‘We’d rather be served by a human than use a bullying self-checkout.’
24th August 2010
I wasn’t aware that they had these abominations in Britain, as well. Yet another bond forged across the pond.
For the time being, the worst we have to contend with is the self-service check-out. That, though, is bad enough. This model of corporate stinginess seems to have taken root in every supermarket in the country. The people who run supermarkets, of course, insist that the purpose of the self-service check-out is not to save them money, but to save us time by reducing queues.
Well, they could do that by HIRING MORE CHECK-OUT PEOPLE. Surely they could afford a few minimum-wage cashiers for the price of the fancy-pants new equipment? And maybe, you know, provide some jobs for the unskilled? Maybe?
According to a survey published in The Grocer magazine, however, waiting times in queues at Tesco and Sainsbury’s have risen since self-service check-outs appeared. Well, little wonder. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather stand in a queue for 10 minutes to get served by a human than be bullied by a jumped-up calculator with attention deficit disorder.
Hear, hear.
The problem is not just the irritation caused when the thing gleefully refuses to read the barcode I’m trying to scan, or pretends not to recognise the item of fruit I’ve placed on it, or declines to sell me alcohol unless I type in a code I don’t know. The problem is that in order to rectify these many aberrations, a member of staff has to be hovering constantly in the vicinity. Now, forgive me for asking a stupid question, but if these machines are operable only by staff, why not just get staff to operate them? As with, for example, a normal check-out.
Duh.
August 25th, 2010 at 12:02
When I was young, I had several crappy minimum wage jobs. One of them might have actually had a job application to fill out. The others, well, you were just hired or fired by the owner. Lunch was whenever you could slip it in and breaks were whenever the boss wasn’t looking.
My son took a summer job as a cashier at WalMart. First comes a week of watching training videos. Not on how to operate the equipment, but on making sure that you don’t accidentally make minorities (blacks) unhappy when you give them change, dealing with sexual harassment, minimum wage laws, avoiding conflict, etc. A lot of the training has to do with WalMart trying to avoid unionization and lawsuits. On the security training, ‘associates’ are taught that WalMart videos the cashiers. They are afraid of lawsuits and won’t dismiss an employee suspected of stealing. Instead, they continue to video them until security determines that the kid has stolen enough to qualify as a felony, then they just have him arrested.
So why does WalMart want to install self-checkouts? Because it costs a fortune to hire humans without getting eaten out of business by the government and free-range attorneys.