An early sign of aging?

[Hammerskjold]

I agree that many of them don't work too well, but I do love them. Of course I've been a cashier and am used to how to deal with most of the stuff. But if I can get to one that doesn't have someone clueless at it or is empty they can be a big time saver for me as I can still scan and bag faster than many cashiers at many stores. But yeah they are by no means perfect.

I'll state upfront that if I had a choice between the two, my bias is I will usually pick a human over a machine. Unless it's a state of the art femmebot or something similar.

Having said that, it's more common nowadays for me to find 'operator' error when dealing with human cashiers vs wacky machine errors. Eg: the cashier charged me the wrong price for lettuce, because they don't know or don't care what the difference between romaine vs leaf lettuce etc.

But in the larger picture, you are most likely in the right track. The technology is not perfect, but at one point the same could be said for that newfangled laser scanner. Chances are this will be the way of the future, at least for the larger stores.

By that time, we will astound, amaze (and probably bore) our grandkids on their jet powered segways with tales of people manning something called a 'cash register' in the long ago.

Damn kids and their rocket segways messing up my astro-lawn...