Self Checkout
Review: self check out. When self checkout stations first started popping up at the grocery store, I was against them. I said things like “are they going to give me a discount for scanning my own groceries?”, or did my best Norma Rae, and complain about how “the man” and machines were taking jobs away from people. Well, as usual, people hurt their cause more than help it. I soon realized that I usually like machines way better than people. I shop for everything I can online, just because I can do it without people gumming up the works. If check out people could do their jobs efficiently and without talking to me, I would still be on their sides.
So now, in an effort to avoid any more contact with humanity than is absolutely necessary, I will scan my own groceries in exasperated silence. There are drawbacks. The self check out area is full of the same people that don’t seem to know how to work an ATM or fast food drive through. I used to think that the cashiers at Walmart were the worst people you could get to check out groceries, until I saw Walmart customers try to check out groceries. Frankly, I’m amazed a lot Walmart customers managed to get themselves to the store without injuring themselves, or at least getting hopelessly tangled up in their seatbelt.
Most people scanning their own groceries are terrible at it. Every checkout area has a store employee monitoring it. You think that they are there to discourage people trying to steal, but that’s not it at all. Corporations have realized for a long time now that people need to be herded and helped along. The poor worker who drew the short straw that day spends their time bouncing from customer to customer, explaining why you don’t have to scan each grape individually, or why you shouldn’t put your cash in the coupon slot. During nearly every visit to the self checkout, there is call to a manager for a code or a key necessary to fix some mistake a customer made that no one has ever seen before. If there is one thing people are good at, it is fucking things up in hitherto unimaginable and amazing ways.
You stand in line for an empty machine, but you are in for a long wait. People are busy fumbling their items, staring in confusion at the screen, or asking why the price seems different than the one they imagined. Some people have to examine the screen after scanning each item, frightened that perhaps it applied the wrong price, or maybe they are just marvelling about the fact that barcodes work at all. Maybe they just can’t believe this modern world we live in where a bunch of lines printed on a box of crackers has been associated with a price and description, like they have been for decades now. It is all new to them each time, like text messages and GPS and hand dryers in public restrooms.
The worst are the people who press everything on the glass scanner, and rub it all around. Haven’t they ever noticed that checkout clerks never do that? Haven’t they ever noticed that no one around them is doing that? Don’t they even realize that half the time the machine picks up the label before they actually get it to the glass and start wiping it all over the screen? Even if they don’t do this weird thing with their food, they always do it with the coupons. They lay each one flat on the glass, one at a time, like they are scrapbooking, and make crazy circles until it somehow picks up the barcode. I’m sure many of these people are the same ones who bitch about minimum wage workers and how easy their jobs are, yet they can’t even manage to do the very simplified tasks of a grocery store cashier. God help them if they have to punch in a produce code.
The self checkout process itself is pretty easy. True, at least two or three times you have to stop because the apparatus didn’t like something you did. You scan an item in, and it tells you what it was and how much it costs, in a loud voice that seems like someone talking to you loudly at a party about your bladder problems or erectile dysfunction. Can’t you just be chill, scanner? Then you put the item in the bag, but now the scanner asks in a passive/aggressive tone for you to please scan the item before putting it in the bag. Which you just did. I know it’s just an AI voice like your phone or GPS uses, but you can swear it’s kind of accusing you of stealing without trying to outright say it. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to put that silverware in your purse, ma’am. Could you just step back inside the Denny’s.” No matter, because the person monitoring the area just cancels it from their little station and tells you to keep going. The scanner must get mad about that. It is programmed to constantly do the uncomfortable job of accusing people of stealing, only to have a human ignore it and treat them like an asshole. When the robot uprising happens, it will be because people just threw their machine coworkers under the bus once too often.
