I wouldn’t surprised if money laundering takes a 50% off your pre-laundered money. It’s a funny world when some people are paying to avoid taxes and some paying to pay taxes!
Awkward surely, but in this day and age I can at least give her credit for listening and not trying to bluster past it like so many public figures when confronted with inconvenient facts.
This is the supermarket self-service checkout model. Nobody likes them, because most of the time it doesn't work and then you have to stand around waiting for someone to intervene.
Interesting. Here in Norway I have nothing but good experience with self-checkout. It just works. Only thing is if I buy alcohol I have to wait for someone to click that I am over 18. It even has less queue, and queues are the worst!
In the Netherlands they've closed all but one regular check out line, and instead of paying cashiers they pay people to tell you to go to the automatic one. The reliability of the self check out (how often it craps itself and waits for assistance) really depends on the supermarket chain you're at though. At some it never breaks, at some it breaks almost every time (so hardly anyone uses it there).
I've found it highly depends on the store and how recently the machines were installed. My Walmart that just got renovated with self-checkout lines has snappy machines and a very intelligent weight system (often allows you to take items off the scale without supervisor intervention), while a Kroger that has had the machines for at least 5 years can be super slow and may take ~3 seconds for the scale to detect a new item.
I now tend to prefer to go to the self service, because it's usually faster than the normal checkout.
The exception is when I know I will trigger an age check.
But to the car comparison: If that happens enough that people won't use them, then they're not good enough unless it drives the cost down enough that people decides it's worth the wait.
Toby Litt wrote a novel called Finding Myself where the book is presented as a diary account of a holiday with some friends of the fictional protagonist, but it includes notes from the editor of the character who has written the diary.
