Seriously? Most people in our wal*mart go through the self checkout. It’s been that way for the last 10 years or so. There are always a couple of cashiers open, but each entrance has 12 self-checkout machines, and a supervisor or two watching over them. It’s way faster than the cashier.
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Both the ones nearest me don’t have any, there’s one a couple of hours out which I went to once which did, but that was a huge one serving a massive rural area, so maybe gets large traffic spikes or something, I guess.
Same here, the walmart store has two pods with 8 self checkouts each, and one pod with 8 conveyor-belt self checkouts. Probably depends on the zip code though.
There is one person holding a tablet monitoring each pod. I think it communicates to the “loss prevention” person to decide who gets flagged if they suspect something.
The blonde guy who played Loki in “Supernatural”, and was in “Band Of Brothers” if I’m not mistaken, was in an ancient IBM (?) commercial, where he’s scooting around a store, grabbing food and sticking it into his pockets as Security Dewd is eyeballing him. Right as he’s making his way towards the exits, Security Dewd stops him, “Loki” rolls his eyes like he was just caught at something, and Security Dewd goes, “You forgot your receipt”, then “Loki” smirks and takes the receipt and walks out.
Think it was about the wonders of contactless technology letting you grab’n’run like that.
Wouldn’t surprise me if it were online somewhere…
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Goddamn, I’m good! 
Ah, Richard Speight Jr.
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I’m old school and I have a special hatred for self checkout-with a passion and that’s the polite version. The impolite version would get me permabanned.
The area store here has it and I figure I must carry a bad electromagnetic aura with me because the damn thing crashes every time I try to use it. I’m not a laid back person and lest I wind up in cuffs I get a real person to do it. Half the time and after a certain hour they don’t even have people.
Companies aren’t gonna be happy until they fire every last person. They’re gonna get their Skynet yet.
My wife has the patience but I sure’s hell don’t so I pass.
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Orwells 1984 here we come.
Just came back from CeeBeeEss, self-checkout.
Line for a hyu-mon was long, self-checkout only had the immediate person being rung out. “Cash Or Card”, so walked up, scanned my goodies, go through allllllllll the machinations of paying until it asks what method, and “Cash” is grayed out. Tf??
The gril comes over and says, “Yeah, it’s card only.”, so I point to the word “CASH” on the ginormous sign on top of the machine, red on white in all-caps, and just go “huh?”, and she says the cash part on both machines busted, so it’s card only.
Wellp, rather than go to the end of the loooong line and wait, I just fed it plastic.
I’m telling ya, in The War With The Machines, they’ll win without firing a single shot, as they’ll just annoy us to death.
Since Covid a few shops have stopped taking cash here, we are potentially heading to a deep dark place if we go cashless.
A few weeks back we had a major telco outage the network was down for 12+ hours, they where begging for cash then.
Serves 'em right.
Yeah, cash is inconvenient, but it works as a backup,. why I always carry some, but I don’t use it if I can avoid it, because cash doesn’t come with credit card rewards or consumer protection laws.
In terms of self checkouts, the big problem is that the companies that operate them don’t pay for maintenance, when they fail. Also, a lot of the time, they chose to disable cash handling in the machines, because cash handling is expensive for the company, and card processing is cheaper.
I almost never use cash for any face-to-face purchases. Exceptions are places like the farmers market, a garage sale type of purchase, or maybe if I can save more than 2% if I use cash instead of a credit card (there used to be a few gas stations that offered that). I carry cash for just-in-case, but it seldom leaves my wallet. As wolfgirl42 stated, there are advantages to using a credit card with rewards (cash back for us) and consumer protection laws.
Yeah, the main thing I use cash for these days short of emergencies or cash-only bars is tradespeople - they often give a discount if you pay cash. I assume it’s tax but not my place to say… 
Depends. 2 service stations I had some car-work done, I’d get the bill and ask almost as a joke, “Haha, any discount for paying cash?”, and they’d be all like, “Umm, yeah, okay, ‘no tax’.”, which in reality is, they still pay the tax but give you about a 10% break.
This 3rd place, I did that, and he was, “Awww, no, I can’t…”, and I’m all like, “Oh, no worries, I gotcha…”, and pulled out some plastic.
