An early sign of aging?

[Monkey]

You can strike me up in the geezer column when it comes to these things too. The only time I will use one is if I sense it might save me 20 minutes or so. I actually like bagging my own groceries, but I don't like having to do it in the presence of a balance that has to sense just the right amount of weight. And as anti-social as I may be, I still like customer service from a human being when I'm out shopping. My dad used to say the only reason McDonald's isn't a vending machine is that people like to get their food from a human being, and I think more and more that he is right. Plus if I walk out after doing a self-serve checkout, I'm always expecting some security guy to come and tackle me.

Of course, I do my grocery shopping at 4 AM. The night shift manager at Meijer knows me by name, and the only wait is trying to find a cashier someplace. It's a different world when you are a night person.

They field-tested the auto-checkout at the Kroger by my college, so we all became "early adopters". We were a bunch of college-age gamers and the clerks were quite apathetic, so we flew through in comparison.

I've moved a couple of times since then and now prefer the human if there's one readily available. The self-checkout is slower for many reasons:
1. Bad UI. The self-checkout doesn't expect (like the cashier's system does) rapid data entry. It lags up frequently. Sometimes doing reasonable things it doesn't expect will make it hang until the overseer (who is usually off somewhere else) returns. Meanwhile, the cashiers in my current area aren't apathetic and like to go fast.
2. Cloth Bags. The self-checkout system won't let me bag my groceries into cloth bags ("Please put the item or items back..."). Also, I can bag while the human cashier scans.
3. Alcohol. To buy beer at the self-checkout, you have to go get in a little line at the self-checkout overseer's stand and have your ID reviewed and painstakingly entered. And if the overseer is AFK as in #1, you're screwed. The human cashier is not only much faster at this process, they'll also frequently take one look at my face and bypass the whole ID business.

Finally, by choosing the human cashiers,I'm helping to preserve entry-level jobs in my area. Grocery stores will undoubtedly scale down the human cashiers as much as they have evidence to support. By adding a little traffic whenever the humans don't look busy, I help slow that process.