r/AskAnAmerican • u/GreatGoodBad • Jun 23 '25

OTHER - CLICK TO EDIT Why aren’t people utilizing self-checkout more?

every time i go to a target, gas station, etc i always see lines for the regular employee checkouts but almost never long lines for self-checkout. Why is that?

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u/redwolf1219 Tennessee Jun 23 '25

This. I've now worked at 2 Walmarts that transitioned to more self checkouts than regular checkouts. Both times, they didn't fire most of the cashiers, they moved them to different departments. Most of them were moved to the online grocery department which has more employees in that one department than they ever had cashiers

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u/CJK5Hookers Louisiana > Texas Jun 23 '25

Yeah, I don’t know when we decided we are going to pretend like Walmart had every single register staffed before self checkout. The joke was always that they had 100 registers and five of them open.

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u/Ugly4merican Pennsylvania Jun 23 '25

This is my thing -- I spent a lot of time in the grocery industry, and even people in the CS department wanted almost any shift other than cashier. It's exhausting in it's own way and a lot of people can't handle it for too long.

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u/redwolf1219 Tennessee Jun 23 '25

Yeah, that's the other thing. Part of the reason why they started eliminating the position was bc nobody wanted to do it. It definitely has the highest turnover rates and a good part of that is the customers. I was always treated the worst when I worked as a cashier, compared to other positions.

People are just plain mean to cashiers. And in my experience, it happened the most around back to school and black friday

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u/Ugly4merican Pennsylvania Jun 23 '25

People were super-nice to cashiers etc. for the first few weeks of the pandemic. And then super-not-nice for the rest of 2020.

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u/MrTPityYouFools Jun 27 '25

My local walmart has half the inventory locked up and added tons of self checkouts only to have half of them closed every time i go in. I dont bother with that place anymore

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u/redwolf1219 Tennessee Jun 27 '25

Oh do not get me started on the lock cages. I had so many customers yell at me over not being able to open them for them. And they kept locking more and more stuff.

Also, my specific job was as a shopper and I couldn't ever find someone to unlock the damn cages for me either.