[averagewall]

Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?

[mantas]

Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.

[throwanem]

If you're in the US, your fruits and veg almost certainly have little stickers on them. Those stickers contain four- or five-digit numbers which, if entered into a register or a kiosk, identify the produce and save the time of navigating an icon menu to do so.

The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.

[mantas]

Late reply, but just in case if someone finds this helpful...

Over there fresh fruits/vegs/bakery don't have any stickers/packaging/etc. You pick them, put in a bag and cashier rings them up along with barcoded items. They got a fatass book with pictures for newbies/self checkout and all experienced staff have muscle memory...

[dazc]

In Spain it's common that you have to weigh and label such items as you buy them, so you are just scanning a bar code when it comes to the checkout bit. The only snag is that below a certain price point some stores will intervene to check you really have just bought one croissant, which kind of defeats the whole purpose?

[mantas]

In Lithuania only 1 small supermarket chain do so. In the rest, this is done at checkout.

I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(

[ghshephard]

Our stores with kiosks have hand bags of fruit, fruit/vegetables already bar coded, and, in the dozen or so cases where you have to buy-by-weight, they have hand scales/bar code printers. So, for about 10-20 items out of 10,000 in stock you need to worry. You are right - having 100% universal bar codes makes all the difference.

[kevinr]

I don't have data, only anecdote. I've used two of the same supermarket chain which both had the machines, one in a mixed-use area next to a mid-sized research university, and one in a very residential area in an inner-ring suburb.

Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.

A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.