Self-service checkouts have gotten a bit of a bad rep over the years for being clunky, unintuitive machines that are absolutely superb at draining your will to live, but I would make the argument that they’ve gotten a lot better over the years. Yes, there are some utterly insane mechanics and checks and balances that force you to slow down and consider kicking the thing until either it explodes or you break every bone in your leg, but hear me out. If you just be patient with them and try to work with them rather than against them, you’ll probably walk out of the scenario with the will to wake up the next morning, until something else inevitably saps away that good feeling.
The overall efficiency of the machines tends to waver depending on what supermarket you go to. Asda’s is fine, Tesco’s is acceptable, Sainsbury’s seems to alternate between being perfect or utterly dreadful on alternating days, but I find the worst ones operate in those posh up-market stores like M&S Food or Waitrose. I can understand why, I imagine most of the wealthy conservative boomers who shop in those places don’t have it in them to learn how to operate them without a six-week induction course, so having effective (or even functional) self-service is low on the priority for these types of stores, beneath charging exorbitant prices for their crap ready-meals; but for a spry Labour-voter-demographic young man with anxiety disorder such as myself, I can state with confidence that these two stores have the worst self-service machines of the bunch. It takes about six swipes to scan something as complex as a flat box of underwhelming chocolates.
I prefer using self-service checkouts because I hate talking to people; I’m extremely awkward in natural conversation and I constantly feel rushed while using a regular checkout. The person operating it could be the nicest, sweetest, most gentle soul in the world and I’ll still have the urge to move like there’s a drill instructor breathing down my neck, likely because the portly, middle-aged balding man stood waiting to pass his three crates of Carling through the scanner actually is a drill instructor. With a self-checkout I get to operate at my own pace because there’s always at least a dozen of the machines in any decent supermarket, and if I’m slow for any reason – either because the machine is taking several seconds to process basic orders or my own smoothed brain isn’t letting any instructions pass through – there’s always another machine for someone else to use, so it’s not like I’m slowing anybody down.
My advice when it comes to operating a self-checkout is to do it slowly and patiently. You have to treat the machine as if it’s on the first day of the job. Or a child. Either is comparable. Scan an item, put it down gently onto the bagging area, then repeat until it’s time to pay. Most important thing is to not repeatedly tap the same thing like an elderly woman on her laptop trying to access her emails when her laptop is bogged down with Chrome running fourty tabs at once. After all, you have to be as gentle as physically possible with the device, lest you suffer hearing the five most dreaded words anyone in a supermarket could possibly suffer:
“Unexpected item in bagging area.”
That is the single worst thing one can possibly hear in a shopping environments. Policemen who have to drive to family homes to inform the wife that her husband has been brutally murdered have it easier than people at supermarkets hearing that sentence. Even the Americans are making memes out of the phrase, whenever they’re not out herding bison or shooting anything that moves, then what doesn’t move. When you hear this phrase, all hell breaks loose. Anarchy reigns supreme in the United Kingdom and all you can do is suffer. Nobody really knows what causes such an error to occur, let alone what to do in situations like these, because it’s never clear what item might be missing. Sometimes the machine will tell you, often times it doesn’t, instead choosing to present an inscrutable animation of some CG model lifting an anomalous box off the bagging area. Yes, self-service checkout machine #6 at Tesco’s, that is definitely the part I’m struggling with. It’s not deciding which of the seven items you’ve decided is a slight to God and refused to process, it’s how to lift a box. If someone genuinely has an issue with figuring that out, I question how they’re even able to walk inside the store without close supervision.
Worst of all is that some poor sod who works at the supermarket has to waddle on up to you to try and solve the issue. The whole bloody point of me going to a self-service is to avoid dealing with other people, because dealing with the antonymous and entirely emotionless husk of a machine is infinitely easier than having to talk to some human who will judge me for my poorly trimmed facial hair or muttering profanities under my breath trying to get the machine to bend to my will. I don’t know how they fix it, they just have some blank card which they flap about in front of the machine for a bit, and suddenly all problems are solved. The machine could be burning or imminent seconds away from a nuclear detonation, but Joe Schmoe making six-quid-seventy at Sainsbury’s can defuse any problem with a wave of his magic wand. I wish all of my problems could be solved that easily, I probably wouldn’t be so cripplingly dependant on self-service machines as a result. Even if everything goes right, the amount of checks and balances our nanny state government is putting in place means that now even energy drinks require someone to come up and wave their anomalous magic card which proves that yes, I am old enough to handle a bit of sugar in my drink, as if all one-hundred-and-ninety-seven centimetres of me wasn’t enough to prove it.
The whole bagging system in general is flawed. They expect you to place your bags on the bagging area, then they ask you how many bags you’re using. I’m not entirely sure why they need this information, or god forbid if they charge you for it, because I always find it easier to just use my own messenger bag that I take with me. I hardly ever buy more than three or things at once if I’m using a self-service, and there’s no way the system can detect my own bag, so it seems pointless. Better still I realize as I’m writing this – why not just scan all your stuff, put it on the bagging area, then leave your own bags on the floor to place your stuff into once you’ve paid? I’m sure there’s something stopping you from doing this, but I doubt I’ll ever be bothered to find out because my own system works so much better. God, isn’t pointless complaining so gratifying?
Anyway, for as much criticism I pile upon these machines, they are definitely a lifesaver for antisocial losers such as myself. There’s a lot of squawking about machines such as self-service checkouts replacing jobs for humans, but I’m not too worried about such a future from becoming real. For as long as there’s an audience of boomers too impatient or incompetent to learn how to use them there will be a line for human-operated checkouts. Even some places like Aldi’s continue to operate with humans only; despite every Aldi’s I have ever been to only leaving about 2-3 checkouts open at one time for some insane reason.
At the end of the day, all I can say is that the best way to get a job done is to do it yourself, and self-service checkouts enable me to work in my own time, so I can feel relaxed during my shopping and go home in a healthier state of mind. Until I retire to the lavatory and hear “Unexpected item in bagging area” ringing in my ears as I conclude my business.