I have always had issues with supermarket checkout lines, but I’ve found that self checkout is not much better. It has come down to a choice of let somebody do it for you their way, or do it yourself and deal with your own shortcomings in the process.
Either way, the grocer wins.
Normally the process of checking out involves a war of paper in plastic, in which the paper bag is the wrong size for the plastic bag (incredibly, they’re often too big). Or it turns out the shipment of paper bags had defects involving fused bottoms which won’t open. I pointed out three such bags to a checker, who shrugged and said, “That’s what they sent us.”
Then no matter in what order you place your items on the conveyor belt–if you have enough time to unload your entire cart–the checker will reach for the eggs at the back of the belt and put them in the bottom of an equally defectively assembled paper-in-plastic. She then reaches for the giant can of beans and throws it in like a three pointer in the NBA.
The problem is that checkers are monitored for speed, even if nobody is in line behind their current customer. There is no area to recover the change, bills and register tape (which these days is five feet long and always seems to include a Sports Authority ad for me). Just mash it all together somehow and get the heck out so the next customer can go through the same experience.
So I decided to try self checkout today, and wheeled my cart up to the amazing assembly of consumer friendly technology, with its bagging stations, scales sensitive to the weight of a toenail and a touch screen which supposedly knows everything.
At least that’s the idea.
The first thing I did was to insert a paper bag into a plastic bag at bagging station number one before starting to “ring my order,” only to hear a computerized female voice intone, “Unauthorized item detected in bagging area: please remove item.” It seems the human attendant relegated to oversee the stupidity of self-baggers must inform the machine that one of its own bags is going combo. She had to come back for two more bags (fortunately the kiosk only has three bagging stations). The programmer who instructs the machine to say, “If you want paper in plastic, please assemble your bags now” will win the Nobel Prize for humanitarianism. The human checkers simply glare at you for combo bags; the computer reads you off.
Three bags, a coupon inspection equivalent to an airport strip search and an empty cart later, I was thanked by the computer for shopping there. Checkers don’t often do that anymore.
So what do I do? The experience is insufferable either way. Maybe I should invent my own supermarket, with checkers who wait for you to instruct them how you want items bagged, a recovery zone where you can put your change away and round up the rug rats, and pre-assembled combo bags.
Maybe I’ll just shop at 24 hour markets after 1:00 AM.
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