Self-service checkouts
What is it with this sudden rise in self-service checkouts?
I went shopping with Tom the other day, and there we were loaded up with two baskets full of Tom's shopping, waiting patiently to be served by a human cashier when we were unceremoniously ushered towards the self-service checkouts and expected to scan all our baskets of shopping for ourselves.
Now I don't have a problem with the concept of self-service checkouts per se - I mean I can see how they can be useful if say you're just buying say a newspaper or a pint of milk - but this new trend some supermarkets seem to have now of employing less and less staff and making customers do more and more of their shopping via self-service is just taking the biscuit.
For one, the self-service checkouts are badly designed. By badly designed, I mean they are well designed. Too well designed. They are designed to be useable by the oldest, slowest people in the world and have so many security checks built in, for anyone with more than about 10 braincells they actually slow the whole shopping process down. Take the Tom's-shopping-trip example as a case in point. Tom buys four bags of pasta. The system doesn't let you type in multiples so you have to scan the packets individually. We move quickly to scan the packets, but the delay between scans of individual items is such that we have to wait for the system to slowly register each and every packet. With each and every packet we can't just put our shopping in our own bags, no, because the system has to weigh what you've put in the plastic carrier bag the supermarket forces you to use, and if it doesn't weight the correct amount, the system calls over a supervisor.
So, after we cross the hurdle of having to scan our items painfully slowly, and pack them in the plastic carrier bags we really don't want under the watchful eye of a supervisor who thinks all young people by default are criminals, Tom then buys a security tagged item.
This in iteself calls over the supervisor who has to de-tag the item, reset the system and give us the item to place in our bag. A few items later, at the end of the transaction, the system then calls the supervisor over again to check that we had indeed removed the security tag that it had asked us to do a few minutes before. Again, the supervisor has to type in a code on the system. Meanwhile, a queue is forming behind us...
Then we come to pay.
Tom goes to pay; I go to pick up the bags ready to leave ASAP. Again the supervisor has to reset the system as the machine thinks we're now stealing as you can't pick up your shopping till the machine says you can. I needn't even add at this point that if you have a large amount of shopping as we had, that the scales aren't actually large enough to fit all your shopping on - but that's another problem I don't really want to go into at this point in time.
After a good amount of hassle, we finally pay and pick up our bags and the machine lets us depart past the ever-watchful supervisor and security guard employed to watch the locals of Yiewsley struggle to come to terms with the stupid self-service machines and their stupid patronising voices. ARGH!!!!!!
It really does make me despair.
Considering the amount of money we all pay the various supermarkets for our goods, is it really too much to ask for a little human contact? A few self-service machines for the 5-items-or-fewer crowd I can accept as being perhaps being of benefit to those in a hurry, but when supermarkets start using these infernal machines as a means of employing less staff, forcing people with trollies full of shopping to have to struggle on their own with stupid patronising machines making the shopping experience infinately more painful, I really do wonder at the way this world is going.
I wasn't going to name the supermarket in question, but now I come to think about it, it really is a badly-run store all round:
TESCO'S YIEWSLEY I'm talking about you: sort it out!