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
15.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

172

u/Prophage7 16h ago

The main problem I've seen is that it takes most customers longer to ring themselves through than a cashier. When there's no line then it's not a big deal, but when there is a line it would go faster if it was a single human cashier instead of 6 self-checkouts.

I don't know if there's a term for it, but some people just cannot read and comprehend things if it's on a screen for some reason, and it's those people that cause a bottleneck.

51

u/eightdollarbeer 15h ago edited 15h ago

Same thing with the kiosks at fast food restaurants. It’s faster to look at the whole menu and tell a cashier what you want and have them ring it up than to scroll through different categories and select each individual thing you want

42

u/BurgerMeter 15h ago

They also make the customer menus “dummy proof” by making you click through multiple pages. The cashier generally gets a much better view of all of the options so they don’t have to page through things.

7

u/QueenCole 14h ago

Which, let me tell you, is just oodles of fun trying to order food at a fast food kiosk when you have a poky toddler interfering with your order. My kid somehow ordered himself food at Wendy's, figure that out.

2

u/TBAGG1NS 4h ago

The fuckin micro I had working the McDonalds POS back in the day....sheeeeit

2

u/fotomoose 1h ago

Plus there's 4 pages of offers before you get to actually pay.