I saw a post on Anandtech and I answered with this story. ..
I like the self-checkout since you only have to check out yourself not anyone else.
If you consider time saved depending on the regular lines versus checking yourself out that may be incentive enough.
Of course there are times like yesterday when my wife strolled into Albertson’s at a quarter till 7:00. She merrily went to shopping for the few quick items we needed to pickup for a meeting at 7:00, but when she goes to check out. The lines are outrageously long down the aisles and around the corner. . . What happened? . . .
(Well about 5 months ago Albertson’s decided to save some money) They installed 8 used self cashier stations they moved from the D/FW area. . . (The welcome screens had local info to the DFW metroplex untill a few weeks later) But yesterday something happened. . . guess what the self check out lanes called in sick! ha ha, well something technical happened and they were all broken at the same time. . . Genius. . .Well Albertson’s now had 2 cashiers to deal with an regular evening rush when they would have 6 to 8 cashiers before the automated checkouts were installed (sorry human cashiers) I guess they were moved to other positions or lost their jobs. . .
Long Story Short, my wife walked out without any of the snacks for the meeting our group had to go hungry last night and Albertson’s lost $10 to $15 sale. .. not much, but that was just us.
Our local Wal Mart’s don’t seem to function under this same assumption (Albertson’s Management used). . . I think all 16 of the Wal Mart Self Checking stations could be broken and they would still have plenty of cashiers. . . but they just opened 2 more SuperCenter’s so maybe that’s helped alleviate the rush of customers. . .
C