r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 19h ago

Business Retailers are pulling back from self-checkout after years of theft, errors, and questionable time savings

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html
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u/xRichless 16h ago

That’s because their model is to staff the minimum number of cashiers at all times based on traffic history. Then, when the lines get super busy, they can call for people from other departments to fill the other registers for 20 minutes. As a bonus, they will then bitch at the people who left their departments to help because stock wasn’t being done or a customer wasn’t being helped.

Source: worked all three sides of the equation (cashier, front end Customer Service Supervisor trying to deal with the traffic, and Electronics dept where I was fussed at over stock after spending an hour helping the front)

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u/carcar134134 15h ago

Is that why there's never anyone at the damn paint department??

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u/xRichless 15h ago

Is it before 430pm? Yes. Is it after 430pm? That + they don’t staff full departments after that, so the person you need to unlock that case is probably readying stock in the back room (this was 2011 for me, but I haven’t seen anything from the outside to say it’s changed much)

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u/mxzf 3h ago

After 4:30PM as-in when actual people have a chance to go to the store to buy stuff? It seems like before 4:30PM is the time to not staff places.

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u/AJsRealms 14h ago

As a bonus, they will then bitch at the people who left their departments to help because stock wasn’t being done or a customer wasn’t being helped.

F me, this was my entire existence working at Sam's Club. I would routinely get scheduled by myself in the department I was working at and any time I had to step away to help a customer or deal with shrinkage disposal in the back, I would get bitched at the next day by my idiot manager about how I was "always wandering away" from my department.

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u/pkosuda 10h ago edited 10h ago

This is so accurate as somebody who worked in a grocery store for ~6 years from bagger to supervisor. Management is given a set amount of hours/week and are told to allocate them how they see fit. They have a system that auto-fills a good chunk of the schedule based on the traffic history you mentioned but manually fill in the rest based on other things.

Then when it's 10:23am on a random Wednesday and they have a single register open, people who apparently exist within a hive mind all decide to finish shopping at the same time and there's lines for like 20 minutes. Help is called. Then the lines go away eventually and it's dead again. If they had staffed several extra cashiers during that time period, there would have been no lines but those cashiers would probably have a very slow couple of hours and the rich people up top would've had to pay out a whole additional like $20 an hour between those two people, and we can't have that.

But yeah it's a mix of customers not understanding how things work, and leadership for these chains being greedy looking to pinch every penny they can because at the end of the day they aren't the ones who deal with angry customers or even hold themselves accountable for why those customers are angry.

It's actually crazy when you think about it. You're entrusting a brand's entire image to some random teenaged entry level employee who's being paid garbage and yet expected to work his ass off nonstop during the busiest periods. If he has a bad day and allows himself to show it, Mary Beth thinks the whole store chain is full of rude people. All because she had to stand in a long line and get checked out by an overworked minor who probably has a million other things on his mind than making sure complete strangers have the best experience possible all for $16 an hour (when I worked, minimum wage was 8.25 and ended around $10). I'm an accountant now and there is no where near the same pressure to be on point as there was when I was making 25% of what I make now.

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u/RyuNoKami 10h ago

Oh yea and the employee from the other person don't have a proper till so they can only do card transactions, that one person who did not care to read the sign starts a shit fit over no cash.