I’ve worked in a supermarket for most of my adulthood. I can confirm that nobody likes the self checkouts. Least of all the staff. We’re supposed to be in eight places at once, monitoring for compliance, preventing shrinkage, helping with the exceptions. But the people using the checkouts haven’t been trained to, they’re customers, they don’t know what they’re doing, so they’re going to compound it by making mistakes too.
When I started out, you had to be specifically till-trained to operate a checkout. Now they throw people on self checkout duty with no training and say “figure it out”. Customers hate it. We hate it. Store management had the bright idea of putting someone on “receipt checking” duty which went down about as well as you’d expect.
I said just put them on a till.
They laughed and said I “don’t get it”.
What is it?!
I don’t disagree but I’m just presenting why every other retailer has them. As another commenter said though, I too am not a “small talk” type of person and hate that these stores train staff to try and engage in small talk with customers. I wasn’t checkout but was trained so I could help with overflow. I always only ever greeted people, with maybe one other follow up remark and then just got them out of there. Since I knew as a customer, I just wanted my shit scanned and to go home. For me it was more customers who seemed to want to have a yarn.
I’m the same. I really don’t need all that small talk, hell I’d even say I hate it. But this is not about me or the other customers, it’s about the employees, who need those jobs. So I take the plunge and only queue at cash registers with staff.