I like it. It’s one of my favorite innovations of all time. I don’t use it when I have a ton of stuff of course but for my frequent trips to buy <10 items it’s much quicker than waiting in line.
I’ve seen different self checkout systems that provide a vastly different experience. Some are painful, like the ones where you scan a bar code and place the items in a scale. It’s effectively a checkout where I am now the clerk, but am less well trained, less experienced, and can not solve my own issues when they happen.
I’ve also seen a superb one at Decathlon stores in Poland. You dump your items in a box. It automagically scans everything using something that I’m guessing is RFID based. Bag, swipe a card to pay, and goIt is much simpler to use and is actually pleasant. It’s one step short of just walking out of the store without actually checking out.
I think this experience probably varies a lot person-to-person. For someone like me who often experiences social anxiety even from the most minimal of interactions, being able to keep my earbuds in and not have to talk to a stranger can be a huge difference if I'm happening to feel stressed on a given day. The biggest issue I used to have was when I wanted to carry something out instead of putting it in a bag, but since all they check for bagging is that the weight is placed on the surface, you can just put the item on the surface outside of a bag after scanning, and it will accept it as being "bagged".
Sure, and I do always strive to be nice to anyone I have to interact with whether they're cashiers or otherwise. Social anxiety doesn't tend to be a rational thing though, so the fact that consequences aren't unlikely doesn't really make it go away. I know that nothing bad is going to happen from a minor social interaction, and yet that does absolutely nothing to make me dread it less if I'm happening to be in an anxious state. A lot of mental health things work similarly to this; for example, having depression doesn't just mean you're sad because things aren't going well, but you can be despondent despite everything going perfectly fine in your life. If you can't imagine having feelings like this that conflict with what you actually know about a situation, then you're one of the lucky ones, but you probably do know someone who would know exactly what I'm talking about.