Just Because We Can, Doesn't Always Mean We Should

Went grocery shopping today. Nothing strange in the act, do it every week, just not normally on Sunday with all the blue haired old ladies after church. You don't want to get between one of these ladies and the pot roast they are spying for Sunday dinner. Talk about competitive shopping! But that is a topic for another day.

One of the things that has been bothering me about the grocery store recently is the presence of the self-checkout lines. Even though I used one today, they really do get on my nerves. I know they are supposed to be there as a "convenience" to the customer (which it was today), but I normally take a different view about them.

I go to the grocery store and pay whatever is listed on the label because it is cheaper than shopping at a convenience store like 7-11. I know it is. However, I also know that part of the pricing of the food I am buying is to pay for the cashiers. When the people who dictate the pricing sit down to figure out what they can sell the hotdogs for, the price doesn't magically appear. They have to take into account what they pay for it wholesale, what it costs them to transport it to the store, stock it, and how much it costs to employ the cashiers to handle the customers. It's called overhead. The self-checkout lines help with the store's overhead since they can use one cashier to cover four or five registers. So, in real terms, by me checking myself out, and basically doing a job that I am paying them to do for me, I am saving the store money.

Now, I realize the amount of money I am talking about here on any given item is maybe a penny or two. Doesn't sound like much right? Well, if you figure that I buy 100 individual items on average, that one or two pennies is suddenly a buck or two. I know people who will drive half way back across town to get the coupons they left on the fridge in order to save a buck or two! And that for me is really the thing that gets me with the whole idea of self-checkout.

If the savings were being passed back to the customer (either by lower prices overall, or even a one cent per item discount on the bill for checking out yourself) I wouldn't have a problem. But as it is now, I am doing a job that I am already paying to have done for me. To make matters worse, stores have now figured out that with all the self-checkout lines, if they do NOT open the traditional lines, their customers are more willing to use the self-service lines rather than wait.

Now, I am a business man, and I completely understand the business idea behind it. But as a customer, I have to say that just because technology made it possible for the self-checkout to be possible, it doesn't necessarily mean that the store should do it. Whatever happened to the customer service aspect of the grocery store? We are still paying for it, but they aren't providing it. I felt like walking up to the manager and asking for a refund on my bill for doing their damn job!