Yes, But

When you see this, you should be thinking "look what they fucking took from us."

Once upon a time, those lanes all ran. The CEO's megayacht is the reason you have to stand in line or check out yourself.

This has been Target and Walmart for the last 30 or 40 years. They build them with 30 lanes with the idea of Xmas rush but then only have one or two lanes open no matter how many customers are waiting.
This was a problem long before self checkout or higher minimum wages or any of that.
- They don't even open the other lanes for xmas rush anymore...
- Hell, 20 years ago when I worked at Walmart we usually had about half the registers open most days. More when we were expecting a crowd. There was a fair amount of downtime, but not an excessive amount.
or check out yourself
Thanks CEO's megayacht. I'll always pick self checkout over forced human interaction.
- At my place a few remaining workers of normal checkout posts frequently run to self-checkout kiosks whenever they encounter random errors or booze (ID requirement), while the lines of customers form and grow on every side. They don't get paid more for doing extra, their further empoyment is at risk, and their work day is full of complaints on how sloppy both they are and how wacky that tech is. Somehow, yet to surprise of no one, the idea that could get rid of unnecessary discomfort ended up salting the wound.
  It's almost like the driving force behind such innovations has rabies.
- The CEO's megayacht thanks you for doing the cashier's work for free
- You don’t to talk to the cashiers, no one is forcing you to do anything and they won’t even remember you, it’s fine. Why so mad about having the smallest interaction with another human being?
- Yeah fuck workers amirite
Minimum wage did this. If they have to pay more than the natural rate for that labor they are going to hire as little as they can. Eventually things will slow and they will get through the queue but you will have to wait. But the company had no downtime for expensive labor.
The alternative was hiring a lot of people at an extremely low rate, meaning you end up with more labor than you need by a lot when things are slow, but at least you aren't paying much for that excess labor and your customers never wait so they are likely to return. The consumer really wins there but someone will have to be paid a low wage.
- Have you been to other countries where they actually pay people a living wage? Cashiers can even sit. Imagine that!
  Somehow big chains in some European countries can pay their employees a living wage and still make a profit, yet, in the US, the employees should be eating dirt in order for businesses to be profitable?
  And as someone buying things in general, I prefer to go to stores and businesses where employees are at the very least paid minimum wage, if not more. Even if this will cost more. I know those business will be better for the community.
  You are eating the lies of corporations if you think they cannot afford to pay their employees even minimum wage.
  EDIT: Poe's law. I may have eaten an onion.
- You say that, but grocery stores keep posting record margins.
- Fucking lol, what a bootlicking moron.
  iTs bEcAUsE TheY hAvE tO pAy bEloW poVErTy liNE WagEs
- The hate you must feel for those employees while waiting in line. Enough diving in mad brains for me today.

Have you tried our self checkout. We make you work for us so we don't have to hire more employees and you pay the exact same price.

