I don't think this is a conspiracy as much as it's what happens when you pay someone a minimum wage.. You said it yourself.. There's no bonus or wage increase to work faster, so why would they?

The thing about self checkout that bothers me is that I'm doing their job for them, so why don't I get a discount on my purchases? That's the real conspiracy here...

Do you go to Walmart for the exceptional customer service?

Would it really be a smart business model to force your customers that are grocery shopping for a family with a huge overflowing cart to stand and scan and pack up their groceries after spending all that energy picking them up in the first place? People don't want to do that shit, and the elderly and disabled can't.

I find people under 30 speed through most self-checkouts. I work faster than most, I'd rather it be done this way. I don't need interaction and I really hate having to watch someone drag ass about as much as I hate hearing people chew.

I haven't a fucking clue why my closest grocery store got rid of all eight of their machines. At least save one for the more competent.

As for the sake of the economy, there's more important work to be done than servicing people anyway. Retail is a waste of manpower.

I know that, and I'm glad self checkouts exist for this purpose. But all customers aren't 20-30 year olds with 15 items or less.

I prefer our education system get better before we start replacing all minimum wage workers with machines.

Well, whatever happens will be because it's the more profitable option. Self checkout means less employees. Next step = ??? Then, Profit!

The companies would likely implement a decent delivery service at that point.

I managed Walmart, not a 'conspiracy'.

All the 'disabled' type people become cashiers. The fast people stock shelves and do heavy lifting.

That's it.

Show up to a Walmart at 4am, and you'll see a lot of young and hard working older people lifting and putting up shit for 8 hours straight.

Go to the Cashiers and you'll see some happy people, but also a lot of lazy people who don't want to actually have to do work (or hard work).

Cashiers are smart though. If they move too fast, they become stockers / get put into more work (like government). They prefer the slowness, fake a disability, AND cashiering pays $3 more than working hard as a stocker, too.

Plausible! There's a problem. You know that the solution to the problem is what you want. If YOU fix the problem now, the people won't demand the change that you know will occur and want to occur. So you let the problem ride itself out. There's got to be a word for this. When you let a problem go because it will cause some to think a certain way. Like letting the anarchists burn stuff. Yeah it's bad. But let it happen and people will change their mind about them.

Kind of yes. Vicarious liability?

Why?

You're already in line to give them money.
You're unlikely to leave without giving them money.
A good cashier won't be getting MORE of your money either.

They do. Associates have a scanned items per minute score and the top ones usually receive incentives by managers. Customer Service Managers and our front end managers push and try to motivate the slower ones, but often they can't because a lot of workers are just tired, naturally slow, or other reasons that cause them to be slow. Plus, when you're being yelled at by 200 different customers a day because you put something in a bag that they don't want in a bag, or if they insist the price is wrong, and just get shit on by customers daily, it really makes it hard for you to be as fast as you can.

People buy more as they stand in line. Walmart loves only having one register open at night. Youre captive in the store until you check out, or you wasted your time going to the store. All the impulse buy items at the register, its all designed to have you spend more than you anticipated going in and not realizing it.

Ditto! Other than the occasional Internet purchase, I avoid self-serve shopping.

have to admit i love self checkout, though i do realize and am saddened that it will phase people out eventually. i just hate fucking talking to people and want to spare check out folks my sullen discomfort that always comes across as dickish impatience. plus there's never any lines.

however it's not all bad. i had to run out to home depot christmas eve afternoon and they only had 3 employees working. one overseeing the self check out and two other stand abouts. everyone else got christmas eve off. when's the last time home depot gave everyone but 3 people christmas eve off? bob cratchet did a jig in is fictional grave.

and the other night i ran into CVS for something pretty late (all i know is i ended up buying a stuffed kevin the minion that was by the checkout counter). the girl on duty just has to monitor the self checkout machines since she's there alone at night and its safer than having the cash in the register and she can walk around the store to check things out periodically, with leaving the register unguarded.

if the work week was in line with productivity, it would only be 11hrs long at max. so instead of paying one person to work 40 hours, 4 people could be paid to work 11 hours each, each getting the salary of a full time worker. this would be synergy with the self check out machines, like the CVS girl at night. the increase in payroll is more than offset by the gains from increased productivity.

the 40 hour work week was itself fought for by unions to give 2 people a job that used to be done by 1 in 80-100 work weeks. it was a tool to try to achieve full employment, which is the only true way for strikes to succeed and wages and work environments to rise. no scabs can cross the picket and break the strike if everyone's got a job.

I wouldn’t put effort either if I was making 8$. An hour

Minimum wage at Wal-Mart is 10 bucks.

