Source: u/Portarossa on Reddit, April 7, 2020.
Transcription:
‘Unexpected item in bagging area.’
It’s not unexpected, you digital fuck. You literally just told me what it is. It’s right there on the screen. I did the wavy-wave, you did the bleepy-bleep; up until the point where you decided to have an electronic stroke, things were going exactly according to plan. What you mean is that you haven’t been programmed right. Don’t go putting this on me, like I’ve somehow gone out of my way to surprise you. I’ve got places to be, man. I can’t be playing hide-the-actual-salami with the Terminator’s younger, shittier cousin.
Oh, and now you’ve sent for backup. Well done. Now I have to deal with a human person who thinks I’m either an imbecile or a thief for not being able to work what’s effectively a bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur for the fourth time.
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I bring my own bag. I press the “I have my own bag” button. I scan an item. Alarms. “Please wait for an associate.” Wait. Associate toddles over. “Sir next time press the ‘Brought My Own Bag’ button.” Scream internally.
You have to press the “brought my own bag” button, then put the bag on the scales, then let it think about it for about 30 minutes, and then you can start scanning.
I can never be bothered with that, so I you always just put the bag on the floor and transfer all the stuff from the sensor to the bag when I finished
🙃
The self checkout at my local store will get confused and tell you to “remove the unscanned” item, but someone set it up to time out after like 10 seconds and just let you keep scanning.
I recently used the self checkout in an Aldi and it just… didn’t care. It was fantastic! I left most the items in my cart and just scanned everything with a hand-held scanner then paid and bagged everything at my car.
Then I went to another store and they have plastic bag holders welded in the scale area and it complained that my head was an unexpected item in the bagging area with a top-down camera perspective to prove it.
Aldi is like the crown jewel of grocery stores. There’s not one close to me, unfortunately. And they’ve always (as long as I’ve known them, anyway) let their cashiers sit. Aldi needs to buy Kroger and show them how it’s done.
Other grocery stores don’t let their cashiers sit? Wtf? Standing still for 8+ hours sounds like hell? Why would you force someone to do that?
I’ve never been to a grocery store where cashiers were forced to stand and I’ve lived in 4 different countries in the past decade. This is an American thing, yes? But why?
If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.
This infuriating quip summarizes the cultural perception of the laziness of the low wage worker. I also think it is somewhat culturally related to “Protestant work ethic” and the phrase “idle hands are the Devil’s playground.”
I worked a lot of shitty low wage jobs in college and I can still feel the unfairness of it all in my core. I bristle decades later when I think about being reprimanded by a manager for waiting to mop a lobby until we had locked up for the night. Their argument was that I was wasting time and no counter argument would be heard. They didn’t get it, I was insubordinate, I quit a month later. Rinse and repeat somewhere else. I’m sure the hours worked after close cut into their Christmas bonus or some shit.
But I digress. The point is, in the US, it’s common knowledge that businesses exist to abuse you. It’s just that a lot of people delude themselves into thinking that if they’re the customer then they’re better off than the employee. Then add in some “back in my day” and a “well, I never” with a twist of “I took advantage of a combination of luck and a commitment to unhealthy work-life balance to get promoted to assistant regional manager so now I empathize with your boss because I now realize that employees leaning against the counter or sitting at the register cuts into my productivity bonus and also looks bad to snotty customers like me and that’s how I rationalize working 60+ hours a week after signing a contract where I’ve waived my right to overtime pay because technically I’m salaried and should be able to do all of my work in 40-hour week.”
The US is a truly ridiculous country. They have all these weird Hang-Ups about what constitutes good customer service, apparently sitting is offensive to some people, although I’ve never met anyone who thinks that.
But I just don’t get it. How is standing a customer service? It doesn’t add anything except suffering to the cashier.
Americans think that suffering is a service and they damn well deserve it
Same with Walmart. The scales just don’t seem to care.
I’m sure 99% of the self-checkout attendants are in a daze of numbness or barely contained rage when the item weight is a known error and requires them to correct it every single time a customer scans it, to be fixed at the monthly inventory adjustment and only to be replaced by another few items not correctly weighed or sensed.
Having worked a self checkout, it’s mostly numbness. At least for me it was, every time the yellow light came on I just walked over, asked what happened and then scanned my badge while trying to to get them to stop rambling at me
You asked what happened?
All I ever did was scan my badge.
We have had these in Europe now for nearly as long as you North Americans. I tend to do daily shopping after work, nice little 15 minute walk calms me down.
But because of this, I was using the scan thing statistically far more than people who don’t shop daily. Another important thing is I use my backpack to pack groceries, and in a former life I did a shit ton of back country hiking, so I know how to pack.
I got so fucking tired of 16 year old kids asking to unpack my carefully packed stuff to scan a random number off items (it’s not by weight most places here) then trying to pack it back - no no no don’t mess with my system - that two years ago I swore off of self check out and only go to the humans now.
Yeah I have to wait in line sometimes, but I figure that evens out for the number of times I was “randomly” checked by some teenager.
