2 weeks Ago By Emma Ayers
Frustrated shoppers are turning to TikTok and Reddit to vent about self-checkout machines, an everyday annoyance that has become a running joke on the internet. More than 20,000 #selfcheckout posts parody everything from the chaos of weighing bananas to the silent shame of scanning wine under a camera. One TikTok user called the experience “a scam to not pay people a living wage,” while a Reddit commenter wrote, “I didn’t come to the grocery store to work a part-time job.
Why am I scanning and bagging my own stuff like I’m on payroll?” Despite being marketed as efficient, the machines are notoriously glitchy — 67% of customers report failures when using them in a 2021 poll from Raydiant. Still, 85% “strongly believe that they are typically faster.” But that belief has always been more psychological than practical.
“It takes the consumer longer to do her own checkout,” said Kroger executive Donald F. Dufek told The Oklahoman in 1987, “but the individual perceives it is faster, because she’s doing it herself.” Employees aren’t thrilled, either.
“They’re not very intuitive,” a Fresh Thyme worker told HuffPost. “Even younger people, who have been around the whole time that self-checkouts have pretty much existed, still struggle with it.” The result can become a mess: errors, returns, abandoned transactions and a checkout process that often requires just as much staff intervention as before.
Workers also say they’re stretched thin, juggling their own registers while babysitting the kiosks. “Personally, as a worker, I do think the self-checkouts make things harder,” the Fresh Thyme employee said. “I’m running back and forth between the self-checkouts and the register.
” As one customer bluntly put it to HuffPost: “They’ll try to automate the whole thing. It sucks, and I hate it.” Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC.
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