This happened again this past Saturday morning, one of the busiest times of the week. There were maybe a dozen shopping carts waiting to get processed by the single solitary checkout person who, certainly by design, also did not have a bagger working with her. So, if the shopper did not pitch in to bag their own groceries, the clerk had to stop halfway through a customer to bag what she'd rung up so far.
So maybe half of us peeled off to go toward the four self-checkouts, which were originally supposed to be for people with limited numbers of items in their baskets. We were doing our full shopping so we had some 35 items, as did everyone else around us. So, every ten items we'd rung up, the light up top would start blinking and the message "Help is on the way" would pop up. Then the employee working that area would have to come over, scan her key credentials, and override the system so we could continue. She had to come do that for us four times. And she had to do the same for every other customer who brought their full week's shopping into the self checkout as well. She was very unhappy. As we were all.
This is how little Kroger et al cares about their customers, but I also wonder whether it's part of a larger movement afoot to get rid of all checkout clerks and literally force customers to always check out their own groceries so the clerks can all get fired. It happened with gas station pumpers four or so decades ago.
Is it all going to stop with grocery store checkout? I don't know, you tell me ... 😏