Pet Peeve #101

As I get older, I realize that I have more and more pet peeves. Some of them have been with me for a number of years, but others seem to crop up fresh.

Today's pet peeve is one that I think I have had in some form or another for a number of years, though it has been exacerbated by cell phones and online shopping.

Pet Peeve 101: Making it hard for customers to buy stuff that they want to buy.

I was at the supermarket the other day, and decided to use the self-checkout. The basic idea of the machine is fairly simple -- just scan each item and then pay when you are done. To the right of the machine is the "bagging station" where you can put your just scanned goods into a plastic bag.

Being environmentally conscious, I like to bring my own bags, so I put my bag on the ground.

It turns out that the "bagging station" is also a scale, and if the scale does not register the correct weight after you have scanned something, the machine gets angry with you. If the machine stays angry at you, it eventually calls a human over and you have to play the "let's scan everything again" game.

And, of course, the human takes their sweet time in getting to your station, making sure that they have finished chatting on their cell phone first.

Self-service machines can be seen as either a way to make commerce more efficient, a way to put checkout clerks out of a job, or both. After that experience, my take is that self-checkout machines are to shoppers as Microsoft Clippy was to authors.