This seems to be an implementation issue. In my neighbourhood discounter, in Germany, there’s three self-checkouts and while they’re a bit small they also don’t do any of that weighing and whatnot bullshit: You scan your stuff, pay, done. The only thing they can’t do is apply best-before rebates.
There’s also always a manned till open (or at the very least, when things are slow, a worker hanging out in the vicinity). In practice if the queue is empty you go there, if you have lots of stuff you go there (because it’s bound to be faster as you can focus on packing while things get scanned), otherwise you have the choice to use self-checkout. Never had to stand in line for self-checkout, before that happens they open another manned till. What the self-checkouts do is keep small purchases away from the manned tills when they’re busy which is exactly what they’re good for. I
If they cannot apply best before rebates then the store needs to change the system of applying them. One of our local chains uses orange stickers with new barcodes for best before discounts so the self checkout scans and accepts the new barcode with a lower price.
I’m sure they will at some point but it just doesn’t seem to be a priority. It’s not like they closed the manned tills, and the total number of items is quite low. Basically only applies to the packaged meat section and then maybe two handful of items a day, if you don’t shop in the morning you’ll probably never see a sticker.
My guess is that with other items they run an ordinary rebate well before the best before to get rid of stale stock but meat spoils too fast for that.
This seems to be an implementation issue. In my neighbourhood discounter, in Germany, there’s three self-checkouts and while they’re a bit small they also don’t do any of that weighing and whatnot bullshit: You scan your stuff, pay, done. The only thing they can’t do is apply best-before rebates.
There’s also always a manned till open (or at the very least, when things are slow, a worker hanging out in the vicinity). In practice if the queue is empty you go there, if you have lots of stuff you go there (because it’s bound to be faster as you can focus on packing while things get scanned), otherwise you have the choice to use self-checkout. Never had to stand in line for self-checkout, before that happens they open another manned till. What the self-checkouts do is keep small purchases away from the manned tills when they’re busy which is exactly what they’re good for. I
If they cannot apply best before rebates then the store needs to change the system of applying them. One of our local chains uses orange stickers with new barcodes for best before discounts so the self checkout scans and accepts the new barcode with a lower price.
I’m sure they will at some point but it just doesn’t seem to be a priority. It’s not like they closed the manned tills, and the total number of items is quite low. Basically only applies to the packaged meat section and then maybe two handful of items a day, if you don’t shop in the morning you’ll probably never see a sticker.
My guess is that with other items they run an ordinary rebate well before the best before to get rid of stale stock but meat spoils too fast for that.