[wahern]

Not once have I ever been able to use self-checkout at a major grocery chain like Safeway without violating whatever weight constraints the machine has. Not once. It's absurd. It's been over 10 years, though for most of that time I only ever try about once or less a year and never by choice.

By contrast, I can't remember the last time violating the constraints at a CVS, and I've used it at many. I want to say that it used to happen regularly many years ago, but in any event it's easily been at least 7 years, now. I've also regularly been using self-checkout at a small City Target for the past several years, again without any issues.

Maybe some engineer in the industry can chime in, but my working theory is that CVS either disables their scales or uses huge margins on the thresholds. And CVS can do this because of the already ridiculous markups, whereas margins tend to be razor thin at major grocery chains. Similarly, the pricing and product selection at the City Target I frequent is much more like a CVS or Walgreens than a grocery store, and they also have at least 2 security people standing 15 feet away and watching everything like a hawk, along with the checkout clerks directly face the machines.

[DangitBobby]

I have the same problem at Kroger. I'm slow because the machine forces me to place an item fully on the scale (and wait a second or so) before it will accept the scanning of another. I'm usually waving an item in frustration across the laser multiple times while it figures out what happened to the last item I scanned. Customers are not the problem, IMO. It's dead simple to use these machines, usability issues aside.