As an introverted person, I use self-checkout wherever I can. The less I have to talk to random people, the happier I am :)
I’m also strongly for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines, like it happened with washing machines. Let them do that work, and let people enjoy the creative ones.
I love self check out, it’s great when you’re only getting a few items. When I shop for more than that there’s the handheld scanners, which are also great
Yeah, “scanning errors”, like when it’s charging me full price instead of the discount that it was supposed to be on, which would not be as obvious if a cashier scanned it?
For an almost expired product none the less
They’ve been experimenting with self-checkouts for decades. When I was a kid, I remember being in a store with my grandma, waiting in line to pay, and an employee kept trying to entice those in the line to come over and try the self-checkouts.
She asked my grandma a few times before my grandma, a proud union supporter, snapped “I want a person to ring me up. I’m trying to save your JOB, young lady!”
And the young woman stopped asking my grandma.
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
trying to save you are job
I’m a grammar proponent as well, but I’m not seeing the benefit of your comment. Do you think autocorrect errors are fun for anyone?
Zero training and zero pay. Hmm I wonder if anything could possibly go wrong…
You could pay yourself with free groceries. Or at least leave yourself a tip.
And for some reason they were expected to tip the machine.
Would you like to round up for charity?
i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
often, yes
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
Hello from France. Our countries don’t admit to themselves how racist they still are and how much of a poison it is. I hope your friend is OK.
Yeah, he was born here, so it’s not something new to him.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…The more likely scenario is that you just neglect to scan that case of beer, or those ribeye steaks.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The letter of the law is the letter of the law afaik
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
I completely refuse to use the self-checkout lanes. every mistake we make there helps correct the process that will eventually ensure that the people who need jobs in a grocery store no longer have a job.
Fuck training their robots for them.
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
I almost exclusively use self checkout because it is quicker, and I felt rushed exactly once because a line was forming. Funny thing is, because I felt rushed I literally forgot to pay and just walked out with a free load of groceries. I did come back the next day and told them, and asked to pay because I didn’t want to risk getting banned from that store, as it is the closest one to me. They said nobody ever comes back to do that lmao
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
You are not faster than a cashier.
I’m faster than queuing for a cashier.
And if it’s one where you take the scanner round the shop with you, it’s certainly faster than unpacking it all and repacking it.
No, it’s way more relaxed and honestly I don’t wanna speak to someone after a whole day of yapping at the office. I just wanna pack the groceries into my bag in peace
I’m faster than the line of people buying ice and lotto tickets and cigarettes and paying with a check.
Yes I am. Worked in retail for 8 years. They are slow because they are paid by the hour, not the transaction.
obviously my self checkout experience is faster, or i would go to a cashier. we’ve been over this.
What a strange thing to say.
I use an app to scan items when I pick them up and immediately put them into my bag. The whole self-checkout process takes 10s to scan a QR code and pay. It is much more faster and pleasant.
Wait… I need time to know more about this magical process.
Here in Estonia, major stores (I think we have 5 chains) offer mobile apps that let you scan items. You pick something up, scan it, and put it in your bag. By the time you arrive at the self‑service checkout, everything is packed and you only have to pay, which takes mere seconds.
That’s amazing and I am so jealous of that!
Walmart and sheetz does this.
I still don’t get why you wouldn’t get a discount for checking yourself out. No wonder all those high-falutin’ CEO’s think consumers are a bunch of dumb schmucks. The real heroes are the clerks who “miss” scanning something from time to time.
I get a five finger discount now and then. Small things usually. I will NOT pay the bag fee if I self checkout, you took away a job for a computer, you can absolutely eat the 25-50 cents worth of bags.
Same reason they don’t pay you for using an atm instead of an expensive teller at an expensive branch
It’s easier To add a fee To a new service even if it’s to save them money, Than it is to start charging for an existing service that used to be central to their business
It’s not shoplifting, its an employee discount.
The industry term for that is “shrinkage”.
I was shopping in the pool!
I thought that was used in the porn industry.
That’s “fluffing”.
I thought that was when you stuffed your mouth full of marshmallows and then give head
That’s a fluffernutter.
That sounds dangerous.
Two choking hazards at the same time
It’s my compensation for doing their work for them.
Hey, it’s not my fault that a pack of T-bone steaks weighs the same as a pack of hot-dog wieners.
