Self-service grocery checkouts.

Story in yesterday's NY Times about self-serve checkouts in grocery stores. Kind of interesting to me that it's only now that the Times is getting around to covering them, as I first saw them in grocery stores in Durham almost 4 years ago. One explanation is that the checkout units are sufficiently expensive that it takes a larger grocery store to justify the purchase, and that many groceries in NYC are too small.

They make sense to me: one grocery clerk can man the station that oversees the four self-service registers, and can often find the time to help bag on the adjacent full-service aisle. And they're as convenient as pay-at-the-pump gasoline pumps. Sure, it takes longer for me to ring through my own groceries than it would in the full-service aisle - but I don't have to wait in that line behind 3 other shoppers before I can start.

The only consistent problem I had with the self-service checkout lines here in Richmond was that the bill-recognition circuitry didn't recognize the new rainbow-colored twenties when they first appeared last fall - but they got that sorted out after a couple of months. So now they accept the multi-color bills just like they were real money.

So now the only problem that keeps popping up is the shopper who is incapable of using the self-serve checkout lines but ends up there anyway. It's fairly infuriating to be waiting for one of the units to open up, and they can't figure out how to slide a box in front of the bar-code scanner or to put their ten-dollar bill into the slot clearly marked "Put Bills Here."