By Christopher Harper
If you choose self-checkout, you may be considered a glutton for punishment.
With each selection, the automated voice gets more exasperated with your mistakes.
You need to place all the items in the bagging area.
Didn’t you get that necessity the first time? Or the second time? Now it’s the sixth time!
Have you checked all the items? Are you really trying to steal something?
Your card cannot be read. Please try again.
Would you like to add 57 cents to give money to people who aren’t jerks like you?
The card reader failed!
I’ve never liked shopping, and I guess it seemed that self-checkout would be faster the first time I used it. It probably is.
But self-checkout is a way to get me to do all the work that a real person has done for years.
But Ben Cohen of The Wall Street Journal wrote recently about a system that ends the frustration and the embarrassment of self-checkout.
At a clothing store called Uniqlo, the company has simplified the process using old rather than new technology: radio frequency identification readers or RFID tags.
“I picked one of the dozen self-checkout machines, followed the instructions on the screen, and placed my clothing in the box. The machine did the rest of the work. I confirmed the number of scanned items, tapped to pay, and grabbed my receipt. And that was it,” Cohen wrote.
The key to the whole operation was RFID tags and their declining cost. As the technology became more precise and less costly, retailers could afford to buy RFID chips in bulk and deploy them in novel ways: predicting demand, adjusting production, optimizing distribution, preventing theft—and reinventing self-checkout.
Uniqlo said the new self-checkout system cuts waiting times in half—and the longer it’s been in a market, the more customers prefer it.
Putting RFID cards on some products, such as tomatoes and bananas, may be difficult. But stores have found ways to counter such products’ lack of bar codes.
The only further change would be a way to silence the ever-present school marm who anticipates and notes every conceivable mistake you make!
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“If you choose self-checkout, you may be considered a glutton for punishment.”
Or as an alternative view, you could think of it like algebra. Learn how the system works. Use the system as designed. Problem solved. I use self-checkout all the time when I have only a few items to buy and I don’t have problems. It did take a few tries for me to learn the system, but with a teachable attitude that can be done. Maybe the problem is not really the machine.
I admit that the nanny voice is very annoying. Kinda like the airport announcement lady’s voice. Or the vehicle guidance voice in my car. Or any nanny I suppose.