: Sat Feb 28, 2009 11:09 am
Slef Service Checkouts are the spawn of evil and frankly, we (the public) are merely going through the testing process for them that they should have gone through before being let loose on the population.
You can't scan things too quickly and especially in the case of the Morrisons ones, the distance between the scanner is too far from the bags meaning that the infernal machine starts to kick off because you haven't got your stuff in to the carrier quick enough.
They also don't have the intelligence to understand that you might be buying enough gear to fill a second carrier, so you have to get the first carrier off before you can fill the second one. However, the machine works on weight and it knows how heavy your items are, thus complains if it can't feel what you've bought because you've taken the damm first bag off in order to fill the second one.
There's usually a member of staff who'd drawn a short draw of being there and is either rushed off her feet dealing with 4 problems at once or is chatting to her mate .... Either way, when you get the inevitable 'supervisor assistance required' warning you'll still have to wait around longer than if you'd have actually got in one of the queues to have your stuff run through the checkouts. You went to the self-service ones trying to delude yourself that it will be 'different this time' and they'll have got it right, only to fall in to the same old trap and see people who should have been well behind you in the getting-out-of-the-store stakes sailing past because the technology involved with self-service-checkouts is frankly cr*p and merely an excuse for supermarkets to lay off a few more highly paid check-out staff.
Don't get me on about their habitual failure to recognise BOGOFs or dented tins too, will you ....
