381
Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
381 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
59578 readers
3190 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand people that get upset and hostile at employees in these situations. When I go through self checkout I go in with expectations already set that it's very likely that at some point during the checkout process the machine is going to trigger an alarm and an employee will need to come over and override the alarm. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does my first reaction isn't to get all pissy and throw things at the cashier.
If you have no patience for this sort of thing, then go through the regular checkout. See if it takes longer going that route.
The store has chosen to save money by pushing work onto customers via a buggy robot overlord.
Employees are the only person you can complain to.
Just more billionaires making things shitty for everyone.
I could justify it if even a fraction of a percent of the savings were actually passed on, or hell, even distributed to the few employees they still have. But no, it lines the fat cats pockets.
That's the worst part. It has gotten so miserable for both employees and customers and none of the profits made from these changes has gone back to those most affected by them.
Yeah I do agree that complaining to employees is useless, but it's also a really frustrating situation and it's not like you can get the CEO on the phone to complain. I wouldn't personally complain at an employee, but I do get how someone might in the midst of such frustration.
As a consumer, what’s your other option?
Pretty much nothing, hence why I said I get it 🤷🏼♂️
The only viable legal option is to vote with your wallet. I know elsewhere you said that's not an option in your area, and that sucks. Still, do what you can to shop at other places, even if you can't nix walshart entirely.
Edit that was another guy who said that, my bad. Statement still standa tho
Shop elsewhere.
Where? Idk about your area, but in mine all the options are big corporate chains
And even in areas where family owned retail stores still survive, a lot of people can't afford to shop at them, because they'll always have higher prices than the big chains, and with the price gouging that's gone on since 2020, many families are struggling to make ends meet as it is.
Yeah, it sucks for sure. I personally choose to spend a bit more and buy a bit less to go to somewhere that doesn't suck horribly, but that's a lot of effort and a privilege that others may not have. I'll never condemn a person for shopping at walshart, due to that. Still though, shop elsewhere when you can, buy minimal when you can't. That's about the only legal recourse we have as consumers.
What regular checkout? Around here they are all closed down and only self checkout is available.
Take all your shit to customer service and check out there.
It’s an asshole move everyone should use until they stop understaffing checkout.
What customer service? That shit's closed too.
I might uniroically start doing this. Or I would if I thought for a second it'd do anything other than inconvenience the employees..
I would LOVE to go through a regular check out! If only we still actually had more than 2 open in a full supermarket. It's not about time taken, though, it's about the sheer level of inconvenience that it's become. It's an active pain in the ass to have to do the job that used to be done by employees, with shitty machines that yell at you every few minutes, while actively being recorded and treated like a criminal, and have to go through another checkpoint where they're going to once again actively treat you like a criminal and look through your receipt. Or I can spend like, 30 minutes in line at one of the two open cashiers.
We all make decisions like that daily. Just because I'm choosing one slightly more convenient shitty thing over another doesn't mean the one I'm choosing is good. It just has a utility. It also only has that utility because the other option is being actively neglected.
It also wasn't too long ago that I worked retail, at Walmart no less. Even after self checkout became popular, we'd have 4-10 cashiers depending on the traffic at any given time. They'd even call employees who worked completely different sections, like myself, to run registers if they got backed up.
I think a lot of it has to do with that last part of your comment. The amount of times I've gone to the grocery store to find there's no register open other than the self checks or that there's 1-2 open at a huge grocery store with a 6-8 people in line for them and no self check line... People are being forced into self checking when they don't want to. These people are obviously going to be more easily upset by issues with the self check machines. Walmart in my limited experience (try to never buy anything there if I can avoid it) is the worst offender I've seen.