It is 1866. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 1940. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 2026. You get the picture.1920s - Corporation Genius idea: “self service groceries” - put the product out so people have to fetch the items themselves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
2000s - Corporate Genius idea: “self service checkout” - People scan their own products that they went and got from the shelves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
Solution? Tax the employees more to pay for police to protect our record profits!
“Record profits” in nominal currency will be made year after year. Profit margins (on supermarkets in my country) remains low, and is lower than it was 10 years ago.
EDIT: if you don’t believe me, ask for evidence instead of just downvoting because you don’t like facts. Lemmy has a narrative about grocery profits that (at least in my country) is not supported by evidence.
I recognize the impact inflation has on the term, but it varies from store to store and country to country whether it outpaces inflation. Walmart, which this meme is about and a load bearing parasite on the US, maintains growth slightly above inflation. This doesn’t indemnify everyone, or really anyone in particular. It’s pointing out that money is going somewhere in this current era of force-fed infinite growth, but seemingly not to the people who need it most.
To phrase my comment another way, the wealth gap is widening and businesses will do anything but address it, instead complaining about their own impropriety as if it were your fault.
This meme is about self service checkouts which are ubiquitous in my country.
Walmart had an operating profit margin of 4.2% in their last statement, and a net profit margin of 3%.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for widening wealth inequality, profit margins under 5% are not where you’ll find it. Check the facts instead of going on pure vibes - company accounts are public and subject to audit (on pain of huge punishments if wrong - they got Al Capone on tax fraud remember)
Walmart’s gross profit rate was 24.1% of net sales in fiscal 2025, and operating income was $29.348 billion, or 4.4% of net sales.
So for every $100 Walmart keeps $4.40 after paying everything including corporate staff but before taxes.
For Walmart, the “3%” is basically net profit margin for fiscal 2025, Walmart reported $680.985 billion in total revenue and $19.436 billion in net income attributable to Walmart, which is about 2.85%.
3% sounds like nothing but 19.5 billion in profit definitely is but nothing.
Wording it like this is a struggling company is a really…special way to go about this.
I’m getting my numbers from here: https://stock.walmart.com/financial-information/income-statement I believe the difference in figures is between US and Worldwide, and aren’t different enough to affect the conclusion.
I’m not “wording it like” Walmart is struggling; I’m saying that Walmart (and the grocery sector in general) works on razor-thin margins, and trying to ignore that fact by talking about “record profits” is misleading and either stupid or dishonest. I’d encourage you to re-read my comment and try to decide which words made you interpret it that way - I think you’ll find that they aren’t there, that I was just reporting facts in neutral language, and you’ve made that interpretation because I’m going against the narrative.
What a low profit margin means is that if an average shopper buying a $100 basket of goods decides to swipe a $2 chocolate bar, their profits are nearly halved. Problems that seem small have large effects to a company operating like this.
The narrative Lemmy commenters tend to believe is that the cost of groceries went up in the 2020s due to corporate greed and lay the blame for their current struggles at the foot of retailers like Walmart. The actual facts don’t bear that out. They then mock complaints about theft from shops attributed to self-service checkouts as price-gouging fat cats whining that their cost-saving measure isn’t saving them costs, ignoring that, with profit margins relatively steady/down since before the pandemic, those cost savings are being passed on to them, the consumer.
Are the companies in your country currently complaining about theft in massive PR campaigns? Because Walmart is.
And Walmart’s outpaced inflation. Not all of our companies have, but some certainly. Your argument is like asserting that a car couldn’t have run out of gas because it has 90 km/l.
And of course I’m going to blame a company that underpays and abuses its employees as severely as Walmart, while siphoning half of its personnel budget from local taxes.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
https://wallstreetnumbers.com/stocks/wmt/operating-expenses
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/revenue
Not in a massive PR campaign, but yes they are complaining publicly. Retail theft has gone up significantly, with 360k offences in the last year before the pandemic, having fallen for a couple of years from a peak of about 380k, and the most recent year stands at 530k offences.
And by all means, criticise Walmart for their abuses of staff and exploitative practices. But their profit levels are just not part of it. If Walmart were nationalised and stopped making profit and stopped paying its execs as much your $100 grocery bill would still be over $95. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
I can tell you that Dillons (subdivision of Kroger) is on genuinely razor thin margins, and they at least pay half way decent for the area im in
Then it sounds like I wasn’t referring to Dillons. Do they even have self checkout?
Yes, most have two separate checkouts on both sides. And also this weird self checkout/belt lane thing. Was just trying to add to the conversation, geez.
