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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
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I would LOVE to go through a regular check out! If only we still actually had more than 2 open in a full supermarket. It's not about time taken, though, it's about the sheer level of inconvenience that it's become. It's an active pain in the ass to have to do the job that used to be done by employees, with shitty machines that yell at you every few minutes, while actively being recorded and treated like a criminal, and have to go through another checkpoint where they're going to once again actively treat you like a criminal and look through your receipt. Or I can spend like, 30 minutes in line at one of the two open cashiers.
So what you just said is you could but don't want to. I feel that deflates the point.
I got new for ya. There were rarely more than than 2 checkstands open before self checkouts were commonplace, too. If you remember differently, you must have been in a different part of the country than me. Either way, you are choosing the self checkout because it's more convenient, not because of a lack of choice.
We all make decisions like that daily. Just because I'm choosing one slightly more convenient shitty thing over another doesn't mean the one I'm choosing is good. It just has a utility. It also only has that utility because the other option is being actively neglected.
It also wasn't too long ago that I worked retail, at Walmart no less. Even after self checkout became popular, we'd have 4-10 cashiers depending on the traffic at any given time. They'd even call employees who worked completely different sections, like myself, to run registers if they got backed up.