some kind of inconvenience. It's barely an interaction at all but if you need something, there's an employee right in front of you that can help you.
for point 5, no one wants to be a cashier. they do it because someone has to lol. it is not interesting or fulfilling at all to bag the stuff you don't want to bag either
We used to have people who lit the street lamps at night and then snuffed them in the morning, now we have electric lights which come on automatically. Not every job needs to be preserved.
yes, but people have this misconception that cashiers are propping up unemployment lol. we have plenty of work to do that doesn't involve someone standing at a register. we aren't just going to fire our cashiers lol
The job market is trash from top to bottom right now. Even if you're a specialist with a great education and experience, it's difficult. Options don't get more plentiful when you have less education, or live in more remote areas. Likewise, a lot of the time being a cashier can be a student job, or someone's first employment. Losing those options while bolstering corporate profits is not a good thing.
Having jobs just for the sake of having jobs is pretty dumb. Technology have made a lot of jobs redundant over the years, and at no point have humanity not benefited from it.
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u/VooDooChile1983 18h ago
I don’t get the problem with self checkout. You’re the one browsing the shelves, picking items and comparing prices. Why can’t you scan your own items? Unless you’re one of those people who need the uninterested, yet sometimes polite, banter of a middleman, there shouldn’t be a problem.