Since when? I know someone who worked there recently and it was just a dollar above minimum wage, like 8.25/hr

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/18/news/companies/walmart-worker-pay-raise/index.html

This was decently big news when it broke. Not sure what the reality in the ground is, but there goal was to reduce turnover and the costs associated with it, which makes sense imo.

It depends what area you live in too. For example, I know a guy that works at McDs in a rural area and he makes $8/hr, now on the other hand I've seen them hiring for 10-11$/hr in more metropolitan areas

Exactly. It depends on location. The Walmart just down the street from me pays $9.25/hr. A friend of mine got hired 3 months ago, and is now making $12.25 (transferred to stocking), so there IS room for advancement, ya just gotta work for it. But, most of the cashiers here are indeed slow, so I can imagine the ones who don't show incentive won't be advancing anytime soon. On a side note, making $12.25/hr where I live is amazing since 99% of the other businesses only pay minimum wage, so unless you're a server at a restaurant, the best bet around these parts is Wally World.

14$/H Here in Ontario, Canada Walmarts

*Most people who make minimum wage choose to make minimum wage.

Some of us are still young working a minimum wage job

That is complete and utter horseshit.

Honestly, because you wouldn't go to self checkout if you had a cart full of groceries. So the time you save scanning a couple of items on your own, is your reward for self checkout.

"reward?" lol eat shit

but y

Fuck walmart, they should be paying cashiers to run single registers instead of dumping the work of 10 registers on one person and the customers.

they do make it easier to steal shit

These are totally braeburn apples and not honeycrisp!

The problem with that theory is that Walmart gives raises for people that work hard and promotes from within. I have several friends from high school that don't have college degrees that make OK money there.

You get the bonus of not having an awkward social interaction and standing in a shorter line. That's your discount ;)

Plus a paid self checkout employee is always on hand helping out all the customers who can't figure out how to do the cashier's job themselves (it's quite a large number).

I get the added bonus of not having the "guy" with orange hair and feces under his fungus-nails touch the food I wrangled from the filthy shelves.

Which is why I only go to walmart for non-food items, and only if I can't wait for amazon.

Walmart does not have enough billions - walmart is a shit-hole.

I just wonder how many customers go through one of these before the machine pays for itself every time I have to use one.

Probably not many, considering the volume that goes through Walmart every day in North America alone.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're "stacking the deck" a little bit in the way of hiring cashiers a bit more on the slow side.. but I see it as a double edged sword:

In the now, they're giving people that might not have the chance for gainful employment elsewhere. They offer a lot of jobs to the disabled, seniors, etc.

However they are gouging their low level, non-full time (mostly seniors, or the disabled) employees in many ways, this article goes in depth on the subject, but it's not quite on the subject of OP's submission. This article is interesting if you consider the volume of McDonalds that exist within Wal-Marts.. but i digress.. Maybe this is best left for a different post.

So, back to the point of OP's post. In the future.. we should see the demand for these Cashiers to go to nil sooner than later. I absolutely agree with the fact that installing these particular people, and giving them next to no incentives, is pushing the move. I have no doubt about it.

TLDR: There is a reason every member of the Walton family is a billionare, self checkouts are more than likely already paid for, so yeah, what rich asshole wouldn't want to cash in on a free employee robit.

I just wonder how many customers go through one of these before the machine pays for itself every time I have to use one.

Probably doesn't take long, considering the volume that goes through Walmart every day in North America alone.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're "stacking the deck" a little bit in the way of hiring cashiers a bit more on the slow side.. but I see it as a double edged sword:

In the now, they're giving people that might not have the chance for gainful employment elsewhere. They offer a lot of jobs to the disabled, seniors, etc.

However they are gouging their low level, non-full time (mostly seniors, or the disabled, huh!) employees in many ways, this article goes in depth on the subject, but it's not quite on the subject of OP's submission. This article is interesting if you consider the volume of McDonalds that exist within Wal-Marts.. but i digress.. Maybe this is best left for a different post.

So, back to the point of OP's post. In the future.. we should see the demand for these Cashiers to go to nil sooner than later. I absolutely agree with the fact that installing these particular people, and giving them next to no incentives, is pushing the move. I have no doubt about it.

TLDR: There is a reason every member of the Walton family is a billionare, self checkouts are more than likely already paid for by now, so yeah, what rich asshole wouldn't want to cash in on free employee robots!

When I was a cashier at Walmart about 12 years ago this was absolutely not the case.

