Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

The other day I was interested to read that, at least in the U.S., self-checkout machines may actually get less common in stores.

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth...

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

I am glad to hear that a mix of human and machines is likely to remain available at checkout because I know some of the customers who not only don't hate it but prefer it: Andrew was always delighted when he could get through a trip to Asda without having to interact with another person at all. The touchscreens and practically-hidden bar code scanners on those self-checkout machines mean I avoid them whenever possible, but the best accessibility comes from having options, because whatever's a nightmare for one person is going to be essential for another.

Almost as soon as I'd read this, I was reading takes on how this phenomenon could apply in other areas. Of course I was thinking about accessibility; people who work in tech were thinking about tech.

Some of those takes overlap; like number one here is "The user is always inexperienced." People who just buy groceries have never scanned groceries as much as someone who's done that job. Also, independence is a myth. They word it differently; this is how I am wording it because some disabled people and groups speaking for them emphasize "independence" and it drives me up a wall, because none of us are independent.

If you scan an item twice, select the wrong payment method, accidentally get charged for a bag when you brought your own, forget to scan your discount card at the right time, or make any other trivial mistake, you are now at the mercy of someone else. When a problem does occur, a staff member has to notice it, come to your aid, figure out what happened, and correct it. You were promised self-service when, in fact, you are so disempowered that you can't troubleshoot or correct a single thing that might go wrong.

This makes me think about the campaigning against closing almost all the train station ticket offices in England. Apart from all the ways those machines are inaccessible, machines contribute to the unnecessary expense of train fares, already a particularly complex racket that is expensive at the best of times and ensures people pay too much when they buy the tickets themselves. You have to be an expert to understand how to buy appropriate, never mind cheapest, fares, sometimes even making an journey regularly doesn't leave people confident in their ability to get the best price and not get treated like an illegal immigrant by the train guards.

The particular disempowerment of waiting for someone who looks sixteen to determine that I'm old enough to buy ibuprofen is something that occurred to me recently. The need for humans to intervene every time the machine thinks you've scanned an item twice when you haven't, doesn't think you've put it in the bagging area when you have, and vice versa means the few staff who are employed expect to be called over for false positives as much as any actual needs. I've been age-verified by people who didn't even seem to glance at me. Trying to split the checkout tasks into those that can be done by shoppers and those that must be done by staff hasn't really proven to be very effective or fun for either group, in tasks that mostly weren't all that fun to begin with at least there's a smooth process when the person who's processing the rest of my groceries is also making one extra gesture when they get to the beer.