Self Service Is The Scourge Of Grocery Shopping
My wife and I shop at Loblaws' Atlantic Superstore in Nova Scotia. As older shoppers we appreciate good service along with good products and pricing, but the service end of the deal has been diminishing steadily such that we are shopping elsewhere more and more as time passes. In the last couple of years our local Superstores have had their cashier desks removed, the ones where the bags hung next to the cashier and were loaded as she scanned them in, replaced by desks where the products are all moved to the end of the surface by where the shopper is standing. The intent is clearly to entice the shopper to pack his or her own bags while the cashier scans all the items in. We refuse to pack our own bags. The cashier has to stop scanning and pack the bags as the piles accrue, slowing down the whole process.
Lately some of the cashiers' positions have been replaced by self service checkouts. With fewer cashiers people are essentially pushed towards the self serve checkouts or wait in longer lines. The other day my wife was in a line of eight shoppers, each with a cart, waiting at the single open checkout. There was no quick checkout open. An assistant was at the self serve checkouts but nobody was using them. My wife asked why another checkout could not be opened. They brought the assistant from the self serve to open a checkout. The assistant staffing the customer service desk then had to go to the self serve checkout to help the one person who had appeared there. Nobody staffed the customer service desk.
This is all ludicrous. Good customer service is part and parcel of a good shopping experience. Weary people leading busy lives need to have this chore done as smoothly as possible for them. My beef is not that self service checkouts are made available but that the whole level of personal service is diminishing. Good service is included in the price of the products I am buying. If I am expected to use the self service checkouts, I should receive a discount of, say, 5% for doing so. Absent that, why would anyone choose self service other than to save time? More and more time saving is becoming available due to the deliberate diminishing of service at the regular checkouts. I have not me anyone yet who "prefers" the self service; many like us absolutely refuse to use them out of principle.
Am I alone in these frustrations?