We had to hit minimum items scanned per minute. We also had to greet each customer and have a salutation at the end of the transaction

Then again, this was one of the first 50 walmart stores in the country and our boss personally knew sam Walton when he was alive. It was actually a respectful and demanding job

Times have changed...

they have their own Amazon now too. Jet is owned by them if im not mistaken

Having less cashiers working and/or less checkout lanes open is their way to drive people towards using the self-checkout.

... it has been effective in driving me to use Amazon

saves wages.

the down side to self check-out is loss of jobs in any local community.

if you want wives and teens to have part time jobs then boycott self-checkout for normal cart sized purchases.

They don't even have self check out at the Walmart near my house, mostly because people steal so much at this one.

Used to work there, for maybe a year, and there was a shopping cart full of stuff stolen at least 3 times while I was there, not counting all the small things people take daily.

Employees stole as well, so yeah, no self checkout for my area, and it closes at 11:30 or something.

I'm not sure why all fast food places/grocery stores don't have machines mostly yet, are the machines still too expensive?

I'm not encouraging it, just surprised we still have people working.

Couple of years ago, I was a stocker, so there always was a sense of urgency, but if we finished our shit too fast we had to go help other departments, which would've been fine if they helped when we needed it but I don't think they did.

Can't speak on the cashiers, but I figure they assume they're getting them out as fast as they can, it doesn't seem difficult to scan the items as fast as possible without looking weird.

With the food industry it is simple. People would much rather order food from a person than a machine. Until this changes we won't see automated machines being the standard. While I can see some new businesses trying the model, the public backlash on a well established business trying. Might not be worth it. Maybe in conjunction with workers and self ordering to help offset rush hours would be a welcomed change. I'm not sure we need to use the technology to replace people, it could be used for efficiency in conjunction with people.

I like ordering from a person, but I guess I make bad assumptions about others sometimes, I feel like most others wouldn't care as long as they get what they ordered and fast, minus people there'd be less mistakes as well (I'd hope).

And it'd also start to make people aware that a lot of us are replaceable, that's going to be interesting to see when it does start to really roll out.

I agree.

It depends. From a nice restaurant yeah a waiter is nice. From any fast food place i would much rather order from my phone or a touch screen pad

This. If I'm going to Shula's Steakhouse, I prefer a person because they actually give me good service. At anything from McDonald's to Applebees I would greatly prefer to order on a tablet and just have the person bring my food out when it's ready.

And you're more likely to get your order correct. My favorite cheap place is Wendy's, but the one near my second job hires only Mexicans that don't speak English well enough to understand your order.

yeah, but that is for ordering. Do you also want machines to make the food too? I am asking, because some don't have a problem with it, others do. I don't perticularly have a problem with it, I don't eat fast food and if people embrace the idea cool I guess. I don't believe automation would over take the entire industry so go for it I guess. Just thinking it would be hard pressed for any established players to pull it off without major public backlash.

I'm not sure why, if I push a button for no ketchup, the robot isn't going to put ketchup on my food. I won't have to repeat myself multiple times. Machines are far more accurate than humans at just about anything they can do. The more people involved in a transaction, the higher the chance of something getting screwed up.

I'm not sure everyone wants to eat assemble lined fast food that is automated, it is already assemble lined in design. If a new business brings it into the public mind I think from there it could expand outward. But if a bigger more established player tries it the perception of the action will cause outrage. It might be properly embraced if being part of the original business model the business intends to use.

That is just the reality of the situation.

No conspiracy here. Wal-Mart just hires retards.

Nobody at a Walmart cares enough about their job to do it well. It's not some grand conspiracy.

Wal-Mart employees are driven by a scoring system throughout the whole store - clean, fast, and friendly. Wally world does a really shitty job of training managers and the managers are the folks who are supposed to encourage cashiers and other associates to be cleaner, faster, and friendlier. 9 times out of 10 the store is being run by managers and assistant managers who aren't interested in doing anything beyond the bare minimum, why would the associates under then do any different?

There's no conspiracy, Wal-Mart is just being run into the ground by their front line management team.

Current. Why do you think they closed so many express stores a while back? Piss poor management.

I do have to agree on management, there was maybe one upper guy I liked, actual store manager but idk if he did bare minimum, probably.

It was the guy in charge of the stickers (what I was) that didn't do much. He just liked having the little power he did. Guys still there too, it's been about 3-4 years now that I think about it. Hell, if it pays ok and he has benefits, I don't blame him. I'm not really in a better spot.

well i have Nothing But my personal experience to go by, but the cash registers at the Walmarts Ive been to in Cental CT are completely understaffed no matter what time of day or how busy.

if its 2am their will be 1 register open, 5 self checkouts open, and the cashier wont be at the register till you get there.

