Self checkouts

love them or loathe them?

Let’s go to Walmart, suggest the boys after supper; we need school supplies.

I’m jetlagged and ready for bed. I’m also a doting grandmother. And my daughter and her husband are away. I’m on granny duty.

We go.

After what seems like hours of deliberation, choices are made and we head to the one checkout with a real live person. There’s a line of very full shopping carts ahead of us. (NB. I’m in the USA in case you hadn’t guessed, so using my limited grasp of the American language, which has some similarities with English. But it’s American, not English.**)

Let’s go to the self-checkouts, suggest the boys after a while. I’m jetlagged and ready for bed. I’m also a doting grandmother so despite my loathing of self checkouts, we go.

Image: istock

Toby is paying for his own haul, so quickly scans it all and pays with his card. Everything goes through smoothly and easily. The young are so good with machines.

Then it’s my turn. I scan – some things scan first time; others are rejected and I have to start again. One thing refuses to scan. The assistant is called; she takes forever to check in, re-set the machine and scan my item. Off we go again.

Eventually the total pings up with the dire warning: card only. No problem – I have Applepay on my phone with my Revolut card, and enough dollars in the account. For once, there is no panic; I can do this. Huge sigh of relief. This is not always the case for me with technology and devices.

Image: istock

Insert card, the machine shouts at me. I wave my phone frantically. I can’t, I wail. Where’s the scanner? The boys smile indulgently. You can’t always use that in the States, Jonah informs me. I grimace. These young countries.

The assistant is summoned again and we explain the situation. She can’t understand that I have no physical card and her amazement is tangible. She does something with her store card and leads us to another machine, which is cash only.

I begin to scan everything again, only to discover she’s somehow magically already added everything on to this new machine.  You don’t need to do that, Toby informs me, leaning across the machine to correct it, his pile of pens clutched in his arm. The clever machine detects one of his items and adds it again. We call the assistant, who is about to delete it for us when the machine decides to do a reset. Caution: all transactions halted. 

We have to wait for the reset to finish.

Put in your cash, instructs the assistant, and disappears with some relief. I need to pay $30.29 and fortunately have a twenty dollar bill, and ten and a one.  The ten disappears into the hungry machine. You owe twenty dollars twenty nine cents, the machine barks. Hang on – I’m trying to insert more bills, I shout, and feed its starving mouth with the twenty and the one.

The machine vomits them back at me and a red light above it begins to flash.  The assistant returns and we sense her reluctance to engage with us again. She feeds the bills into the machine which swallows them with delight and spits out the loose change. At last we are done and I take the lengthy receipt it offers me. 

At which point it spits out another smaller receipt and its red light flashes. A new assistant is instantly there and hastily calls me back and summons another person too. The second, smaller one is alarmed and flustered. You have to pay twenty dollars and twenty nine cents, she informs me. At least, I think that’s what she says, but she and I barely speak the same language and her heavily accented American and my Queen’s English (King’s now, I suppose)  don’t compute with one another.** Plus my hearing aids have decided to run out of charge and I’m hearing everything through a thick wall. It would have been easier to do a runner with my cart, I think. (see last photo below++)

Toby is laughing so much he has to turn away. This is why I don’t use self checkout, I inform him. Jonah is almost exploding with suppressed laughs. I explain slowly and carefully to the woman that I have already paid and the rejected bills had been accepted the next time.  The two women converse in rapid Spanish. OK, they say. You go. Is fine, and they wave me off.

The boys and I giggle and chuckle our way to the exit. On the way we pass the one manned check out. It’s empty. The line dispersed some time ago.

** Please know, if you didn’t already, that I love America, used to live there and have American grandsons. While every word of the above is true and happened on Tuesday, there are some tongue-in-cheek comments in the above.

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