please empty your brain below
When you are buying 100 things for your family shop (which I guess DG never does) then having another person do the scanning certainly helps, even if you have to wait a while beforehand. You can't balance 100 items on the self-checkout scales anyway.
The real improvement for me is the handheld scanners so you can scan and pack things as you pick them. Tesco had these back in 2013 but my Sainsburys only recently installed them.
I never used them for about 6 months because I thought you had to do some complicated thing with an app, but it turns out you can just scan a nectar card - I wonder how many people are not using them for the same reason as I didn't.
Also keeps at least 2 people in a job, the shopper and the driver.
There's still a debate going on about whether self-service checkouts cause job losses. And, on the brighter side, there's less RSI.
For what it's worth, my preference generally is for self-scan at the end of a runway belt. The discounters (Aldi/Lidl etc.) seem to have avoided any form of self-scan and therefore have some of the longest queues, other than those encountered at my local B&Q.
At Tesco you can remove your full bag from the bagging area when the light is green, and start a new one - most people are not aware of this.
I used the handheld scanner once - then a staff member manually checked every single item at the tills. Not sure about the efficiency of this...
Me! Thanks, I'll take a closer look - though I'd feel like a shoplifter walking around putting things straight into my wheelie bag!!
The 2010 comments that predicted ticket offices at stations and fewer tellers in banks were spot on!
Sadly my uni graduates have not managed to find any kind of employment - skilled or unskilled, so it is getting harder out there for the young ones, and it's not being helped by their parents being made to work longer and longer as the pension age rises.
One store I know of has actually removed its self-scans in favour of more manned checkouts (B&Q at Leyton)
Do remember to bring your own bags to the 2020 supermarket, because oherwise you'll have to pay for one.
Had a trip to Sylt near the German-Danish border and then Bremen.
I always use my credit card when abroad as I don't always hear properly and cannot be bothered with mucking around with EUROs. My bank does not charge me a foreign transaction fee and generally get a good exchange rate.
The shops in the above mentioned places(food shops) would not accept my card, wanting cash.I found this strange as other parts of Germany accept credit cards as we do.
I am 70 and queue up as you say.
Back in the mid 90's the main local supermarket chain in Northern California, Safeway (not the UK company), was planning to fire all its check-out people and replace them with self service scanners. Our local supermarket in San Francisco had a wonderful staff who had mostly worked the same store for decades. Exceptionally nice people.
The supermarket workers union did a great job of explaining what the company was planning to do, in fact the company boasted about it, then the union called a strike. For three weeks none of the regular customers would cross the picket line and management eventually had to cave in. Once the strike was over there were extra long lines in the supermarket as all the regular customers turned up to congratulate the staff on winning the strike.
The management did eventually install some self service check-outs a decade or so later but the human checkers are still there. Still as nice and friendly as ever. And just as busy.
What I find interesting is that the locals will still almost never use the self service checks-out. They always seem to used by people new to town who dont know the story.
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