If its 2pm their will be maybe 3 or 4 registers open. All with lines of people snaking around the aisles and maybe 10 or so self checkouts open

You can blame that on how Walmart schedules people. It's called "Customer First" and without going into too much details, a computer makes a schedule. Not a manager.

It wouldn't surprise me if they lowered cashier metrics or reduced enforcement of them to encourage self checkout.

I do believe in an unrelated but similar kind of conspiracy regarding Microsoft Exchange server. Removing the Windows management application in favor of a reduced functionality web interface and required CLI configuration is an intentional change designed to make Exchange more difficult to manage, encouraging customers to buy into Office 365 subscriptions.

Apparently if the store loses enough money because of the self checkout scanners they decide to go back to having more cashiers. Honestly I'm not sure why one of my local grocery stores that is a chain decided to get rid of their self checkout machines. But I assume it is because enough people pretending to pay. The grocery store I visit has had a very high increase in traffic over the last year. Or two.

No. Retail sales are affected by local and governmental policy and costs such as min wage and the fluctuating price of other inputs such as energy, real estate, lease and loan costs, as well as insurance, liability, loss, and taxes. When these costs go up, without corresponding profits, you have inflation. And since Walmart is a public company, it receives more than 25 times its retail revenue from investment, so conceivably it can only care 1/25th about retail operations. So when the cost of living goes up, typically by poor governmental policy and increased taxes, retail operations are forced to squeeze budgets in order to justify to shareholders why 1/25th of the company is being disrupted. The reason Walmart employees are slow is because the cost of living is so high the Walmart employee probably has multiple jobs and can't be dedicated to all of them.

Hopefully you are human as you will become the cashier they are just getting rid of a pointless job. why hand someone your goods
when you can scan them yourself and save time, money, and energy.

No. I work at Walmart and it's simply because they're tired of doing the same thing over and over. Plus, they go slow on purpose sometimes if they're in a shit mood. No manager or Walmart is making them less productive on purpose.

Walmart is promoting self checkouts because soon most Walmarts will only have self checkouts. Mine that I work at is doing this next week. This is because you have have a lot more self checkouts than actual registers so there will be less lines.

It's def about the wage that they're paid and the pool of candidates that would work for a wage so low. Kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel. Happens at my job....who wants to do deliveries for $11/hr?? And I have to keep finding new employees.

i do not work at walmart, but frequnt them often, like everyday often.

slow or otherwise there are people who will not self check out, for whatever reason, they just won't. literally could be in line for ten minutes to get a human checkout when they could have just done it themselves and already been in their cars.

if you stop and watch the lines at walmart you will see the same thing, some just want a cashier.

They don’t have to make them be less productive, just pay them like shit.

Jerk dat dick.

Did they have someone check receipts at the door?

no theyre just losers

says the guy with no apostrophe...

are you fr

I bet if they had incentive based pat they would move a lot faster.

like if the cashier got a percentage of all the items they rung up

Think about this as well, at least in my area they almost always only have one or two registers open. No matter how busy they are but the self checkouts people are zipping through.

I’d suggest they are not.

They’ve taken steps to make lines more efficient by pooling shoppers into a single line serviced by multiple cashiers, rather than the old-fashioned and less efficient one line to one cashier.

If they wanted to frustrate the customer with long lines, they wouldn’t have done this.

As a cashier myself, it’s one of the worse soul sucking jobs in existence unless you’re a superior who isn’t doing it for 9 hours straight. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy to encourage self checkout, if anything they’re putting in more self checkouts to pay people less. A lot of cashiers don’t mean to be slow, especially when you have to bag groceries. Honestly, I think you may be overreacting to people just being slow at their job.

I have enough reasons to go self checkout anyway. Why deal with a person if I don't have to? Why wait in a longer line? I would prefer more self checkouts and less cashiers. What exactly is this conspiracy about? They are going to automate jobs as much as possible, they don't have to tell the cashiers to take their time to make machines more efficient.

As a former Walmart cashier (about a year and a half ago), no. They certainly don't give their cashiers a ton of training, but they're expecting most cashiers to be gone within two or three months anyways. Most people don't work there longer than they absolutely have to, so it's kind of a mutual understanding that low quality work is to be traded for low quality hours.

As for your point about low numbers of open registers, they're maximizing their profits. If they can get the same number of customers through three fewer cashiers, not only are they not having to pay those extras, they're also avoiding as much cashier down time as possible. Walmart is a middle man by design. The best way to make money as a middle man is by making sure you yourself have as few middle men as possible.

As someone who was a minimum wage cashier, this is a fantastic and funny post for a lot of raisins.