They want to take plastic, let them pay the… what is it? a 4% vig? more?.. rather than have the extra %age in their pockets.
Cash is anonymity. Can’t complain when it’s gone if you don’t exercise it as much as possible now. You think targeted ads is bad when you go online? Wait 'til some industry snoops hike your insurance rates because you buy “too much” fast-food or junk-food, etc.
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My primary complaint about self-checkout is their inherently bad workflow design.
- The stations with inflow belts had a short lifespan in the marketplace and were replaced with awkward tables that just get in the way of positioning the cart adjacent to the scanner; outflow has always been worse than an actual checkstand with the all-too-small bagging table that won’t handle a single cart’s worth of purchases
- UI design is bad: slow, weird errors, no ability to remove items from the ticket, infuriating delays trying to look up PLUs or type anything onscreen. Mercifully most places have stopped trying to weight items on the outflow table.
Cash acceptance on these things has always been dicey, which is not terribly surprising as cash-handling mechanisms are pricey things - they’re far and away the most expensive components within the average low-security ATM at the local kwik-e-mart. As such whenever I want to pay with cash or have any sort of complex purchase I prefer to transact with a cashier.
That information is out there today and has been for decades in various forms. Retailers and payment processors alike are all to happy to extract secondary revenue streams from transaction data. Sure the SKUs might be withheld and there’s some handwave privacy policy in place about identifying specific individuals (as opposed to blocks of subscribers by zipcode or demographic factors), but ultimately one can buy lists of names, addresses, retailer(s) frequented, etc easily enough.
All this is - and has been - available in aggregate to insurers looking to raise rates because you frequent Arby’s, a speed shop, or the local outdoor kitchen fittings supplier. Or for that matter to anyone willing to sign the typically weaksauce bounds of the data-sharing agreements for presumably commercial or fundraising purposes.
Some other fun stuff going on:
- Passive Bluetooth scanning that can determine what aisle you’re in at a given store via triangulation - only requires the bluetooth transceiver to be active. This can associate you with purchases easily enough. Using a retailer’s app surely whispers BT MAC addresses so as to further enhance the tracking.
- Full on active IMSI catchers might still be within the realm of grey area warrantless police surveillance but a good possibility someone’s found a means to passively monitor cell phones themselves ala bluetooth scanning
- Facial recognition tech might not quite be CSI:Midland-Odessa good but it’s probably sufficient to ID you as wander about the local megalomart as Amazon Go demonstrated in 2016 with scanner- and RFID-less ‘cart’ processing. I’d be less than shocked to learn that big retailers are doing some form of realtime walk-in/walk-out tallying using cameras on a store- or department-wide basis, as these sort of capabilities have been on the market for decades.
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You don’t have to pay the vig for using your card some places?
Our local car garage (Which is excellent and fair) charges like 2.65% if using plastic. They have it well marked and will gladly take check or cash but they are covering their costs and believe this came in 2013 but may vary by state.
PA allowed it about 2 years ago.
Doesn’t really matter, they bake in the cost whether they charge or not in some fashion.
Worked for a very early Computer mail order in 1987 and we whacked 3% shipping fee for MC/Visa and 6% for Amex and Diners club.
That’s some BS when you pay $30 shipping to get a Video card or software that cost $500 but most times the guys with Amex didn’t care, wrote it off as business expense I guess.
Aware of it and take countermeasures for all of them as appropriate, but ultimately I have more shit to deal with in my life at levels above “when I buy food” as there’s nothing meaningful there that couldn’t be found more easily with less money. I remain cognizant of what my card spending patterns say about me, and there are reasons I carry cash too even if I avoid using it for trivial day to day stuff (if nothing else, a pain to restock, especially since if you just go to an ATM, there are cameras everywhere, your card number is obviously logged with the amount, there’s ANPR if it’s a drive though, and even the actual serial numbers of the notes dispensed may potentially be logged; cash isn’t as secure or private as many libertarian types believe unless you’re trading Monero for it in an in-person deal), but for me it’s more important I know how to move under surveillance when necessary than to do it with things like basic shopping habits, whuich just costs me time, money, and mental energy to do. Arguably something said from moderate privilege, but somewhat offset by being a highly marginalised demographic.