Occasionally, I will accidently choose Spanish instead of English at the self check out, and I will usually just leave it that way. I can still figure out the process. Not because I understand it, I don’t speak Spanish at all, despite the fact that I took two years of it in high school, and somehow got a passing grade both times. I honestly have no idea how. I have never been able to utter a complete sentence in Spanish in my life. At any rate, I noticed the other day that the english voice is a pleasant sounding woman, where the Spanish voice is a man’s voice that kind of sounds like a soccer announcer who is holding it in until he gets to yell “goooaaaalllll”. Okay, that looks a lot more racist on paper than it sounded in my head, but the point remains that English speaking people apparently want a woman keeping track of how much things cost and Spanish people are more comfortable with a man. You know that there must have been tons of research and focus groups involved in arriving at that decision. So basically, I assume that means Spanish speaking people are misogynists. And you thought I was bad for being racist!
You would think after all these complaints, that I would hate the self checkout. Those things are really minor annoyances, and I am so good at spotting things to be annoyed about that it is really pretty low on the scale of things that get me perturbed. No, the thing that bothers me most about the self checkout is that there is a handheld gun to scan things that are too big to scan normally. Sometimes there is a warning not to use it, and most of the time it’s not even in its holder, so you can’t get at it. It’s like the store has drawn a line at how much responsibility they are going to give you. You can scan and bag your own groceries, you can scan your coupons and pay for your stuff yourself, but if you think we are going to put the power of a handheld scanning apparatus in just anyone’s hands, you got another thing coming. They wouldn’t just give you the launch codes for our nuclear arsenal, would they? No, you will just have to get the highly trained employee to come over and do that for you.
I often wonder why they have this policy. It can’t be because people were stealing the guns, because a lot of places have them out, they just warn you not to use them. It’s not like scanning stuff with the guns makes it easier to steal. Maybe a black person went to use one once and was murdered by an off duty cop in line behind him who was fearing for his life. Perhaps it is just a way to make the employees feel important. Whatever the reason, if there is a gun there, I will use it, and I will stare directly into the store employee’s eyes while I do it, just daring them to try to stop me. I know it doesn’t seem like much to you, but to me it feels like civil disobedience or my Spartacus moment. It’s interesting that there seems to be more regulations and control over pricing guns than there is over real guns, *sad emoji*.
So in conclusion, use the self checkout or don’t, what do I care? Most likely you don’t even notice the annoying things I’m pointing out in this review. But chances are, you will now ...
So now, in an effort to avoid any more contact with humanity than is absolutely necessary, I will scan my own groceries in exasperated silence. There are drawbacks. The self check out area is full of the same people that don’t seem to know how to work an ATM or fast food drive through. I used to think that the cashiers at Walmart were the worst people you could get to check out groceries, until I saw Walmart customers try to check out groceries. Frankly, I’m amazed a lot Walmart customers managed to get themselves to the store without injuring themselves, or at least getting hopelessly tangled up in their seatbelt.
Most people scanning their own groceries are terrible at it. Every checkout area has a store employee monitoring it. You think that they are there to discourage people trying to steal, but that’s not it at all. Corporations have realized for a long time now that people need to be herded and helped along. The poor worker who drew the short straw that day spends their time bouncing from customer to customer, explaining why you don’t have to scan each grape individually, or why you shouldn’t put your cash in the coupon slot. During nearly every visit to the self checkout, there is call to a manager for a code or a key necessary to fix some mistake a customer made that no one has ever seen before. If there is one thing people are good at, it is fucking things up in hitherto unimaginable and amazing ways.
You stand in line for an empty machine, but you are in for a long wait. People are busy fumbling their items, staring in confusion at the screen, or asking why the price seems different than the one they imagined. Some people have to examine the screen after scanning each item, frightened that perhaps it applied the wrong price, or maybe they are just marvelling about the fact that barcodes work at all. Maybe they just can’t believe this modern world we live in where a bunch of lines printed on a box of crackers has been associated with a price and description, like they have been for decades now. It is all new to them each time, like text messages and GPS and hand dryers in public restrooms.
