As a general rule I enjoy shopping but today was an absolute nightmare. We went out to one of the larger chain stores and did a mass of birthday shopping. That was fine – my girls will all be very happy with their birthday presents (3 birthdays in 15 days is no joke). Once we had collected all our goods it was off to the checkout and that is where the rot began.
All the checkouts were busy so I, being the clever dick that I am, decided we should try the new ‘self checkout’ facility that they have installed. Talk about a crazy worthless system – no wonder there was no one waiting to use it.
First, you scan the item yourself – not a big problem except the very first item wouldn’t scan – when it did it scanned twice. That’s cool – don’t stress – just hit the cancel button – all along there is this sickly sweet female computer voice giving you advice. We hit the cancel button – ‘please wait for an attendant to verify’ – there goes the ‘self checkout’.
The attendant arrives, swipes her card and toddles off again. ‘please place your item in the bag’. Hello, I don’t want a damn bag, this item wont fit any bag any way – its too big. ‘please wait for an attendant’. Back she comes, waves her card, all cool again. We keep going. Except the damn machine doesn’t recognize when you do place your item in the checkout bag. I am sure I put things in and took them out again half a dozen times before it was happy.
Half an hour later we finally get everything scanned and its time to pay. ‘please wait for an attendant, an irregularity has been detected’ – by now I was getting a little sick of hearing the voice and was not in a good mood. (
photo credit: msmail)
The attendant arrives, ‘have you got any DVD’s or CD’s’ – yes three or four. That’s fine she does her thing and clears the machine ‘irregularity’ – I’ll give it ‘irregularity’ all right. After finally getting to pay
and thinking all was fine, we start to head off out of the store only to be stopped again by ‘the attendant’.
‘BTW – you need to take your receipt and the DVD’s back to the entertainment section so they can put the DVD’s into their boxes’.
You have got to be joking.
After two hours of actually finding what we wanted to buy, it took another hour to use the ‘self checkout’ facility before we could head off to the pet care center to buy a few other odds and ends. ( photo credit: beneneuman)
This has to be one of the worst cases of technology making life easier for the consumer. You can bet we will see more of this into the future as well. One ‘attendant’ can look after 6 of these machines. That is five young check out operators who wont get jobs – often first or after school jobs.
I want a human or I am not going to shop there – plain and simple.
I love the self serve systems but I agree they’re a little ridiculous at the moment. They’re not ultra sensitive either – if you place something ‘in the bag’ that isn’t very heavy, it tells you to ‘put the item in the bag’. I just think they need to figure some way to do the items with high security risk like cds & dvds to make it so you can demagnetize them yourself. Anyway, I’m sorry to hear you had such a bad experience with them. I love using them for grocery shopping because I seem to have a knack for getting the bar code to scan, and like you said there’s hardly anyone waiting to use them so I’m in and out lickety split!
Funny Post Les…I know not funny for you but funny to the onlookers. My first experience with such machines occurred I believe in Portland, Oregon and thankfully I was with someone who knew the ropes…otherwise I might still be there…LOL
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