People Twitter

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.

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?

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.

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

To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.

The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use "AI" to make sure you're not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you've swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.

However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they've mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don't even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There's probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don't know. I've never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I'm paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who've never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.

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

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.

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.

The latest models have AI cameras watching you scan your stuff. If you don't hold things and do the motions properly it will stop and contact the underpaid human to help you while the queue behind you gets longer.

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?

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.