the walmart here must be experiencing a high rate self-checkout 'discounts'. they've added more 'watchers' who are actually watching everything. enough extra bodies now that they could just staff the regular registers, and with less waiting in line for the customer.
- They won't staff them until they consistently have longer queues and see a risk.
  Only way to get more checkouts is favour shops with staff and shorter queues that are staffed.
Meh, self-checkout is blessing. I don't have to stand in a irritated line of idiots, don't have to deal with overworked and really doing their best impression of not suffering clerk at the checkout and all that taking like what, three times as long as self-checkout?
Ya all really are masochists just so some tortured soul would smile at ya and pretend shit's fine.
Edit: Folks repeat some points, so I am gonna respond in edit - sorry folk ;-; - but overall I need to check my privilige. THE FUCK YOU MEAN CAMERA. THE FUCK YOU MEAN AI. I live in Europe and we got a scale, a barcode scanner and one person watching 4-8 self-checkouts. Line moves blazingly fast, you scan your shit, you maybe get bothered by machine for a sec if you have loyalty card and that's it, pack your shit, pay, and go. Oh, some shops even have barcode scanner at exit - some of these catch my barcode before I position it fully. I...feel even more sorry for you, Americans ;-;
- Self checkout is a blessing when you have, like, six items in your cart. Any more than that, and it's a punishment. Have you ever tried to be fast with those torture kiosks? They've added cameras and shitty AI so that they complain if you're holding the next item in hand while putting the first item in your bag. It forces you to pick something up, scan it, put it in the bag, wait for the scale to register it, and only then pick up the next item - and heaven help you if you have a second person helping you. Having worked at grocery stores in the distant past, it's agony.
  The actual checkers can scan an item with one hand while picking up the next item, passing each item to the bagger behind them in a steady stream without having to wait for anything. It's not quite an order of magnitude faster, but it's close. The only reason self-checkout is 'faster' is because one cashier can watch six kiosks at a time, and payment takes the same amount of time no matter how many items you have.
- A good cashier/bagger is much faster than self-checkout. If I only have like 10 items or something, I use self-checkout, otherwise I go to the cashier. Granted, I rarely get a fast cashier/bagger anymore; makes think the company does that on purpose.
- I like self-checkout in general. I have already been a cashier and I don't mind. I can keep my headphones on and just go about my day without a social interaction for a few items.
  However there's one thing that I started to not like about some of these, and it's the giant camera pointed in your face. Sometimes with the image on the screen so that you can see yourself. It makes me wonder how many layers of software are analyzing that data. I'm under no illusions that they are also compiling data from the checkouts with employees, but it's never so literally in your face.
- I don’t have to stand in a irritated line of idiots,
  You're literally describing the self checkout line here.
  I refuse to believe you've never been in line, absolutely seething while the poor grandma in front of you is trying lookup, scan and bag her groceries while multiple store employees stand by and watch... And then they needed to help anyway because she has a purse full of expired coupons!
- Sounds like you're just lucky enough to have self-checkouts that aren't shit
- I sort of feel like this is the sort of challenge people should be faced with. Like the idea of exercising your feet to walk to the store.
  I’m an introvert. I’ve left many parties early. But it’d never get so bad I’d hate interfacing briefly with a cashier for pleasantries. Having those skills, while certainly a challenge for some, is a worthwhile challenge to overcome. I’ve also had some great interactions with cashiers that cheered me up.
- Every self-checkout I’ve ever seen still has a line of irritated idiots. Generally its the only line since the other manned registers are never open.
yes, but some of us got social anxiety and would much rather not have to interact with people when shopping.
- And still, you can ignore the person, swipe card and you keep someone in a job.
  Staff don't always want to talk, but they still would like a job.
  If we stay in our comfort zone, our comfort zone shrinks smaller.
- I don't get social anxiety, but sometimes I dont want to talk. Just through in some "yeah, that's right" and "Oh yeah?". They can just talk while you think about the next loot drop you'll get in your favorite game.
  They won't know the difference.
  Alternatively, if you're sick of people talking to you. Just break the convo and start trying to sell them stuff. People shut up real quick.
Do you feel the same way about getting the stuff off the shelves yourself?
- It is the store who wants payment from you and is responsible for collecting it.
  It is the customer who wants an item so he may be reponsible for picking it up.
I've stopped using the self-check out all together. My grocery store has clearly been trying to do more with less. So I want the bean counter to see people using normal check outs so they're more inclined to hire more people. It's sold to customers as "a convenience" when really it's just having 1 person watch 4-12 self-checkouts instead of hiring more people and having 3 or 4 lanes open.
Also, self check outs are prone to failure, and if multiple fail at a time there's usually a single person having to manage all of them.
My personal belief, if you can't carry the items in your hands, then you have too much stuff. I find it very inconsiderate people who roll up with full carts. I don't care you're reason, but especially if you're like "I have social anxiety", buddy everyone is glaring at you. You couldn't have more eyes on you and more people pissed off at you. And then if there's any error, even more people are looking at you and you're still going to have to deal with someone.
A well trained person will get you through the check-out much faster. I've also had cashier's double check items to ensure they're good (like eggs), or apply coupons for you, or in rare instances I've had something fail to scan so they do an over-ride and set whatever it was to $1 because they just don't care.
- Meh, it's more efficient to make less trips to the store and buy all you need in one go, than to go to the store often (less fuel/electricity/time). Some people have large families and multi-generational households as well.
Yes, I did. It's faster. It's the only way I shop since it's been introduced.
The good ones are better because I can scan faster than your trained clerks. (I never had a job scanning so I'm not trained, and my wife does most of our shopping so I'm out of practice - despite that I'm still faster than most clerks)
- I used to be a cashier, I'd scan things fast too...and then get yelled at for not being gentle with people's food.
Ours are now limited to 15 items or less in nearly every store.
Pisses me off I have to wait in line with everyone else and be behind the social butterflies who want to carry on a conversation. I’m just trying to get my shit and go home.
I keep hearing this argument, but having to put all my stuff up for scanning fucking sucks. In my ideal world stuff gets scanned when I put it into my cart and at the end I simply pay. Everything else is dogshit. Sadly, there are too few supermarkets that offer this.

