Some self-checkout thoughts

Several years ago, I moved back home to help my parents out around the house and farm.  And to have time to write.  That’s great and all, but I can’t really use a short story or the afternoon I helped my dad bale hay to pay for my car insurance.  So a couple of years ago I got a crappy part time job to pay the bills.  When I say crappy, I mean that for a while even though I worked thirty-nine hours – often over six days – a week, I was still “part time” and didn’t get benefits.  But for the last year or so I’ve cut back so now I only worked two, or three days a week which means I actually have time to unwind and maybe get something done.

The store I work in is busy.  As in we had three registers and there were times when even with three cashiers ringing people out we still had customers waiting in line.  But a couple of months ago the Corporation, in their “wisdom,” took out one of the registers to put in a self-checkout.  I say “wisdom” because apparently the software of the self-checkout doesn’t work with our old software, and even though they knew the problem existed because it happened in all the stores they put self-checkouts in, they still went ahead and took out a register we used on a daily basis and put in a glorified counter. 

All this means is that for the last couple of months I’ve gotten to hear many people’s thoughts on self-checkout.  To me it seems that younger people are … not excited, but at least cool with the idea, whereas older people are often anti-self-checkout.  They often proudly claim that they will never use one because “it takes away jobs.” I wrote up some of my thoughts on self-checkouts a couple of years ago, but now that I have direct experience with them, I thought I should expand on the issue because things are not black-or-white. 

In a store, there are various jobs that need done.  When stuff is delivered it either needs to go out on a shelf or in the back as overstock, old overstock needs worked to make room for new, sale signs have to be put up and taken down, items need to be returned to their proper locations (you would not believe how often stuff like cans of soup will be left with the bleach), the store needs to be cleaned, oh, and customers need to be checked out.  Let’s call all the worker hours needed to do all of this work each day X.  But the thing is, X is not constant.  A random Monday in May will not be as busy as the last Saturday before Christmas.  Now the Corporation has records of how busy the store has been in years past, so they can have a rough idea of how busy the store will be, but it’s not an exact science.  The number of worker hours the Corporation gives the manager we’ll call Y.  In an ideal world, Y would equal X, but that never happens.  In reality, the Corporation only has two choices, Y>X, or Y<X.  In the Y>X scenario, everything would be put away, the customers would all be helped, and employees would be standing around doing nothing and getting paid for it.  So the Corporation – whose goal is to make money – will opt for the Y<X scenario.

But that means the store won’t be perfect, and customers will have to wait in line.  Yeah.  The Corporation can lose money in one of two ways, they could spend hundreds of dollars each week by having more employees on the floor, or a customer could walk out without buying a $2 thing of deodorant because it wasn’t on the shelf because there wasn’t an employee to put it out.  The Corporation will gladly accept a less than perfect store because the extra money they’d make from a perfect store won’t cover the cost to get to a perfect store.  Basically, the law of diminishing returns. 

Now let’s talk about self-checkout.  I don’t know how many thousands of dollars our self-checkout system cost, but – if the damned thing worked – it may only take a few months for it to pay for itself and it will be cheaper than having an employee standing at a register all day.  And the gap between X and Y will be smaller.  (You can see this as either the paid employee workload X being smaller, or Y being higher, all because the Corporation has some unpaid customer/employees.)

Of course, the Corporation is perfectly fine with current size of the X-Y gap, so it is possible that with a lower X they’ll just lower Y.  And that’s why some people claim self-checkout is costing jobs.  But is the point of a corporation to cut as many corners as they can to make the most profit, or to create some utopic store where all the employees and customers are perfectly content?  It’s not a one to one correlation, but I do wonder how many of the people who won’t use self-checkout to “save jobs” would scream bloody socialism if you asked them if we should raise the minimum wage. 

I do think a tiny element in why some people don’t want to use self-checkout is because they see being a cashier as “beneath” them.  We sell a lot of clothes at our store, and some customers will take the hangers off so all I have to do is scan and bag the clothes.  But some customers will just dump twenty or so shirts on the counter and just step back and watch as I fumble to get the hangers out.  If they’re little old ladies, or they have kids, that’s fine.  But for some I get the feeling that making my job easier is of no concern to them.

So what are my final thoughts on self-checkout?  If you’re buying an entire cartload of stuff, it will probably be faster to go with a human cashier.  In part because we actually know how to scan a lot of stuff quickly.  But if you’re only getting a couple of things, then instead of ringing you out that cashier could be putting that deodorant away.  Also, I don’t know how many times someone with an entire cartload of stuff has come up, and then somebody with a fifty pound bag of dog food gets into line behind them.  Normally, I’d call up whoever I’m working with to ring them out, but sometimes the person I’m working with is on their break, or checking in a vendor, or putting the ice cream delivery away before it melts, or some other more pressing task.  So the dog food person just has to wait several minutes for me to scan the forty-seven cans of cat food or whatever.  But with a, working, self-checkout they could quickly be on their way.  Or there are times when there is a line and I’ll look up and see someone is seven or eight customers back, and five or so minutes later when they get up to the register all they’re getting is a candy bar and drink.  And often the only reason they’re buying something is because they want cashback and we don’t have an ATM.  You know, those things that took away all those bank teller jobs.

Technology is always changing.  In the olden days, a cashier either had to know the price of a can of soup, or the price had to be on a sticker on the can.  Now we just scan it, there’s a beep, and the computer finds the price and adds it all up.  Maybe a decade from now there won’t be human cashiers.  You’ll take your cart up to a spot, and robotic arms will pick up all your items, scan, bag, and return them to your cart.  Or maybe you won’t even go to the store.  You’ll just make a list of what you want, text it to a store, a robot will pick it all out, pack it, and then a self-driving car will drop it off at your house.  Personally, I look forward to the day machines take my crappy job because being a cashier sucks.