“It Sucks, And I Hate It”: This New Technology In Grocery Stores Has Both Shoppers And Employees Feeling Extremely Frustrated

In 1986, a company named CheckRobot invented self-checkouts. They claimed to reduce long lines, human interaction, make checkout lanes faster, and reduce labor costs. These self-checkouts reduced cashier costs by 60%, and grocery stores saved a lot of money.

But in 1987, Donald F. Dufek, then the group vice president for The Kroger Co., told The Oklahoman: “In reality, it takes the consumer longer to do her own checkout, but the individual perceives it is faster, because she’s doing it herself.”

A 2021 poll showed that 67% of customers have experienced failures when using a self-checkout; however, another poll revealed 85% of customers “strongly believe that they are typically faster” — but they’re not.

Self-checkouts have become ubiquitous at most major grocery store chains, but also at CVS, Target, Walmart, and the ilk.

But the truth is, both customers and cashiers dislike them. There are tech difficulties, it takes people longer to check out, people might miss scanning an item or items ring up incorrectly. Basically, self-checkout has become “a failed experiment,” according to The Atlantic.

It’s also become the butt of a joke. More than 20,000 #selfcheckout hashtags exist on TikTok. Videos have parodied the difficulty of buying bananas, the lack of customer choice, and how it’s a “scam” to not pay people a living wage.

We did a little digging to unearth the biggest problems people have with self-checkout.

The user experience of self-checkouts is frustrating.

“They’re not very intuitive,” a Fresh Thyme employee, who chose not to share their name, told HuffPost. “It’s not just older people who aren’t as familiar with the technology. It’s even younger people, who have been around the whole time that self-checkouts have pretty much existed, who still struggle with it. And I will say that’s maybe a bit specific to our store and it does get people pretty easily frustrated.”

Some of the problems include people ringing the wrong items on the U-scan or the scales being off. “If the barcodes are moving around, it rings multiple items or rings the same item multiple times, and then that obviously results in later returns,” they said.

And this creates a logjam effect. A BBC article stated: “Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them and to service the machines. The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it’s worth.”

Self-checkout causes an increase in theft.

Kroger self-checkouts have tech in place that makes it difficult to steal anything. For instance, if the customer doesn’t scan an item and places it in their bag, the screen locks, and the message “help is on the way” appears on the screen. An employee has to come over and unlock the screen.

However, stores like Aldi, Walmart, and Fresh Thyme’s self-checkouts allow the consumer to get away with not scanning and bagging every single item. It’s also easier to ring up bananas as conventional instead of organic. Fifteen percent of customers admitted to Lending Tree that they steal from the checkouts — though that’s just the people who confessed. Almost 70% said the checkouts make stealing easier. A study showed that theft increased 65% at self-checkouts as opposed to a regular cashier.

“People do walk away without finishing their transaction a lot, then that involves kind of chasing them out the door and awkward interactions,” the Fresh Thyme employee said. “But I think because we are a bit of a smaller store as opposed to somewhere like Walmart or Target, I can see how theft would be an uptick through the self-checkouts.”

Grocery stores hire fewer workers because of self-checkout.

These days, a lot of stores have more self-checkout lanes than cashiers. Both Aldi and Fresh Thyme have two cashiers and six self-checkouts.

“Significantly more workers report understaffing when working in stores with self-checkout,” states Harvard’s The Shift Project study.

“Personally, as a worker, I do think the self-checkouts make things harder because I’m not only having to deal with my register, but I’m running back and forth between the self-checkouts and the register,” the Fresh Thyme employee said. “I think they’re generally inefficient, and people prefer to talk to a person.”

It’s harder to load your groceries without the space of a conveyor belt.

Another issue is the lack of space self-checkouts have. The customer has a small area to scan and bag items, whereas cashier lanes offer a long conveyor belt.

“Self-checkouts force you to buy fewer grocery items so that you end up making more trips to the grocery store,” said Mike James, a Kroger customer. “It conditions people to buy less and make more trips, which works in cahoots with the auto and oil industries. It makes you buy more gas to get to the grocery store. It’s one thing if you live in an urban environment and you can walk to a grocery store, but that’s not the situation for most people in the whole country. Most people are forced to drive to grocery stores.”

Surveillance is an issue.

Self-checkouts record your transactions and place you on video. (Wave to the camera!) Big Brother is watching you scan that bag of Cheetos you don’t need.

“It increases the surveillance state,” James said. “It forces you into a tighter line where everything can be surveilled.”

Some stores allegedly participate in surveillance pricing throughout the store (not just checkouts), in which prices fluctuate based on the customer’s spending habits. Stores also can use facial recognition tactics to target consumers, especially people of color. This leads to mistaken identity in trying to detect shoplifters, and it invades people’s privacy.

“Surveillance in and of itself isn’t bad,” James said. “But … the potential for surveillance to be abused for the purposes of reinforcing the police state and the prison industrial complex are certain.”

Self-checkouts place free labor onto the consumer.

A recent Reddit thread perfectly laid out all the issues of using self-checkouts. “I didn’t come to the grocery store to work a part-time job. Why am I scanning and bagging my own stuff like I’m on payroll?” wrote a user.

The stores save money by putting the burden on the customer. The Fresh Thyme employee has heard things like, “Do I get a discount for ringing my own groceries since I’m doing your job?”

“It reduces the amount of labor and it increases leverage against union labor,” James said.

Fortunately, some companies like Dollar General, Target, and Five Below are reducing the number of self-checkout lanes. A new bill aims to regulate the experience, citing a maximum of 15 items and a staff member monitoring “no more than two self-service checkouts simultaneously.”

“I do think being a cashier seems like a very run-of-the-mill job, but obviously it does still require patience and skill, and people do want the customer service and they do want a conversation,” the Fresh Thyme employee said.

But for now, the frustrations and the bad user-interfaces and lack of user-friendliness of self-checkouts are here to stay.

“Anything they can do to reduce labor power against human beings is what they want,” James said. “They’d like to automate the whole thing, but they can’t yet. They’ll try. It sucks, and I hate it.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

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