This is the Target in Hixon, TN everytime i go there. I've stood in a 20 frustrated person long self-checkout line with at least a dozen regular checkouts collecting dust and not a soul with a red vest in sight. One poor lady helping 5 or so self cheout kiosks. The Starbucks at the entrance has more people behind the counter. And they still wonder why they're failing spectacularly.

"Obviously it's the checkout supervisor's fault, they're too expensive. Minimum wage for 8 hours with 4 hours unpaid overtime?! How do you expect a corporation to lose that much money to their employees and still fulfill their responsibilities of producing record revenue for their shareholders. Obviously the answer is to let go of the checkout supervisor's at our stores and contract out one checkout supervisor to five stores and have them rotate between them in their own vehicle. It's not like they really do anything anyway, they're just their to make the consumer feel better."
Said a CEO to his board.
First time I've seen my little corner of the world mentioned here. The Hixson Target is still wayy better than the Gunbarrel one. I'm convinced that Target is single-handedly keeping the company afloat.
- Howdy, neighbor!
Target fucking depresses the living shit out of me. The only reason I ever go is that I'm a school bus driver and for some reason half of the tips I get at Christmas and the end of the school year (why the fuck do people tip school bus drivers? I have no idea) are Target gift cards. It always has Kmart-at-the-end vibes with half-empty shelves and employees that look like they want to kill you. And I don't understand how they can maintain a grocery section at all - the selection is poor and everything costs twice as much as it does at normal grocery stores.
For some unknown reason, the stores all seem to have been inadequately constructed. The floor shakes at every multi-story Target I've ever been in.
- why the fuck do people tip school bus drivers?
  Because you provide a valuable service that anyone with a heart and half a brain know you're not fairly compensated for. Without you we'd have to schlep our own children to school, taking up time from already busy schedules. What takes you two hours would take fifty cumulative hours between every parent.
- I’ve actually found that Target groceries are cheaper overall than the major grocery store chains, even the shittiest ones. I live in a major U.S. city so ymmv. The only big chain that beats Target’s grocery prices is Walmart. But you have to psych yourself up to shop there because it’s always a hellscape and I’m usually too tired for all that.
  Aldi’s/Lidl/Trader Joe’s are also always very economical but they have a limited selection of items.

The reason to have several more checkouts is for holiday rushes. Under normal day to day operations they don't use them all.

they could use them all. but they allow self checkout to have a line. it’s ok though, the self checkout discounts usually help offset.
- the self checkout discounts
  Thee what now? You must live in some magical non-Capitalist hellhole if you're actually getting a discount for ringing yourself up!
that's true now but that isn't how it used to be before the self checkouts came. It was not unusual to enter a grocery or big box or general goods store and see every single checkout lane staffed by humans during daylight hours. You could almost always go right to a waiting checker or get in the shortest line and be next in line. The grocery stores operated like this for many decades!

How’d you get a picture of my local grocery store?

For real though, one of those cashiers would be on the self checkout helping 50 people at once and the cashier who has to actually scan stuff has 5 people in their line but all of them have enough food and goods for an army.

I always go to the cashier.
I hate self checkout.
The payment flow is always way too confusing, I hate scanning and bagging…
Please keep the cashiers.
- same. The local self checkouts are a sensory nightmare for me. There's blinking lights I can't avoid, a camera+screen I can't ignore... I just can't deal with it.
  local home depot only has self checkout. I don't go there any more.
- Self checkout with app where you can put the items in your own bag or backpack as you shop, is the fucking goat
My supermarket is the opposite. The registers have a few people with like 2 items, and old grampa with 4 weeks worth of groceries is learning how to use the self checkout, and talking back to it when it says there's an unexpected item on the scale.
- Sorry I’m with grandpa on this. Fuck your unexpected item in bagging area.
- Goddamn it, I talk to the self checkout, and I don't have any grandchildren that I know of.

