Spill the beans...on your self-service checkout tips (beep)

BJV

Gillby1 wrote: »

Ha ha Blufish! I bet you'd be amazed at how many of us semi-consciously worry about little things like that! You are not alone...

Or even worse going so fast that the shopping soft items, bread, eggs that sort of thing, that you have tried your best not to squash gets buried under a mountain of veg.

I know someone who used to work for Tesco's and she said she used to pass the time by eyeing up what people had bought and mentally judging them!

Kids love the self scan machines and as long as you plan it like a military operation, bags check, purse check, bagging area free check, its fine.

Aimless

I think avoiding them is the best tip! Not only are they temperamental pieces of junk, but they also allow shops to get rid of staff. If we all refused to use them then they would have to stop replacing masses of proper tills with them.

The last two times I gave in and used them, they broke! First time, it got stuck in a loop telling me to put something in and out of the bagging area. All staff members had disappeared, and I was there so long I nearly just walked out. Someone ran past, pressed a few buttons and vanished again, ten seconds later it crashed completely. The second time, it took the money but didn't register it, meaning another long wait for someone to open it up. Never again.

originator

blufish wrote: »

Personally I love self-service checkouts, but then again I'm a socially awkward numpty. I get terribly embarrassed and panic that the checkout assistant is judging me by what I buy

I am checkout assistant,believe me it is all a blur as we have IPM targets to meet:o
The odd drunk breathing fumes over me is a diff matter:rotfl:now that I do judge!

ruth56_2

I have found that if you have lightweight items (seeds, cards), they often dont register when put in the bag so I now put the item in the bag and press on thebottom so that it registers. Does not always work tho! I agree that being a little patient after putting the item in does work. I feel sorry for the assistant who seems to run around in circles!

andrewbarke

originator wrote: »

I am checkout assistant,believe me it is all a blur as we have IPM targets to meet:o
The odd drunk breathing fumes over me is a diff matter:rotfl:now that I do judge!

Couldn't agree more with this, since i never pay any attention to what people are buying (only look out for tagged, restricted etc things), even people themselves just blend into one, unless as you say you have some drunk or 16 year old trying to buy some cheap booze!!

bailey70

I hate self service but have started to see them as a necessary evil and they do save a lot of time messing about in queues... however I've often wondered if, since they avoid having paid staff handling our shopping, if we should actually get a discount for using them!

My biggest problem is loose fruit and all the supermarkets seem to have the same problem. You enter the code for your item (i.e. the pink grapefruit for which it seems to take forever to find the right item on the menu), tell it how many you have then transfer the first one to your bag... the moment you put the second one in you get the usual "unexpected item in bagging area" message! Putting them all in your bag at once doesn't seem to help either.

I also tend to get annoyed at the "Don't forget your shopping" message being shouted at you when you're already walking away with your bags.

Oh... and I know this applies to the manned checkouts too but does anybody else get annoyed at Asda's insistence on asking if you want cash-back before taking your payment?

Brian_Steele

Don't use the Tesco ones - they always throw a wobbly when I use them. Sainsburys are fine.

Don't try to buy anything restricted - alcohol, or CDs etc. that are security tagged.

Shout at it! It may not make things any quicker, but it certainly relieves the frustration.

wishus

Neither is this a tip, more of a cautionary tale...

My OH has always hated self-service scanners, particularly the ones in our local HSBC which all look the same even though they do different functions - not good for him as he suffers the double whammy of being a dyslexic glasses wearer, with added impatient grumpiness, but he has no choice. Most people get on with the machines, and most people didn't make a fuss about the reduction of actual members of staff to help people with their banking. So, now there are no staff, just one person rushing around the machines helping numerous confused biddies and my OH.

Being a lover of all things gadgety, and like a poster above, somewhat socially awkward, I was his polar opposite, and used to get on quite well with self-service scanners in our local Sainsbury's. I could nip in before work, grab a couple of snacks that I probably didn't need, and nip out again. No need to speak to anyone!

But seeing his little frustrated face in HSBC one day, I began to realise I was part of the problem. His problem.

When we went shopping together, this became more and more apparent, and we would have to avoid the self-service scanners and bide our time in the ever-lengthening queues. (You'll have noticed in most places how they have abandoned that policy of opening up new tills if the queues get too long? they want to herd you to the scanners.)

That was until we got a new ASDA near our house. To begin with, we loved it - they overstocked a lot, so you could pop in most nights and get super reduced bargains - I was in MSE hog heaven (mind, most of those were cake and bread items, we started piling on the pounds).

Then, they decided to make it a George/catalogue collection store, with not so many groceries. It was a bit rubbish, and even worse, they took out all the manned tills apart from the cigarette counter.

I went in by myself one day for cat food. I was hungover and knackered, but thinking about my OH's diatribe on scanners, how they were evil machines that stole jobs from real people, how 'self-service' is an oxymoron, I decided to queue for the only till - except there was no one there.

A chap came over and asked if I would like to use the 'self-service' scanner, and I said no. He asked if I wanted cigarettes, and I said no, I just wanted to be served by a real person. He speculated that I might not know how to use the scanner, so I went into a spiel about the billions of profit Walmart make, and they can't use that to create jobs, they just want to cream even more off the top. The chap explained it freed him up to do other things round the store, so I said, yeah, jobs that someone else could have had, and now he's expected to do more than one. He said he knew, but unfortunately there was no one who could serve me at that moment. They were a bit stuck.

So I used the scanner, popped in my credit card, packed up and left.

The security card came out after me - I'd somehow managed to not finish paying! :embarasse

So my sort of tip is - don't use them with a hangover.

But it brought home to me that the user is only as good as they are able to be, and like it or not, one day we will all be less able - and not just because of alcohol.

These machines disenfranchise the minorities that can't use them, and they are an afterthought to these companies, because they are just people. Like the staff are just people, an inconvenient necessity for acquiring money, and needed much less these days.

Well, my OH and I took a bold step after that and since March 1st, we haven't been in a supermarket at all. Not everyone will be able to do what we do - we take a shopping trolley to the local market and shops, which is hard work, and for which we have to be super-organised, but we have worked out that we do in fact save quite a bit of money. Not much on the actual products we buy - we save about £3 a week, but we are spending less on tempting crap nutritionally rubbish that we don't really need, which is what you end up putting in your trolley when you go round a supermarket.

You might not want to do this, but to us, it's total consumer revenge.:beer:

Lifeforms

I like the speed and convenience (if they do actually work!) with them. But we do not generally get on. I have to talk back to the, "Gimmie a chance to put my damn card in!" "oh hurry up, I've already paid..." "I'll give you an unexpected item in YOUR bagging area" etc I do generally head for those over manned tills. And it makes me feel so much better to be rude and talk back to them!

Our local co-op had them, then one day they just vanished, disappeared, off the face of the earth, never to be mentioned again. All that stands, in this large sad square of empty floorspace, is a single solitary newspaper stand (square, multiple slots). Now they generally only have the ciggie desk open for shopping. Cue the Queue!

VfM4meplse

I always assess the queue in advance. If it contains anyone that looks old, less than with it, or a bright spark with a trolley I go to a conveyor belt instead. It may take longer in practiice but it's less frustrating.