At least our check out people can sit down.
Lol, I would be livid in my careful Tetris-ing got ruined every time. The self checkouts are only a time saver if you have like 5 items or less. Anything more, and just wait in line.
Is this really that common? I never have issues with self checkout- but I realize that’s anecdotal…
Completely dependent on how the store programs it. There is a lot of variance. For me it seems like grocery stores are the worst where even looking funny at the thing sets it off, then like target is usually fine, and finally places like home Depot don’t even seem to have the sensors (they let you use the gun and keep things in your cart).
Definitely regional, but common enough. That has been my experience with my local chain pretty much every time, including on the way home from work this evening.
The local Loblaws near me (the Canadian devil chain) set theirs up with like a 5% weight tolerance, so if you put something down too fast? Sensors go off. Bag it then put it on the scale? Sensors go off. Manufacturer put too many chips in your package? Sensors go off.
I don’t shop there anymore
Theirs suuuuck. The ones I actually enjoy using though? Home Depot. They don’t bother with the scale weighing anything, and you get a gun to scan (with green laser sight!) so I leave most of the stuff in the cart, beep beep beep and I’m out of there. Can recommend
I agree about the Home Depot experience. The scan gun is fun and efficient. However, I’d attribute it to the impracticality of placing 12 bags of mulch on a scale rather than Home Depot truly wanting us to have a pleasant checkout experience.
I can imagine a kafkaesque nightmare where the checkout accuses you of having too much paint in a gallon can.
My local Whole Foods did a serious redesign on their self checkout (no laser gun though) and it works pretty well even with having to look up and weigh produce.
Thank God for shrinkflation am I right?
It can be, depending on the level of maintenance your particular store has for the self checkout machines. Happens to me from time to time, usually at the most messed up stores where pretty much nothing works; not even the regular cash registers.
One of the grocery stores near me is picky like this, I guess it has a camera so it guesses what you put on there and if you pick something else by searching for it then it gets upset
Woah dude, when this happens to me the attendant comes over, presses a flurry of buttons and apologizes for the problem.
I mean, yeah, that’s kind of how it is here, but there are usually 12 to 15 self checkouts all being monitored by one person. They’re constantly going from machine to machine doing that, so you’re often stuck waiting for them to get to you. It’s ridiculous on multiple levels.
Refuse the auto checkout. Join the resistance.
Totally do. If I have more than 3 items, I always wait in line for the 1-2 cashiers they have nowadays.
A lot of Krogers around here got rid of the cashiers. It’s all auto checkout. Right above the touch-screens are live feeds of the cameras pointed right at your face. Numerous cameras hanging from above, viewing from all angles. I only go there if I have absolutely no other choice. Every Kroger worker looks miserable.
God damn 😭😭😭
This is poetry.
I don’t know who the author of this is, but I wish they were my friend.
Unexpected item in the bagging area
Please place item in the bagging area
Unexpected item in the bagging area
Please place item in the bagging area
(twitch) 🥴
i’ve never even seen a self checkout that does this… it feels like it would be an enormous hassle for the store.
also we’ve had the little hand scanners you bring with you through the store for something like 20 years so i don’t really ever go through the checkout unless it fails to scan my card.
The scale based ones are quite common in the UK. It’s designed to detect someone putting 2 things into the bag at once.
Unfortunately, it requires the weight to actually be correct, to be programmed in properly, and for the scale to work properly.
Even with problems, it still lets 1 staff member man 8 tills, however, which speeds things up considerably.
Part of the problem is they never clean them. So they have about 3 g worth of fruit stickers, dust, random bits of cellophane and onion skin in them. So they’re already starting out from a compromised position.
Morrisons are the absolute worst for this.
I know someone who developed a load of the underlying code. It’s a lot of bodging, and sensors being ran past their nominal lifespan. Some of them just go a bit unreliable, and the error accumulate until it starts triggering errors.
what i mean with extra work is partially the weight thing, partially the fact that here there’s usually 15-20 checkout things in larger stores, and no dedicated staff member at all unless it’s busy.
My local supermarket swapped over to a system with no scales, which works fine. Probably running some kinda detection software on their surveillance cams or something, I’d guess. At least scanning goes faster now.
Lately I’ve been using the scan gun. Just blast everything in the cart, grab a handful of plastic bags, push it out to the car, and bag as I’m transferring to the trunk. Cuts checkout time in at least half.
…and freaks out the door guard person every time, lol. 100% looks like I’m just pushing a cart of unpaid groceries out the door.
I have reusable bags and place the items in them after I scan them. Saves a step.
I bought just one cooked chicken the other day. Being in a hurry I scanned it, placed it on the output area and hit pay now.
Machine said to wait for help, so I went to another and repeated the process with the same result.
When the operator came, I think I saw a video of myself scanning the chook quickly play back. So I guess either it didn’t get to recognize my face, or thought I was scanning something else.
Now I’m intrigued and will see if I can do it again some time.