Anyway, it’s more important to appear normal so anything you do that isn’t isn’t noted, than to be concealing every single movement and transaction, which comes up as a bigger flag to any mass surveillance system.
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Other than gas stations which pretty much universally have separate cash/credit prices, that kind of thing’s almost unheard of here.
When CCs got mainstream and places were charging extra to make up for the vig, some smoothbrains passed a law that “Thou shalt not charge higher for credit than cash, lest ye be smited.”.
The solution was to simply offer “cash discounts”, and publish cash prices with little blurbs saying “prices reflect cash discount”. 6 of 1…
When people started pushing plastic anyway and CCs became ubiquitous anyway, they pretty much stopped that, as it wasn’t worth getting arsed over 2 different rates at the register, and they didn’t want to lose business from plastic-pushers.
So yeah, they baked in the vig into the total price, and you gotta ask for a cash discount at places like that. But supermarkets, box stores, etc., where you generally don’t have the option to “haggle”, that just doesn’t happen.
At the very same CeeBeeEss, after I paid up front and was walking to the back to get to the parking lot, several places along the aisle, as I was passing there was a “ding!” probably from one of those advertising tablets (didn’t look closely), and in just those few seconds it got so annoying that at the last “ding!” I turned and just gave “it” the finger in “its” general direction.
And years’n’years ago, for the first time ever I went into a GameStop at lunch with some cow-orkers. They wanted to go, I couldn’t give 2 shiites. Literally never ever got spam from GS ever before (or from anyone, for that matter), but the next day I get a spam text-message from — you guessed it! — GameStop.
I normally just kept/keep my phones turned off when I’m not actively using them, so that was never an issue. That time, for whatever reason, maybe I was expecting a call, dunno, but that time only, I left my phone on and in my pocket.
Coincidence? Riiiiiiight.
And I was just talking with someone about labels. There was an ep of “Firefly” where River kinda had a fit and ripped a bunch of labels off some cans, and Shepherd quipped that they’ll just have some “mystery meals” for a few days. I mentioned to someone that all they had to do to narrow down the choices would be to match the big labels to big cans, small labels to small cans, etc., and maybe recreate what was what.
Just poking through amazon to see if there’s any shipping updates yet, and on one of the “selected for you” horizontal-scrolling thingies is… labels. You know, the blank rectangular labels you print addresses on? Nothing but that!
I was like, “wtf?!? I wasn’t browsing any labels or anything, so how…?”, and then it dawned on me about the labels conversation.
Now that’s just downright creepy. It’s like phones are surveillance devices listening in on your every word. Wait, did I use the word “like”? No, they ARE that, apparently.
Oh, right. Megalomart possibly running that on their outdoor surveillance cams - perhaps cashing in on live action vehicle repo as there’s a nice finder’s fee for making a referral that results in a successful recovery (a friend works in automotive finance, says he’s seen the process take less than ten minutes, and it’s always at walmart - albeit using independent camera cars).
Unless one is truly destitute, the idea that one can live in modern society truly anonymously is borderline folly. Commercial interests are powerfully interested in profiling you for hucksterism, but said data is naturally useful for other purposes.
There are days when I wonder if I will be forced to use phone apps, seeing how the incentives to move customers to apps that claim respect your privacy until you finally unearth the actual usage in §37.Q.XVII.178.a.ix of the >20k word EULA is greater than building a functional mobile website.
I recall that the pitch to one of the last holdout industries - fast food - was that customers spend more with plastic than cash, thus the transaction fee was easier to swallow.
Voice assistants are doing cr_p like that all the time. Mobile - and possibly desktop - Chrome allegedly sends the contents of the clipboard to Google. Unsubmitted forms often whisper their contents anyway. Search for anything anywhere of note and you’ll see banner ads for weeks relaying likely matches; it’s fkn hilarious when I search for the likes of micro toggle hasp on the 'Zon and see Temu, Ali, Wish, et al that just so happen to have such wares that might be of interest to me.
As if Android wasn’t bad enough at this I gather there are some things coming down the pike that will bake the tracking into the OS.
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