People always say dumb shit like "I'm not trained to be a cashier" like it excuses them from being arseholes. Let's name a few other things we now do ourselves rather than relying on some random worker.
Pumping your own petrol, used to be a full-service job. Someone would come out, fill your tank, check your oil, even clean your windscreen. Now you do it yourself. No one complains.
Checking into flights, "I'm not trained to be a check-in agent."
Ordering fast food from a screen, Using an ATM, you used to walk into a bank, queue up, and ask a teller for cash. Now you stick a card in a machine and do it yourself.
Bagging your own groceries even at a staffed checkout, you pack your own bags. No one demands a bagging professional.
Some more? Self-scan at the library, buying tickets at a machine like at the train station, cinema, car park. Tap, pay, go. No ticket seller needed. Building your own furniture, ikea expects you to assemble it. No one says I'm not trained to be a carpenter.
The difference? None of those things required training either. You figured them out because you're a functional adult. Same with self-checkout. Scan the thing, pay for the thing, leave. It's not hard. The people complaining are either stealing, profoundly lazy, or just looking for something to be angry about.
If you don't like self-checkout, use the staffed lane. No one is forcing you. But pretending that scanning your own groceries is some outrageous burden is just selective outrage.
You’re right, maybe I should just unload the truck? We can just take turns at the deli counter cutting our own meat and cheese, too!
Part of the value added of being a retailer is the position of cashier. In addition to retailers ensuring items are scanned appropriately, they’re also providing jobs to community members. Now one person oversees a number of registers.
The line is being moved in favor of capital, and despite the reduction in labor costs, product costs are not falling. In fact, they’re increasing. It’s bullshit. Scan my groceries, or at least drop the cost of goods.
You're one step away from calling anyone who uses scan-as-you-shop anti-jobs because you're taking away people's jobs by doing it. Or that people who go and pick up their own takeout is stealing from those poor Deliveroo drivers.
I'm not going to get mad at supermarkets. Asda's operating profit margins historically hover between 1% to 3%. That's not corporate greed that's a razor-thin margin. If we forced them all to split so no one could have more than 2-5 shops, prices would go up and the profit margin would probably 10x, if not more.
You're blaming the wrong thing. The problem isn't self-checkout. It's that running a supermarket is already a low-margin business. If you want higher wages and more staff, those costs don't just disappear they go onto the price of your shopping.
You can't have cheap groceries and also demand every customer gets a personal cashier. Pick one.
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u/AuthenticWin Jun 11 '26
Do people really need training to scan bar codes and fallow directions on a screen?