Just go to the self checkout. It's so much easier to steal from

Does your local grocery not have the AI cameras set to over-react mode where it flags things that get scanned and put into the bagging area too quickly? Or when you scan a heavy item and put it under the cart since it would never fit in a bag anyway?
If not, it's something you can look forward to soon!
- I have had workers override it in my favour plenty of times
Honestly, stealing from the manned checkouts is easier. I just tell them "This bag is from another store" and while that's true, I bought the bag from aldi, the contents are all from here. And they don't get paid enough to even look up or deviate from their programming.
- don’t get paid enough to even look up or deviate from their programming
  Also, it's literally not their responsibility to do anything about shoplifting attempts. Normally there is a security person (yes, one) employed in the store, but I wonder if they are only there to tackle aggressive behaviour or to actually peek into people's bags and pockets. As a till worker, you can point out that those things are actually from the store, but I think it's not legal to require you to enforce anything - especially because it isn't (and shouldn't be) in your job description.
  Yes, sometimes, it's IDGAF, sometimes it's lack of critical thinking, but more often than not it's "everyone knows but obviously it's out of our scope to make a scene for a jar of gherkins or a cheese wheel". Nobody will think much about it if you actually look like you need stuff, but based on my several years of experience, in the majority of the cases the employees clearly know when someone is trying to do petty tricks, they definitely judge you for that (unless you're in need of course, but you can still ask and get stuff), the employees just won't act for the above 3 reasons.
- Isn't it normal to reuse bags from other shops?
Yes,
Multiple self-checkout kiosks
But
Less than half are working for some reason, and the ones that are working are all full because everyone is waiting on the one employee to come by and clear the screen because the machine detected a weight discrepancy, or an item was accidentally scanned twice, or they tried to use a coupon, or any of the seemingly 1000 different ways to cause the machine to freeze up and force you to interact with the one employee in the area.
I just go to those because it's faster
- false logic. It's faster for you... only if there's an open self-checkout. I've stood in a self-checkout line waiting while customers try to figure out how to use the machines and there's one employee trying to run around fixing all the problems. The average employee will always be faster than the average customer.
  If you're going for faster then pick-up or delivery would be your course of action. Self checkout will always be statistically better for the companies profits versus speed of checkout or customer experience.
When the picking, processing, packing, transportation, and shelving of products is all automated I'll be a withered old man and will be damned if I don't steal everything not bolted down.

My old bank branch had thirteen teller stations and two tellers since at least 2018.

My Bank does Apple shop style now. Get there, to the techbro with the glasses and tablet, "ah, please wait a bit, person X for problem Y is availlable in half a hour", wait, tell them the same thing again.

Just in case you're wondering, they actually do man all those checkouts during superbowl weekend

My first job I worked at a grocery store that had I think 12 checkouts and only 4 cashiers on at most times. The exception was when they did a special "2 hour sale" during which time it was busy enough for all stations to be staffed, but also it was basically guaranteed that you'd get to go home early on those shifts because it would die down pretty quick and they'd cut the unnecessary staff for the day
And holidays.

One line has 8 people waiting with a bunch of groceries each but the line is moving steadily

The other line has only two people .... a little old lady at the cashier is holding up the line because she wants to process three out of date coupons, a return item with a label that said it was past its best before date, and a loaf of bread that 'doesn't look right'.

Even at the very height of Xmas Eve my Tesco has maybe half the tills open. I don’t know why they haven’t just got rid of the others, it’s free real estate. You could pop a Timpsons in there.

That would cost money. Possibly even more than hiring more cashiers.

I'm just pissed my grocery store got rid of self checkout

All of those are self checkout. Those 2 are also busy helping other people.

Heh. Butt.

Look, no one in self checkout is in a hurry or can figure out how to use it, one item won't scan, they put something on the scale and need assistance from the attendant who isn't paying attention but isn't doing anything otherwise. It's a great system

Would've been icing on the cake if they were conjoined twins.

Guess all those highschool girls will just have to stay home and torture mom n dad

Those registers are for Black Friday.

Ah old checkouts. I sometimes have to use those when I go back to Germany.