I’m just wondering what the title asks: do you organize your groceries in the order you will check them out, if doing self-checkout, or arrange them on the belt/counter in a standard checkout line, in the hope that they’ll be bagged in a specific way?
I didn’t know there was any other way people do it, but just learned some people prefer to checkout/bag without pre-arranging things. I’m kind of curious to see what’s more common, or if there’s some other options I haven’t considered?
So is it customary to tip the person doing the bagging? Or maybe a designated bagger will do it faster, resulting in less wait times?
My favourite system is where I place my cart next to another one, and the cashier will scan everything while placing the item in the other cart, where I could have placed boxes if I wanted to.
But how does this person provide any value though? That person has to be paid as well, and doing something a customer can do well by themselves provides very little value. It used to be necessary, older petrol pumps had to be manually enabled or had no stop valve that person is required. With modern pumps having a person fill up your car is equally unnecessary.
When I was in South Africa, this wasn’t very common. I suppose you could tip them but there isn’t a very big tipping culture there.
Personally, I’ve never thought that having a designated bagger was that much faster (by themselves). Sometimes you’d see someone helping the bagger, this would be faster.
It’s not necessarily about the value they provide. Since unemployment is so high, if you can create extra jobs, the business will do it. When I left, unemployment in my province was at 50%.
It’s the same for self checkout. You could easily do it yourself but you’d lose out on potential jobs (bagger and cashier). This article is really good at showing why these systems are the way they are.
I always thought that such jobs would be best replaced with universal basic income. Maybe even not universal, and only for those who need it
There seems to be a recent initiative to introduce a universal income (read here & here) but it’s minimal.
This shows what you could get with the grant.