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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
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I'm thankful my grocery stores have a mute button for self checkout. It makes for a much less stressful experience, I don't know why they have it narrate so much junk.
As for your issues with the inability to remove things, I do know the trick. (I can't speak for non-us self check out kiosks) As someone who worked as an attendant for the kiosks, the main cause of setting off the thing is picking your bag up before the scale has settled. The scale isn't just checking that the weight has increased by a certain amount, it's also waiting to make sure the weight is balanced. The issue with that, is the intuitive thing to do when your bag is full is immediately put it in your cart to make space. So the best thing to do is put your item in, wait a few seconds then you're set to move the bag. With the small things not registering, could be uncalibrated scales. I have never ran into the multiply issue, as the ones I've all been to have scan guns and you can just shoot the barcode a bunch.
Huh, I'll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.
Not all of them have mute buttons. My local grocery store used to allow you to mute the register but they disabled the function, I am assuming on the basis of reducing theft. When you're typing in a PLU for a given produce item, they want the machine to announce what it is so the self checkout monitor can hear if you rang your asparagus in as (much cheaper by weight) bananas. It also announces the price of whatever you just scanned in, which to me seems excessive.
This is just one store, though. There's another local grocery chain with better self-checkout registers that you can mute, but by default they don't even do all of the announcing that the other one does anyways. I try to support the store with the worse self checkout when I can because it is a union shop whereas the other is non-union, but it is frustrating as a customer when the non-union store is just a better experience most of the time.
Damn wish i cpuld shoot the barcode a bunch thr ines im forced to use make u put down every item before u can scan another so no double scanning to count 2 items