Bruh. (Gaming)

by Claude Errera , Friday, April 03, 2026, 13:08 (1 hours, 37 minutes ago) @ Vortech

Self-checkout at the supermarket is less efficient than what we had before. It's not a surprise. Why would you think one person who does this once a week would be more efficient than 2 people working together all day. Not to mention you have one person for a whole set of issues, adding a delay. But even after it became clear that it was not about efficiency, people still chose it. The lines are literally longer for a worse experience and the store can happily fire those people and save money. I can only assume people prefer to avoid human contact.

I agree with a lot of what you said in this post, but I wanted to point out that this is demonstrably wrong (at least in my experience).

It is quite possible that a cashier/bagger combo can process my groceries faster than I can... but I can do it in about 40 seconds (on one of my average shopping trips), so the savings is going to be negligible... and completely wiped out by the 10 minutes I need to wait in the line that has a cashier (at my supermarket) compared to the almost-always-immediate availability of a self-checkout station (even in busy times, my wait is under a minute). It's been 13 years since I used a different setup regularly... but my recollection is similar (if not exact) in the last house, where the circumstances of checkout were vastly different (the supermarket was a 20 minute drive instead of a 3-block walk, I visited once every week or so instead of every couple of days, there were 10 or so manned checkouts instead of 2, and there were 5 or so self-checkout stations instead of 20), but the self-vs-manned calculation was actually about the same (it was usually faster to do it myself, if you count the time from entering the checkout line to the time exiting the store).

Clearly your situation is different - I'm just pointing out that 'people prefer to avoid human contact' hasn't been necessary to explain my choices for at least 27 years, in two substantially different shopping situations.