Self Checkout Stands, Beards, and Nose Rings

I’m a big fan of the self checkout lines at the grocery store because they usually have the shortest line. People who have lots of items in their shopping carts or are afraid of technology seem to stay away from this line. The self checkout counters also seem to be growing in popularity too. Two counters take up the space of one checkout aisle and one cashier can manage four checkout counters. So a win for me on saving time and a double win for the supermarket on adding more checkout counters+ saving on the number of employees.

Unfortunately, the advantages of the self checkout counters were absent when I visited Ikea today. The store only opened the self checkout lines so everyone had to check themselves out. Myself, and several other customers, grumbled about the fact that the line was ten deep when we entered it. Thankfully I chose the line without the mom with two kids but instead chose the line with the Japanese lady who didn’t speak english and grandma and grandpa who couldn’t find the credit card slider thing. This made for a mess and it took a very long and irritating 15 minutes for me to buy clothes hanger.

While standing in line, I had the following thoughts:

• What kind of numbers did the company that built these self checkout machines pull out of the air to sell all these stores on? Will I learn how to do that in bschool?
• Are the stores really saving that much money? Will the amount of money lost from people who “forgot” to pay for an item be less than the money they save on not having a cashier?
• What about the customer experience? Some people, I don’t know who, might like talking to the cashier or bagger.
• I wanted to pay with cash. I only had dollar bills. And they were crinkled.

My other rant for the day is about Costco. Over the years, I’ve noticed that if a man has a beard, he has to wear the shower cap on his face. This afternoon, I got the urge for a slice of pepperoni pizza this afternoon so I went down to Costco. The cashier was a man and he had a beard, earrings and a nose ring. As expected, the man was wearing a shower cap on his face. He also was wearing tape over his nose ring and he wasn’t wearing his earrings (saw the holes). The guy looked weird, as if he was a leper and was trying to cover it up with all that stuff.

It’s understandable that Costco wants us to enjoy hairless pizza and they don’t want to offend people who find nose rings offensive, but the cashier was just wacky looking. If the cashier is going to look that way, Costco might as well let the guy wear a ninja mask. He might still look wacky, but at least the mask will soak up his sweat instead of having the sweat fall on my pizza.

I wish some chinese restaurants would be half as sanitary as Costco’s food court. I’ll never be able to get the image of the chef @ Supreme Dragon smoking a cig and scratching his head while he cooked. Extra salt and pepper anyone? Yum!