Maybe I'm weird, but I enjoy self checkout line. Picking up each item, looking for barcode, scanning it, and bagging, is kind of fun activity to do every once in awhile. The only lame part is, "please place the item in the bag" mechanism.
Switching bags, finding barcodes and placing the goods at right angle so it can be scanned, all of these makes me feel like being trained for unnecessary skills, it's repetitive and time consuming, thus incredibly annoying. Sometimes things went wrong, I had to ask for assistance (yeah, more interactions please.) I just stood there like I'm a 70-year-old man who isn't good at interacting with computers (well hello?), watching the assistant guy input the barcode number manually. After all that, I had to do the whole card payment process myself, while people stared at me waiting for free self checkout slot. Ugh!
> You should do that anyway to help out the cashier. It's common courtesy.
O_O
To be honest, I've never done that, and I'm surprised that It's common courtesy. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I had a chance to help the cashier to find the barcode. What I do myself is placing items on the conveyor belt, putting items into the bags after checkout. Was I being impolite? What's the cashier's job then? Pressing the scan button...?
It might be courtesy, but it's certainly not "common." Times like these are where I feel like half of HN must be from a totally different planet. Searching out barcodes is fun and common? What?
In my country there are signs in every store at the conveyor belt saying "turn the bar code toward you", i.e. so that the it lines up with the scanner.