I didn’t mean any offense, but I exclusively found dillons in low population cities, which made me question whether they’d have any need for a self checkout.
Even the little corner shop in my town of a couple thousand people has one now. There’s no way that a second full checkout would fit in the space, nor is hiring another staff member to work it likely to be realistic, so it’s a straight upgrade in capacity
Gotta be careful giving dissenting opinions in the black and white world of the internet.
I have no idea what the belt lane thing is and I’m interested. My self checkouts are just the scanner thing, and then you put the items on the scale. The inclusion of a belt is intriguing.
So, its a self checkout screen, then you place your scanned items on a belt that carries it to a bagging area. I think the idea is for the self checkout attendant to then bag the items for you
I fucking hate that belt fed one! They put it in my go to store shortly before I moved close to an aldi and how exactly is it supposed to be helpful? You scan, and it belts it all into a pile at the other end that you then have to walk over and organize. At least the lazy Susan designed ones can let you organise it all into the bags.
Also, I don’t know how their “unexpected item in the bagging area” sensor works but I literally set them off by getting within 10 inches of the bags. When I worked at one years back we literally measured the distance. No contact, no previous errors, tested on two different machines, apparently I produce an aura that makes Dillons bags gain mass.
And according to Hollywood accounting not a single movie has ever made a profit…
I would be surprised if supermarket’s profit margins are actually as low as they all claim.
They are “low” but it’s on purpose. When you make 19.5 billion in profit that’s the number that needs to be spread around. 3% sounds like Walmart might go under with one bad move. 19.5 billion in profit after they paid taxes in 2025 is a powerful company with plenty of profit.
People don’t really understand how these companies profit from their scale. They expect the regular person to be empathetic over 3% profit while hiding 20 billion dollars year over year.
Not true, Hollywood can shift profits from one film to another, but not hide them in such a way that no-one of them break even. You could have checked what the major studios are making (it was about $6bn net in 2025).
This is what audits are for, and in any functioning country (indeed even a half-functioning one like the US) the internal revenue department makes it very difficult to hide profits at a large scale. There’s an easy way to sniff check this claim: if it were possible to hide profits so thoroughly, why does any company at all pay any corporation tax at all?
What Hollywood does is shuffle its real costs around so that films which would have to pay the largest royalties appear to make no money. They can also shuffle some things around so that subsidiaries operating in high tax countries appear to make a loss. Supermarkets selling physical goods in physical shops can’t do this.
There’s also no reason to think that companies have got better at hiding profits over the last few years, even if you think their profits are wrong.
In the local shop they often catch you for not scanning the paper bag.
But if you scan tomatoes as peppers or vice versa nobody bats an eye.
I’m gonna be so real, I prefer self-checkout whenever possible. The “employee discount” is just an occasional bonus
I don’t.
Every single thing involves me getting the attention of the 1 guy who is responsible for minding like 10 of them.
- item won’t scan …
- you have alcohol
- you have a thing with a discount sticker on it
- item has 2 upcs on it for some reason and the first one scans and is like twice the cost of the thing
- I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
You can avoid this by just ringing up all produce as bananas.
What is the cheapest tomato? That’s the tomato you ring up. Oops, silly old me, making a mistake anyone could make.
I actually would like to do that but I live in Canada and in February there cheapest tomato choosing is hard.
Red tomato might be a green house tomato and cost more than you might think.
This combined with the shit interface that truncates the names and is slow as hell makes it annoying.
In my experience (L.A.) the tomatoes each have stickers on them, with either a scan code or a number code. But you’re right the whole thing is a PITA
Loose romas
So, ten dollars?
Carrots are cheaper.
If you can find them sold by weight. Most stores in my area sell them in big, pre-weighed bags.
My experience is from Norwegian shops, so it might differ from the standards in elsewhere.
- item won’t scan: very rarely an issue. We can put in the bar code numbers manually if needed.
- you have alcohol: a nearby staff will take a quick glimpse at me and will approve the age from their unit. Only people close to the age limit will have to wait for the staff.
- discount stickers in shops here have the updated price on a barcode on that sticker.
- I don’t understand the “2 upcs”-issue.
- accidental scans can be corrected by the user without staff involvement.
Having lived in both the US and Denmark, I’d say the listed problems are much more prevalent in the US. The ID check being a pain, the double bar code, discounts not being applied.
It’s just a better experience here than the US lol I’m guessing it’s similar in Norway
We can manually enter the bar codes in the usa. It’s just that my fellow Americans are stupid.
