As someone who suffers from trolley-rage I was overjoyed when my local Little Britain introduced self service checkouts. It would at least halve the time I’d have to spend grocery shopping.
My joy was short lived. Like the mayfly. Or is that the mayflower? Or McFly? Anyway, it started out great. No queues. No-one asking if I had a Clubcard. Had I a parking receipt. Did I know what terrible weather we were having. If I’d fancy a quick shag under the till. No. All I had to do was grab the goods, scan them, drop them in my shopping bag, feed the machine a few euro and go. Easy in - easy out.
Then it all went terribly wrong. Other people have started using my checkouts. The cheek of them! I wouldn’t mind if they could actually use them, but most can’t. And because they can’t, there are queues now.
I have had to develop a totally new algorithm for choosing which queue to join. The old one for regular checkouts had pretty straightforward selection criteria: Number of people in each queue; number of items per person; was the checkout girl worth checking out. That kind of thing. Empty queue - go there. Queue with a number of people but only a few items each - go there. One person in queue with trolley contents spilling out - avoid like the Tánaiste. All queues with a number of people with full trolleys - goto Dunnes.
Now there are extra things to look out for:
Has the shopper in front got loose fruit or veg? Avoid. Some will wave a turnip over and back across the scanner 2.39 million times before realising it isn’t barcoded. (What’s a barcode?) Others will try to tell the machine what the item is. “T-u-r-n-u-p”. [sic.] More will place the turnip on the scanner and stare at it. Then bounce it off the glass.
Has the person using the checkout still got their shopping bag in their hand? Avoid. They are placing everything loosely in the bagging area and will have to pack it later. That’s the bagging area signed Bagging Area, with little arms you hang a bag on to keep it open while you drop in each item when you’ve scanned it.
Is the person in front a large Nigerian lady? Avoid. All large Nigerian ladies need 30 minutes to wait for a bus due in 5. They run walk saunter in slow motion. Lee Majors without the che che che che che che. If you have no option but to queue behind them, ask a passerby to fetch you some razors. You may be scruffy looking by the second day.
If the person in front is a large Nigerian lady, with a shopping bag on her arm and a basket of turnips …
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I find the self-service checkouts are very poor. I’ve used them half-a-dozen times - twice without incident, but the other four times I’ve had to get a customer service person over, either because it wasn’t scanning an item or (more annoying still) because it was scanning a higher price than was on the label. I know they’re new technology, but fuck’s sake. If our IT department let out that sort of halfassed technology they’d get their holes kicks up and down the road.
There were some teething problems at first with the machines in Naas. Why they didn’t learn from the experience of the outlet in Newbridge which had gone through the same thing 6 months previously I don’t know.
They got them sorted fairly quickly I’ll admit.
There is one major bug now: There’s no facility to enter your PIN when using a credit card. People kicked up about the security risk.
But instead of changing it so a PIN has to be entered, they set a limit of €20. If go over that, an operator has to login, print the docket and have you sign it. Defeats the purpose of the whole thing.
Here’s the really funny thing: The operator login code is a 10 digit number. They carry it with them on a slip of paper. One young guy discovered that if he made a barcode of it and scanned it in, it made his life a lot easier. Plus no-one can ‘rob’ the number by watching him key it in. The guys who installed the machines didn’t know this was possible!
Back in Dublin, we’d sometimes use the self-checkout at the Tesco. But the damn thing wasn’t calibrated to accept shopping bags. So you’d put your bag down in the area and the machine would start chiding you about an unexpected item in the bagging area. Yes, it’s SO unexpected that I’d want to actually put a bag in the bagging area.
That used to happen in my Little Britain too, Ann. It’s fixed now. But I had a workaround in the meantime: Scan your heaviest item first. A 2l milk container say. Put it in your bag, and then put the bag on the scales.
Large Nigerian lady. Bit of a tautology there, Mr Sneeze. I don’t recall seeing a small Nigerian lady.
Ha ha! You’re spot on there Mr Robber. It’d be like seeing a small rat or an ugly baby. (Unless, of course, it was a baby rat).