The Written Podcast: Self-service Tills

Every major supermarket has the self-service checkouts. Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s (I don’t enter Waitrose because every time I get within a hundred yards of the place, I can sense an impending debt creeping its way toward me – like seriously, how expensive is Waitrose. I can get exactly the same items in Asda for much cheaper than from Waitrose. Why?).

When the self-service checkouts were first introduced, it was believed by many to decrease the time spent purchasing their items, allowing for better customer experience. On the other hand, it decreased the need for actual employees to man the checkouts. It was considered a controversial move on the most part, but it’s an idea that never went away, but instead increased in strength. Self-service checkouts are, for introverts like me, a way to purchase my junk food and fizzy drinks to spend all day on the sofa watching TV with a little less guilt than if I were personally handing them over to someone to scan, with a scanning look on their face. Whilst obviously they weren’t, because they just want to get you processed as quickly as possible, I always felt as if they were judging me. Like that time when I was working in 99P Stores and a woman came up to me holding 10 boxes of condoms – there were many questions regarding why so many, but of course, not only could I word my curiosity, but also had to keep a natural expression throughout the entire interaction. The self-checkout would prevent any awkwardness from assistant to customer, and just receive the judgemental looks from other customers instead.

How many times have you used a self-checkout and it went wrong? It’s annoying when they do go wrong, because all you want to do is pay for your items and get out of the supermarket. Having the machine that you’re depending on, going wrong, is something you’re obviously going to be angry at. Having to wait for a person to come over and press whatever key combination is necessary to make the machine work properly again is frustrating, because these self-checkouts aren’t government by one person per machine, but instead one person manages six or more self-checkouts at once. If one or more machine goes wrong at once, you’d have to wait for that singular employee to work their way around, solving each problem before getting to yours. You may be lucky in that yours is the first machine they get to whilst making their way round, but you know that’s not as often as the machines actually going wrong.

Admittedly, over the few years the self-checkouts have been around, they have certainly improved on their performance. I dare say that the number of times they do go wrong is not as often as you may believe they do, it’s just our anger at the time when they do go wrong, we automatically believe they go wrong all the time. It’s the level of frustration at wanting a quick getaway only for it to morph in one where you have to interact with someone, where you have to wait for the problem to be fixed; that’s not what the definition of a quick getaway is.

But it doesn’t matter how much we try and eradicate human interaction from our shopping experiences, we have to admit there will always be some level of communication. We still all make the mistake of taking films and clothing through the checkouts, completely forgetting they have security tags on, so you have to call someone over to take them off. You might as well just go through an ordinary checkout with that level of failure to prevent interaction.

And now we have a different version of self-checkouts. One where you are pre-packing whilst you walk around the shops. You scan the item, and then put it in your bag. If you were to do that without scanning, you’d be taken to one side for stealing. Once you’ve finished, you go to the self-service tills 2.0 and upload all that you’ve scanned to the system, and then pay for it. 2.0 only means they’re going to need a lot of explaining so customers can use them, which means, yet another attempt at making the customer experience quick and easy has resorted in even more interaction that before – it makes no sense.

You have the option of the machine printing a receipt or not. We don’t want yet another piece of paper cluttering the bottom of our bag, immediately forgotten about the moment we walk out of the shop only to be chucked in the bin when we do our yearly clean out of our bags, by which time we probably don’t actually own the thing we brought as what is mostly brought from supermarkets is consumable. If that machine says it’s scanned properly by there was an undetected glitch within the system so upon walking out the alarms goes off because they believe you’ve stolen something – and that security guard comes over, and you don’t have your receipt, you then have to go through all that unnecessary hassle of proving you definitely purchased a Twix, which by the time you’d be allowed to walk out of the supermarket, it would’ve melted in your pocket, preventing you from enjoying it as intended so many minutes beforehand.

What I’m trying to say is, we can’t see the self-checkouts as a way of completely eradicating the need for human interaction, because no matter what processes the supermarkets implement, the need for communication with strangers will always be there, whether necessary or unnecessary. As introverted as I am, and as some of you reading this are, whilst we love how quick the machines can be when working properly, we must accept that the only way we’re ever going to further decrease the need for us meeting strangers, is to buy online – but even then a human (a stranger) must deliver your shopping. You may be within the comfort of your own home, and it may be raining outside, and you may still be in your pyjamas, but unless you specifically request the delivery driver to leave your shopping outside for you to collect once fully dropped off, us introverts will have to accept we cannot completely eradicate the need for communication with strangers.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)