baking potatoes!

I love self-checkout and use it whenever possible. Like the ability to swipe your own credit card, it's a flawed step in the right direction. Self-checkout is not always quicker because you have to follow its rules. You have to answer questions. It frequently forces you to wait on scanning the next item. Sometimes it makes you wait until you've placed the last scanned item in a bag, relying on a scale underneath the bagging area. What if I don't need a bag? Go back and buy more groceries, the scanner thinks. I don't understand the requirement of putting one thing down before scanning another. Do they think you're stealing if you scan something and then don't put it down? Do they have a database in there of how much something should weigh, such that if you scan a bag of spinach and bag a steak, alarms go off?

Harris Teeter has the worst self-checkout. It asks you twice to scan your VIC (Very Important Customer, gag me) card. Then, when you've committed to paying, it asks you if you have any coupon or items on the bottom of your cart. These are two separate questions, and two separate screens, two separate times when you have to hit a button while you're fumbling for your credit card. I suppose the first one is to be helpful to the customer, but I'd rather be in charge of remembering my own coupons and skip this step. The second step is to keep you from inadvertantly stealing, because they know you're not going to come back and breathlessly explain how you accidentally stole that bag of Purina One, here's $20, now say three Hail Marys.

Food Lion, my regular grocery store, has only a slightly better system. They don't ask you a lot of questions. However, they send your groceries down a belt, where they accumulate at the end. There are sensors on the belt, so that if the bagging area gets full, you won't be allowed to scan any more groceries. The trouble is that self-checkout has replaced staff, and so there's never anyone to bag your groceries for you. You're expected to scan a few items, then go bag them, then scan some more, then bag those. This is not efficiency. At least at Harris Teeter, where bagging is enforced, you can bag as you go because the bagging area is next to you instead of five feet down a belt. Wal-Mart has a spinning bagger, which allows you to put more items in more bags. However, once the scale was broken, and so I had to do a manual override after every item because it thought I wasn't bagging. After every five items or so, a manager had to come over and say it was okay for me to do all these overrides.

The best part of self-checkout for me is the Voice. She's very friendly and upbeat, and always welcomes me as a MVP customer. I like ringing up produce the best because of the way they've programmed the voice to insert the name of your item. They recorded a woman saying the phrases "please move your" and "to the belt." Then they recorded all the possible fruits and vegetables with the same woman, but of course it's really obvious that the phrases are cut and paste together. "Please move your. Baking potatoes! To the belt." I am unable to keep myself from mimicking the Voice. I wish that I had that job. I think I would be good at it, bringing a whole new level of excitement to phrases like "hot house tomatoes," "your total is," and "arugula."

I complain about the self-checkout problem, but I don't know how to solve it. I like the bagging area to be next to me, but I don't like being forced to use it. And I want to scan things as fast as I'm able. I don't want the scanner to ask me about coupons or my discount card or items under my cart. I don't want to have to swipe my card at one place, then move over and sign my name somewhere else. However, I don't have any complaints about the Voice. She's fine by me and can ask me to move my Baking potatoes! any time she wants.