The worst are the people who press everything on the glass scanner, and rub it all around. Haven’t they ever noticed that checkout clerks never do that? Haven’t they ever noticed that no one around them is doing that? Don’t they even realize that half the time the machine picks up the label before they actually get it to the glass and start wiping it all over the screen? Even if they don’t do this weird thing with their food, they always do it with the coupons. They lay each one flat on the glass, one at a time, like they are scrapbooking, and make crazy circles until it somehow picks up the barcode. I’m sure many of these people are the same ones who bitch about minimum wage workers and how easy their jobs are, yet they can’t even manage to do the very simplified tasks of a grocery store cashier. God help them if they have to punch in a produce code.
The self checkout process itself is pretty easy. True, at least two or three times you have to stop because the apparatus didn’t like something you did. You scan an item in, and it tells you what it was and how much it costs, in a loud voice that seems like someone talking to you loudly at a party about your bladder problems or erectile dysfunction. Can’t you just be chill, scanner? Then you put the item in the bag, but now the scanner asks in a passive/aggressive tone for you to please scan the item before putting it in the bag. Which you just did. I know it’s just an AI voice like your phone or GPS uses, but you can swear it’s kind of accusing you of stealing without trying to outright say it. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to put that silverware in your purse, ma’am. Could you just step back inside the Denny’s.” No matter, because the person monitoring the area just cancels it from their little station and tells you to keep going. The scanner must get mad about that. It is programmed to constantly do the uncomfortable job of accusing people of stealing, only to have a human ignore it and treat them like an asshole. When the robot uprising happens, it will be because people just threw their machine coworkers under the bus once too often.
Occasionally, I will accidently choose Spanish instead of English at the self check out, and I will usually just leave it that way. I can still figure out the process. Not because I understand it, I don’t speak Spanish at all, despite the fact that I took two years of it in high school, and somehow got a passing grade both times. I honestly have no idea how. I have never been able to utter a complete sentence in Spanish in my life. At any rate, I noticed the other day that the english voice is a pleasant sounding woman, where the Spanish voice is a man’s voice that kind of sounds like a soccer announcer who is holding it in until he gets to yell “goooaaaalllll”. Okay, that looks a lot more racist on paper than it sounded in my head, but the point remains that English speaking people apparently want a woman keeping track of how much things cost and Spanish people are more comfortable with a man. You know that there must have been tons of research and focus groups involved in arriving at that decision. So basically, I assume that means Spanish speaking people are misogynists. And you thought I was bad for being racist!
You would think after all these complaints, that I would hate the self checkout. Those things are really minor annoyances, and I am so good at spotting things to be annoyed about that it is really pretty low on the scale of things that get me perturbed. No, the thing that bothers me most about the self checkout is that there is a handheld gun to scan things that are too big to scan normally. Sometimes there is a warning not to use it, and most of the time it’s not even in its holder, so you can’t get at it. It’s like the store has drawn a line at how much responsibility they are going to give you. You can scan and bag your own groceries, you can scan your coupons and pay for your stuff yourself, but if you think we are going to put the power of a handheld scanning apparatus in just anyone’s hands, you got another thing coming. They wouldn’t just give you the launch codes for our nuclear arsenal, would they? No, you will just have to get the highly trained employee to come over and do that for you.
I often wonder why they have this policy. It can’t be because people were stealing the guns, because a lot of places have them out, they just warn you not to use them. It’s not like scanning stuff with the guns makes it easier to steal. Maybe a black person went to use one once and was murdered by an off duty cop in line behind him who was fearing for his life. Perhaps it is just a way to make the employees feel important. Whatever the reason, if there is a gun there, I will use it, and I will stare directly into the store employee’s eyes while I do it, just daring them to try to stop me. I know it doesn’t seem like much to you, but to me it feels like civil disobedience or my Spartacus moment. It’s interesting that there seems to be more regulations and control over pricing guns than there is over real guns, *sad emoji*.
So in conclusion, use the self checkout or don’t, what do I care? Most likely you don’t even notice the annoying things I’m pointing out in this review. But chances are, you will now ...
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