That’s one of the reasons I use my card at the self-serve, it is so easy to be distracted by taking your items, organising shopping bags, etc,. to just walk away. A few times I nearly forgot to take my change too.
It also seems that the machine wants to get rid of all the small change in it, and I didn’t like the amount of coins I had to pick up!
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Change? I thought they just rounded up to the nearest $50 note!
I’ve used both card and cash. As much as I dislike them if I have only one or two items I have a go. Card is simpler, but there are as @backflip observed others who use the service to withdraw cash at the same time.
The whole experience of being packed in tight, no conveyor for the shopping to be placed on, bending to reach the shopping and the bagging side, no real room when you bring in two trolleys to handle a big shop or needing to put the bags on the floor, etc etc. it is hardly surprising that those of us who feel pressure in such circumstances make mistakes, including walking away without our cash, or our receipt or our card which we put down to move a bag rather than holding everyone up while putting it back in our purse or wallet.
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I bought a 10kg bag of rice last week which was on special at the local Woollies (need some rice and our usual rice shop was too far away to make a special trip).
I decided to use the self serve checkout and placed the bag into the weighed packaging area. The register came up asking if I was using my own bag…and then froze and the red light above the register came on.
The attendant came over and said that I shouldn’t have placed the rice into the bagging area as it was too heavy and I could have damaged the scales…she also said that when the rice was scanned, the light under the screen would have shown red indicating that it was not to be placed in the bagging area (she said that it would have been green if it was allowed to be placed there). This was news to me and I suggested that they make it clear what the lights mean or the register screen should flash up a warning not to place in the bagging area.
I felt like a 5 year old who had just been rapped over the knuckles for doing something wrong…even though I didn’t know I was.
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In this case there should be clear warning
at the scanners, not just red or green lights.
Also, the scale couldn’t cope with 10Kg,
because it was all at once? How does it
cope with 10x1Kg items?
You did nothing wrong @phb🙂
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In both supermarkets if the light above the scanner is red it means you can’t scan. if the light is green you can scan and take items of the bag scales. When it comes to heavy and bulky items in Woolies it’s a case of looking at the orange text under the scanned item. If it needs to be placed in the bagging area orange text will show up saying bag item. If it doesn’t need to be placed there nothing will appear under it. As a general rule of thumb anything heavier than 8 kgs doesn’t need to go on there - same as on a manned checkout. The heavy items are also listed under the heavy items buttons so there is no need to scan them. Many bulky items like large packs of toilet paper, nappies or bunches/pots of flowers also don’t need to be placed on the scales.
It does happen with people’s change, but mostly happens when people withdraw cash like they do at atms. Sometimes people who are only getting cash put without buying anything will walk away without it.
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Amazing!! And I have been flying blind
all this time😉
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Coles has no such limit on the bagging area scales as they don’t have a problem with a 30 can carton of soft drink which weighs over 11kg.
However, if one chooses the Heavy & Bulky Items sub-menu and places the item in the bagging area, it will say to remove the last item.
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The system is a fail if you have to take doctoral studies to understand all the cans and can’ts. item placement, which part of the screen you need to watch, what the lights are doing and what they mean, check for change, use only the right machine if using cash, need operator assistance a lot of the time, and finally the theft risk. On top of all that there is the lessening of employment opportunities as only 1 staff member is required to oversee many machines…
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It’s great to see some advice from another Choice member who knows the ropes! It will certainly help some.
Truely, if the supermarkets would appreciate me doing the job of the regular check out staff, and to learn how to do their job, should I get a discount for doing it?
It seems fair and reasonable. If only the supermarket will let me log into their online training and assessment program, all will be well!
Actually I doubt it. There are enough other new things to learn that do pay?
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A bit off topic…
I was one of those “young males” back in the mid 70s. My second job, (first job was selling Sunday Times papers in Perth CBD at midnight hours) I was 12 yrs old. I was the best and fastest supermarket packer boy in Perth 
I remember vividly the challenge of looking at and analyzing a customers’ trolley as they approached the till lady to see which items needed to be boxed, which needed to be bagged (in brown paper bags) and then handling all of it with a minimum of fuss and a cheery attitude. Always offered to take groceries out to cars and sometimes even to near by homes when needed.
While working there I also remember the introduction of plastic bags. Very rare and expensive and only to be used for cold/wet items. Previously we used to wrap cold/wet items in newspaper before packing. It was a Sat morn 8 hour shift at Foodland. For two years I got paid $3.50 for the eight hours and remember now looking back, feeling good that I was the only one of my siblings who didn’t need pocket money from my single Mum.
Thanks to this post and all here for prompting this memory. Happy, simpler days
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Appalling.
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Oh, great! One more step toward “cashless”. If they offer a good enough discount, I might give it a try.
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I think it is a great idea.
I always use the self service checkouts, but the limited space to place your scanned items, it can be annoying, as can trying to place packed bags back into the still half full trolley.
This most certainly simplifies things as sone can fully unload the trolley, scan products in groups so that the cold items go in the cold bags, cans and bottles go together, fruit & veg likewise, etc, and easily place the packed bags back into the now empty trolley.
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I support jobs beyond those ICT/POS/mechanical geniuses who design and sell self service anything. Even if I have a single item I’ll usually wait a minute for a human rather than do it myself and possibly cost a job.
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Exactly @PhilT, if we want people to be employed we have to have the jobs to employ them. If we want self service then we must acknowledge that we support removal of jobs for those who can’t reach the standards for the new tech job markets. I will stand in line for a checkout operator no matter the time it takes. The times have increased because they have removed the staff from the checkouts and so more go through self checkouts thus creating a loop of decreasing checkout operators, spiralling towards 1.
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Not that I wished for the conveyor, it seems what ever it takes Woolies intends to retrain us all.
I know I’ll never match any operator for speed and accuracy. Add extra time to self check and carefully repack to perfection. It would be a long wait if you follow my shop, assuming there is no better option.
Next step, order online from the centralised robotic super-warehouse. Woolies staff pushing trolleys around for pick up orders is likely just a brief apparition to get us into delegating the task.
It all seems so wrong taking jobs away that will not be replaced elsewhere In the economy. Under employment and unemployment are both on negative trends. I’ll leave the next step in that discussion, and economic dependence on intrinsic growth and inflation for another topic. What end does this all serve?
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The main thing that concerns me about the ‘Scan&Go’ is privacy. With very few permissions the app could figure out things like customer’s paths through the store, spending habits, shelf height preferences and attach a lot of unique identifiers to suggest products as they shop.
Sure this can make things convenient, but as usual there probably wont be a way for users to ‘opt-out.’ Plus how long before Scan&Go only offers that punish elderly customers or those who don’t own a recent smartphone?
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They probably track most users of Smartphones already through the Store particularly if the user has Wifi enabled.
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So the option now to use your mobile instead of your Woolies rewards card will close the loop quite neatly?
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The real message is ‘We own you!’
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