Alcohol needs an ID scan.
Discount stickers work the same here, but again, Americans.
I think if I buy boxes the 2 upc thing becomes an issue.
Accidental scans need a person to confirm you didn’t steal. Although I know the people where I go and they’ll just approve it remotely when it pops up.
Self check-outs at a fast food place (or boba tea etc.) are great because you can ensure that everything is correct and to your liking before making payment.
But they’re absolutely atrocious for any transaction where you’ve already picked out a half-dozen items or more.
Wow yeah I bought a six pack of Coke or something and the scanner picked up the UPC on the cardboard carrier AND one bottle, like fuck off you’re charging me an extra bottle! Took a while for the attendant to stroll over and lackadaisically fix it at his leisure.
Advantage: when somebody is taking so long it seems like they’re figuring out their taxes, you’re not stuck behind them because the one line goes to multiple stations. At least where I shop.
I prefer self checkout since they have to hire at least 2 person that I have scanned everything instead of 1 person to do the scanning.
Or I get something for free.
Wild guess, you’re American? Because every story I hear about self checkouts in the US is this. Meanwhile in actual first world countries where they are modern systems you very rarely have any of these issues. Even my experiences in Croatia and Spain from 20 years ago had solved most of this (and please, I’m not dissing them. I’m a Swede and my experience is just that Scandinavia is on the forefront of stuff like this.) I haven’t had to grab the attention of a worker for so many years, and from what I see with other shoppers it’s the same for them. The workers seem bored if anything because they so rarely have to help someone even with one person minding twenty of them at the larger stores.
Yeah, so I hit the grocery store two or three. Times during the week, usually getting stuff for dinner that night, fresh veggies, meat, that sorta thing. It makes sense with how my mornings lay out, and I prefer small trips. I’m at a point where I have this shit down by rote. Yes, there’s some hiccups, like watermelon needing an employee because people use watermelon to steal apparently, but I kind of program in to the whole operation.
Larger orders, I’ll hit an employee so I can bag while they scan.
At the end of the day, it’s always about efficiency, and so it’s generally best for me to self checkout.
I prefer it if I have like 8 items or less.
Anything more and I cant be bothered. Especially if it’s groceries and there are codes to enter instead of barcodes to scan and weights to take.
Self-checkout or not, minimum wage is not even remotely enough to expect cashiers to be anti-theft enforcement.
Doesn’t stop some people from trying to. Lady at Smiths insisted on seeing my receipt after telling her twice that yes I was sure I correctly scanned all of the 6 items in my cart, thank you.
Agreed, there is always at least one worker at these places who has a strange sense of misplaced loyalty.
I don’t know what “Smiths” is, but unless it’s a club like Costco that can impose it as a condition of membership, they have no right to demand your receipt or stop you from leaving.
If they stop you anyway, they had damn well better have probable cause (and no, refusing to show a receipt doesn’t create it by itself) because otherwise that’s a false arrest.
One of ours does this. I object, so I just breeze past the security guard without listening or making eye contact.
Me too. Unless you are going to lay hands on me (after which you have a bigger problem) I am just going to walk right by you and ignore you if you try to force me to do anything.
I understand the desire to do this but I know these people just from seeing them often. I can’t imagine giving people a hard time for this where I live.
Just a standard regional grocery chain. They dont have memberships but im not gonna make a scene over $40 worth of groceries i knew I had scanned properly so I just let her realize her mistake and decided not to shop there anymore.
Just saying that the lack of pay doesn’t stop people from appointing themselves as volunteer loss prevention.
You don’t make a scene, you ignore them and walk past them and through the door. You don’t have to prove you own the things you bought. Pretend you don’t speak English or just are confused and keep moving.
I will say though I’d probably show them the receipt instead of call the cops, but that says more about what I think the cops might do than anything else.
Pretend you don’t speak English or just are confused and keep moving
I just either ignore them entirely or say “no, thank you”, declining it as the request it actually is rather than the demand they try to imply it to be.
Its sort of funny, if they catch someone shoplifting its the same thing. They will request they come back to a room and wait for the police but they can’t force them physically.
But how many of them were actually bananas?
Now I want to goto a self checkout and ring up a dozen bananas individually while blocking the camera
Watch out guys they might cut your shifts if this keeps up.
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
Whoops! It seems that my finger has slipped and picked the cheapest variety of banana, out of the 11 varieties of bananas.
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
4011 is the new 411.
