Check Me Out! - 3/11/09

You know me.
You've seen me at Shaw’s, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. As you crawl towards the checkout with your bulging cart, waiting interminably to begin placing your items on the belt, cursing inwardly as the patron ahead of you pulls out a checkbook, I breeze by you wordlessly.
You know me.
I am the one who uses self-checkout.

I confess: the self-checkout lane has always intrigued me. Unless I have a shopping cart bursting with food (which would mean real meal planning on my part, so basically never), I tend to drift to those last few aisles that offer the chance to play supermarket cashier for a few minutes. Look, I can scan barcodes and weigh bananas with the best of them! Using self-checkout gives me the feeling, if only briefly, that I have another concrete skill to fall back on (should the need arise). There are those that prefer to have others scan and bag their groceries, pump their gas and mow their lawns (okay, I agree with that last one) but there's something about self-checkout that lures me in every time.

I always think that self-checkout will be a time saver, and sometimes it is. More often than not, there's something in my order that sends up a flag, causing the little green light on top of my checkout to turn red and blink. The oh-so-friendly computer voice says, "Please stand by...help is on the way". Of course, help is not really on the way, because the other cashiers (the professional ones, not the amateurs like me) are all helping their customers, so I've learned from experience that you can't just wait for help to arrive, you need to nudge it along by saying, 'Help, HELP HELP!" in an increasingly loud voice. At this point everyone in the checkout area turns to look at me while an employee with a key hustles my way.

Anyone out there recognize this scenario? You scan your item and place it in the bag. But you were a split second too quick, because the voice then says, "Please remove item from bagging area." You remove the item only to hear, "Item removed from bagging area. Please return item to bagging area." at which point you put it BACK in the bag and the whole cycle starts all over again. Perhaps this could be implemented as a new form of torture. Imagine terrorists removing and replacing items in the bagging area for ten or twelve hours on end.

The aforementioned computer voice is consistent whether I shop at Shaw’s, BJ's, Wal-Mart or Home Depot. I'm sure the voiceover talent was chosen for her soothing, dulcet tones, but that's a small consolation when I hit my third or fourth error during checkout. At that point, all I want to do is find the woman who belongs to that voice and smack her in the head with my oven-stuffer. A clerk confided to me the other day that one customer referred to the disembodied voice as an evil (I can’t print it here…use your imagination.)

The best part of self-checkout is that it guarantees job security...for store employees. I’m sure they were initially fearful that these electronic cashiers would replace warm bodies one by one. No need to worry. As long as there are folks like me who are masochistic enough to use self-checkout, there will be a need for clerks to change our blinking red lights back to green.
You're welcome.