There is a piece of justification that keeps being repeated in this thread and I want to challenge the logic of it. This is that self-service tills are inherently faster (often written as “more efficient”) for the customer.
I buy the idea that if you have a small — maybe (maybe!) medium-size — basket of goods, it may be inherently quicker to scan the items yourself. But if you take a step back, there’s no way it can inherently be faster to unpack, scan and repack an entire trolley of items yourself. It must logically be faster for two people working in parallel to do that lengthier task together. One is packing while the other is scanning. That just has to be faster.
I think there are a few things going on that feed the perception of the self-service tills being faster even for larger shopping lists. First, they engage the consumer in pressured and rapid work. The mere task of picking out items, scanning them and then packing them, all while feeling the pressure of the queue behind you, will create a sense of time moving quickly.
More importantly, though, shops provide loads of self-service tills and far too few employee-operated tills. The result is that you generally don’t have to queue long for a self-service but you do for an employee-operated. This cause of “inefficiency”, though, is a choice on the part of the supermarket. They are making you feel that using an employee-operated till contains queuing time, as compared with the self-service. You experience this queuing as frustration. Combine this also with the first point and you now compare time-feeling-slow while waiting for the employee-operated till, versus time-feeling-fast while using the self-service till. And thus you feel that the self-service tills are just inherently faster, even though they logically can’t be.
