Comments on: “They” Hate “Us”

By: Lionemom

Lionemom — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:52:55 +0000

I agree with etherdust that I can get out of the supermarket faster if I self-checkout. It always seems I get the cashier that started last week and doesn’t know where the UPC codes are on anything and have to survey each item on every side before scanning it.

And I agree with Tim with the bagging thing! It drives me up a damn wall! They bag things and then re-bag them. Who does this?! I get a bag for my chicken or beef in the butcher section. I don’t need them re-bagged AGAIN! And why don’t they ever bag a gallon of milk. They just assume you are going to carry it. But what if you have 15 bags of groceries? You have to use one hand to carry that milk all by itself. I bring my own bags now too. But RI also has an excellent recycling program (http://tiny.cc/wysMf) for plastic shopping bags, so at least there is that.

And in response to Elaine in the UK, our Stop & Shop here is soon going to implement that very method of self checkout. You take the scanner around and scan your items and they they check it and you pay on the way out. I am curious how it will work out - and how they will prevent massive amounts of shoplifting, aside from actually counting the items in your basket (which would kind of negate the convenience factor.)

By: Stenar

Stenar — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 19:28:03 +0000

I’ve heard of that UK shopping system before and hope it comes to America. Would make things much faster and simpler.

By: durakje

durakje — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:16:29 +0000

A bit OT and incredibly niggling, but what’s with the timestamps on the dooce.comments? Or is it just the done thing that everyone who posts a comment does it at 11 minutes past the hour?

By: Nancy

Nancy — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:52:50 +0000

I’m not seeing this post at Dooce either.

By: tjk

tjk — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:38:44 +0000

be sure to never put a very big magnet near any of the check out computer equipment as it could make a big mess

By: Kristen

Kristen — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 04:03:20 +0000

I agree with Melinda. Living in a very small town where the cashiers take longer than dealing with a sometimes fussy automated checkout makes it worth it.

I’ve learned that you have to immediately throw the item in the bag and keep all sorts of items and body limbs away from the machine and it works fine. Although I have had similar experiences, I still like it better than the direct human contact of a cashier.

By: Melinda

Melinda — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:43:49 +0000

I’ll have to post just to up the number of people who like automated. It’s probably mostly because I’m single and used to life in a big city. Now I’ve moved back to my smallish hometown where the collective IQ runs somewhere around 90 and between the fact that most cashiers can’t make correct change even with the display telling them the amount & the fact that I never buy enough to even remotely fill a grocery cart, it’s just faster.

Plus, it’s just a computer–they’re tempermental pieces of sh** anyway, so why let them embarrass me?

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:30:23 +0000

I saw this post at Dooce - her sarcastic humor makes me laugh so hard I need to wear diapers! ha ha ha.

By: Elaine in the UK

Elaine in the UK — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:26:51 +0000

We don’t have the sort of self-checkout you seem to have in the US here in the UK. (And I have to say I’m quite glad, from the comments I’ve read here and on ‘Dooce’!) Where we have a self-checkout system, you take a hand-held scanner round the shop with you and scan each item before you put it straight into the bags in your trolley (that’s ‘cart’ to you). Then we hand the scanner to an assistant and just pay them what the scanner tells us to! (I sincerely hope the US system doesn’t come to the UK!)

And I’m also quite concerned that, while we in the UK are being encouraged to bring our own bags to the store to ’save the world’s resources’ by not over-using plastics or filling land-fill sites with non-bio-degradeable waste, you in the US seem to be getting things that are already wrapped in plastic bagged and double bagged! Given the number of you compared with the number of us, I wonder why we are bothering? Sheesh!

Love the new Dooce layout by the way, but I do wonder about the large empty column on the righthand side of the page!

Elaine

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:20:53 +0000

While I like the idea of self-check-out, I refuse to use these systems. They’re over-engineered counter-intuitive pieces of crap. And the voice recordings seem intentionally designed to inflict embarrassment and shame on end users.

Waiting for the next generation…