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Go to real a cashier if you want to buy fewer than seven items, apparently.
Kate Cox – Jan****************************, (4:) ************************************************** (UTC UTC) **************************
Trying to get the software to recognize that you cannot scan seven items when a fewer items have been purchased was, it turns out, a special kind of purgatory. She tried every kind of reset and override available to her, but no luck. The audit would not complete and resolve until she scanned seven items. No single item could be scanned multiple times, but she couldn’t exit or restart the transaction until resolving the audit. Basically, it launched into a failure loop where every attempt to resolve one error triggered the other error. We gave up on the audit, and she tried to scan my items at the register for purchase, but my rewards card could not be used on a transaction because there was an open, pending audit on my account.
The employee apologized profusely for the inconvenience. I assured her that I in no way blamed her for the system, nor the fact that it seemed to be designed by howler monkeys. In the end, she used the store card for my discounts; I paid for my food, thanked her, and went on my way with my salad and a plan to buy at least seven things the next time I went to the store. (A goal that was easy to achieve, as I bought a week’s worth of groceries for our family of four on Sunday — the open transaction eventually timed out.) Around and aroundThis is absolutely the lowest-stakes, most pointless, most entitled problem to have, I realize. But the software used to be more flexible — in years past, I faced audits where employees scanned three or five items from my cart. It’s unclear why the platform now demands seven and exactly seven items — no more, no fewer — regardless of the number of items in the customer’s order.Self-service, “frictionless checkout” is all the rage in retail right now. Late in 2020 **************************** Ahold launcheda completely frictionless store , in the vein ofAmazon Go. Walmart and other major retailers arealso consideringways to eliminate the bottleneck at the register by removing registers. A system like the one I encountered at Giant, though,increases friction — I now know that it would have taken me less time to wait in line behind the woman with the cart full of produce and la croix than it took me to go the supposedly easy route. In short: it seems there’s a long way to go before grocery stores and big-box stores can fully embrace a self-service future. (Read More) ************************
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