If you rang up way too many bananas Lynn, then you are simply retarded. That is YOUR fault for not paying attention to what your ringing up. YOUR FAULT, not the checkout. Don’t blame them for your mistake. They wouldn’t come say something to you cause your the one checking out. Its self checkout, not watch over your shoulder to make sure everything your doing is Right. Is it wrong for them to assume that since your a grown women that you are capable of ringing up your items on a self checkout? Its funny how so many people are incapable of following simple directions. Pathetic.

I’d much rather deal with checkout myself rather than have to wait in a line, wedged between magazines and candy, waiting for a surly teenager (and some of them are, depending where you shop) to ring up all the items.

It’s like driving. If human contact is the goal, we should all have chauffeurs, or take a taxi or bus. But people naturally want to feel they are in control of long or annoying tasks like driving and checkout. So we do it ourselves.

And I agree with above comment: I work all day. The last thing I want on the way home from work is to learn a new job skill, however minimal it might be.

My local Home Depot has started the strategy of letting the one human checkout line get reallllly long in the evenings, trying to force people over to the self-check machines. And to add insult to it, they have one self-check monitor person pacing back and forth like a checkout nazi, doing nothing to shorten the long line! How’s THAT for customer service?!

I love the convenience of the lanes and am very proficient at getting through them. My problem is with the imbeciles who are in the queue behind me who see that I can move swiftly through the process while everyone else is bumbling round trying to make the system work. Those same imbeciles line up behind me quickly, often within proximity of seeing my PIN when I use my debit/credit card.

Tonight, a man moved in so fast on me while I was closing my transaction, that the transaction was still open and he already had his items on the scanner trying to scan them.

I restrained myself – one more time – and did nothing more than glare at him while I butted my way back in front of the console and closed everything out properly. It was a hard glare. Hah! I’m easy. Until a point.

The next time another customer crowds me when I am using a self-serve checkout will not be pretty. I will state my case explicitly to them and ask them to back off.

Do I blame this mess on the other customers who are in as big a rush as I am? No. The blame lies squarely with the stores. The store I shop in often only has one cashier – in a bad mood – and slow, to boot – and the self-serve lanes (eight of them) are all that is left

How do I feel about the store where I have to endure this unpleasantness? I hate the store. Hate it, hate it, hate. I would never shop there or any other store with the same name if I could avoid it. I detest the store because of their poor business model.

Are there stores in my area where I prefer to shop? Yes. Good lord, yes. Unfortunately, the one closest to my house just closed for renovation so I am stuck with the store I hate for the moment.

Lately, the anger that I see occurring in these self-service lanes is something about which grocery chains should take note. Just a thought. If the last contact the customer has is in these self-service lanes, they will not leave with a “warm and fuzzy” perception of that store. Period. End of story.

Chuck

Of course, at Wal-Mart it’s always about money. Only the Neighborhood Markets where I live have self-check, not the Wal-Mart Super Money Sucker stores.

Wal-Mart only has self-check where it’s convenient for them.

In the Wal-Mart Super Money Sucker stores, the powers-that-be post those older women at the doors to verify your ticket. Most of the time, I refuse to show them my ticket. Never happens in any other store.

At first I refused to do self-check in Little Wal-Mart cuz I knew they’d start accusing me of shoplifting.

But it was sooo easy, so I did self-check. But some profitable things aren’t self-checkable, like tracfone cards.

In the closet little Wal-Mart to me, it finally happened. I got hassled on my way out about the Coke and Fritoes I’d been snacking on, did I have a receipt?

I whipped out my Family Dollar receipt, and blasted ‘em with my speech about their suspicions and told them no more self-check for me.

Then I faxed the manager and told him that if his employees had time to hassle people about tickets then they had time to do customer service: unload baskets, ring them up, and carry groceries out. Of course I never heard a word. And no more self-check for me.

My little Wally World is losing money to a newly opened Hispanic grocer that has a lovely store and real cashiers, so now they start drilling people who go through self-check.

I really shouldn’t go back to that little Wally World, but I have. I will go through the register and take plenty of the cashier’s time. Maybe I’ll start asking the manager all kinds of questions about products too.

In a perfect world, everyone who reads this post will also start forcing Wally World to work for their money.

They put REAL people out of work, they go wrong.

Its all about saving money for the Stores.