What is your experience with self-serve kiosks?

Grocery stores in my area started using them about fifteen years ago. At first they balked a lot. “Attendant needed. Attendant needed.” I would put my stuff back in the car and go to the next machine or a human-tended line.

Today I use them. Whatever line looks shortest looks good to me, whether it’s a scanner or a person.

When our local Home Depot put in self-serve lines, i used the second day they were using them. Three Home Depot people were walking back and forth by the lines. I processed my items and go to swipe my credit card; The whole Point of Sale system dies; all the regular registers and self-serve, when i get through with the card swipe. They had to restart the entire system for all the cash registers and self-serve, i was laughing my head off.

I don’t know what happened but there were three very unhappy members of the Home Depot team.

They’re usually a pain in the ass.

What sort? You tagged restaurants, but I don’t think I’ve ever run into a restaurant self-serve kiosk.

I have used self-check-outs at grocery stores, but I recently had an annoying experience with one, and so I’ve stopped using them unless I have something really simple. They’ve been good when the human lines are really long and they work. But sometimes they can be quite annoying.

The annoying recent experience had me scanning maybe twenty items before the human attendant came over and told me it had actually been ignoring me because I scanned something with alcohol and it stopped paying attention to what I was scanning, even though it was still beeping and seeming like it was scanning stuff. I had to re-do the whole thing, and when I rolled my eyes at having to do that, the attendant acted like this made sense because “think if a child bought some alcohol!” as if that was a reason to have it ignore my scans of other groceries.

I don’t like them and try to avoid them. They take jobs away from people, often malfunction, and I’d rather talk to a human anyway.

I avoid them. I much prefer human contact.

I don’t use them in grocery stores, because they are usually not set up for easy use and easy bagging of my stuff.

Where I have seen them a lot and with little alternative is in airport snack stands, especially at Newark Liberty International, and at Chicago O’Hare. My reaction to them is mixed, because I feel I am paying too much to begin with.

I always use self-service at the gas station. I can only recall one time that there was a problem. At the grocery store, I will use self-service if I a small number of items and the lines are long.