THEY FORCE ME DO THEIR WORK, BUT DON'T TRUST ME

If I'm doing your job, then let me do it . . .

Barbara has been under the weather and not eaten solid food for two days. At her request, I ran to the store for 4 cups of Noosa vanilla bean yogurt. Only two regular cashier lines were open and they were backed up with people with full baskets. Under time constraints, I went to the self checkout zone, a place I would have otherwise avoided. Even there I had to wait in a short line.

 

To save time, I used one of the containers in my left hand and scanned it several times, using my right hand to toss another one directly into the sack with each scanner beep. At that point, the normal screen was replaced by a large box that said “WAIT FOR ATTENDANT!“

 

When the attendant arrived, I explained that I was scanning my four yogurts when the system interrupted me with the message. She said I was putting things into the sack without scanning them, so the system flagged me in the middle of the checkout.

 

She then used her badge and called up a video on the screen that was from a camera vertically above me, showing me scanning one cup multiple times while tossing each directly into the sack from the basket. When she returned to the normal screen, it confirmed that I had scanned the barcode for all the items, but somehow I still felt as if I had done something wrong. I told her I’d seen the regular, human check out people do this themselves with no problem. She said it’s OK for them to do it, but not for me, a self check out customer.

 

I asked her to replay the video so I could take a picture of it with my camera, but she declined. She also would not tell me if the cameras were monitored by a human or by software. 

 

It was all interesting, but left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

Live and Learn . . .

 

 Self-service checkout I had to use by forced inconvenience

 

 

 Four identical yoghurts, my only purchase.

 

"Big Brother" in the ceiling over the self-checkout lanes