It’s less about encouraging self checkout and more to do with low morale and scheduling policies encouraging managers to only schedule the bare minimum as far cashiers go; there is a point where the amount of people who drop their merchandise and leave because they don’t want to wait in line starts to hurt sales more than the amount of money that chronically understaffing the front end/checkout lines saves in labor costs. As long as you don’t cross that threshold, it is worth it to only have 2 or 3 cashiers out of 12-20 possible lanes. Everyone who is buying someone is going to eventually check out anyways and so it doesn’t matter to management how quick pr slow they get through, as long as they pay.

As far as speed, those kinds of jobs are mind numbing, the pay is low, and the prospects are bleak— no one wants to be there and no one wants to ‘work quicker’ because they aren’t getting paid enough and even if they were it is still mentally exhausting, not something you can keep up all day.

Also OP it needs to be said, when you say passive aggressive things like “hasn’t your manager asked you to work quicker?” you are not going to get much faster service, you’re just going to make the cashier upset with you 9 times out of 10, lol

tl;dr the problem isn’t a conspiracy to usher in an age of automation, it’s Wal-mart’s policy of wasting your valuable time because it saves on labor costs

Interesting question, but I think the conspiracy starts below that. The continued expansion of self checkout machines in more and more stores and even in more and more industries is pretty obviously a conspiracy to employee less people. Not something I particularly want to support in this day and age of so many people being un or under-employed.

Their cashiers are indeed the worst. Shittiest service possible.

They don't need to ask the cashiers to work slow, they just need to put in fewer of them.

When there's one cashier-manned line open and 10 self-check lines open, it's pretty obvious that they're trying to get customers to use the self-check. Screw that. Stand in the cashier-check line anyway. If the line gets too long they'll know their ploy isn't working and will open another regular checkout line. At least they did the last time I was there.

I’ve got two Wal-Mart by me, one is exactly like you described, slow as shit. The employees are never around when you need em, and when they are, they are just fucking around, like the place has no leadership.

The other one, these motherfuckers scam shit so quick you’ve barely got it down and hey are swiping. These goofs are singing to each other and shit, it’s like the total opposite lol. Stores always clean, employees are usually pretty damn cool. But I’ve even seen there boss make rounds, ask customers questions etc.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, if it was, what would be the point? I’m not sure I understand it.

I think it’s just people being paid very little with no incentive to push, and that might be a management issue, because I’ve worked minimum positions that required diligence.

This is why we need to increase the minimum wage. Have to pay these sacks of crap more while they still do the minimum because they are getting paid the minimum. What a joke.

Read on Dead Peasant Insurance.

Corporations are hiring older and older people (see this at walmart) and then cashing in on life insurance policies they take out on their employees who should have long been retired but due to economic situations are forces to work

https://www.snopes.com/politics/business/deadpeasant.asp

As long as we're talking about Walmart, DAE feel dizzy or disoriented on some trips to the store? It feels to me like they put something in the HVAC or pulse the fluorescent lights with the intention of disorienting their customers.. "what did I come here for, again?"

In Australia the banks would make their service desks understaffed at lunch time when it was busiest to encourage people to use internet banking. People hated them for it.

Last few times I've gone to Wal-Mart, the self-checkout lines were 10-15 people deep while regular lanes were no a one or two person wait.

If you stop shopping at Walmart, it will annoy you a lot less.

This is exactly it! Same thing with the public freakout videos, where people throw tantrums about Walmarts receipt checks. Stop shopping there!

The bigger conspiracy here is just how dumb and useless the average minimum wage worker has become.

I think they employ less cashier's, which leads to longer line ups. Which causes users to use self-checkout.

I work in a movie theater and that's the plan going forward. Rather then have a multiple box-office cashier's have a single person to help run the self service machines.

not just Walmart, cashiers in general are slow and customer service is dead. I have had cashiers never speak a word to me, carry on a cell phone conversation or a conversation with a co-worker while half heartedly ringing me up and taking my money.

The key take your cart and push it as far away as possible from the cart corral. They can only terminate those jobs with our willful compliance. this is the world we live in

saves wages.

the down side to self check-out is loss of jobs in any local community.

if you want wives and teens to have part time jobs then boycott self-checkout for normal cart sized purchases.

I find people under 30 speed through most self-checkouts. I work faster than most, I'd rather it be done this way. I don't need interaction and I really hate having to watch someone drag ass about as much as I hate hearing people chew.

I haven't a fucking clue why my closest grocery store got rid of all eight of their machines. At least save one for the more competent.

As for the sake of the economy, there's more important work to be done than servicing people anyway. Retail is a waste of manpower.