Self checkout

Yes.

NO….
In CT and MA Big Y supermarket chain removed all self checkouts 4 years ago.
I will not use a self-checkout if the store also has cashiers. I will not help the store eliminate jobs and they do not give me a discount for doing their labor.

The closest gas station to my home (s blocks) is FULL service. It is consistently the same price at self serve stations in the neighborhood. We use the full service gas.

Once they improve the technology so that people can use it smoothly.

Almost all technology is labor-saving, and to oppose something for that reason seems silly.

Cashiers are slow. I’d rather use a machine.

“They couldn’t use them in an area with a shoplifting problem. It’s basically the honor system.”

The extra losses from shoplifting is much more than offset by the reduced labor costs.

It seems to me that stores save on labor with their self checkouts, but they don’t pass that savings along to the consumer. I’ve never used one and most of the stores I shop in don’t have them. My preference is for checkers to have living wage jobs, and in some cases (like my town) they are organized and negotiate, wages, hours, benefits and conditions.

Neville, many years ago I knew of a pharmacy that had two stores, one in an inner city area and one in a suburb. Guess which one had the bigger shoplifting problem?

Lakewhut, I find cashiers are usually faster at scanning than are self-checkout customers. It just makes sense, since they’re doing it several hours a day as opposed to a few minutes a week.

There are some items that you generally can’t buy in self-checkout lanes, e.g. gift cards.

Same goes for gas. I just find it easier and quicker to do it myself than to wait for the attendant.

That’s only for cars. For planes its the opposite.

At airports with a fuel truck available, I always call the fuel truck. It saves a lot of time, and I can preflight or tie down the plane without taking time to refuel by myself. Many airports do not have a fuel truck available, so then I have to refuel the plane myself from a self serve.

Captain™

In a similar vein, can YWN implement AI so that the coffee room can automatically generate its own posts and comments, and we can just sit back and watch the computers do all the work?

We already do. As of now, we still allow manually input posts, but we find the AI ones are much better.

On any give day, there are anywhere from 65%-85% AI posts and 15%-35% manually input posts.

@Amil-Zola At airports with no fuel trucks they do taxi up to the fuel pump. We just face the pump (not too close) instead of pulling up alongside it (like a car).
Then you attach a grounding cable to the exhaust pipe (tailpipe of a plane, located at he front of the plane).
After the plane is safely grounded, you can begin fueling the same way you do to a car. The only differences are that by a plane you can actually see the fuel coming out of the nozzle and it does not stop coming out automatically like by a car.

Captain™

In EY the newest thing in the big supermarkets, like Osher Ad, Shaarei Revacha and Yeish, are the handheld barcode scanners. Basically you get a cart that has a scanner holder next to the bar to push the cart, and as you go through the store you take your items, scan them with your scanner, and when you’re finished you put the information from your scanner into a checkout computer, pay, and go home. Bagging is up to you. Some people bag it all at the end, but a very smart woman I saw had the large heavy duty shopping bags all open in her cart, and as she scanned her items, she put them straight into the bags, making her job super fast at the end.

Now I have one issue, in Osher Ad, there is one catch. You have to take your cart to a special station and weigh it when you’re finished. There is a bar code on the cart, which records the weight of the empty cart, and the difference is the weight of the products you purchased. I imagine that this is their way of trying to prevent people from taking things that they did not scan (hopefully unintentionally), but I found that due to the fact that there is only one of these scales (maybe 2) in the whole giant store, the line for this process is longer than the lines for having a regular clerk ring up your order. This defeats the whole purpose of using the scanner. I also found it a little insulting that they seem to be not willing to trust that people are honest and will scan everything they put into their carts. Oh well, I just did not use a scanner when I shopped in that store, but everywhere else, I’m happy to use them when they’re available as they simply save a lot of time.

Captain; I’m surprised Stop’n Shop hasn’t been accused of racial profiling yet!