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Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Not all of them have mute buttons. My local grocery store used to allow you to mute the register but they disabled the function, I am assuming on the basis of reducing theft. When you're typing in a PLU for a given produce item, they want the machine to announce what it is so the self checkout monitor can hear if you rang your asparagus in as (much cheaper by weight) bananas. It also announces the price of whatever you just scanned in, which to me seems excessive.
This is just one store, though. There's another local grocery chain with better self-checkout registers that you can mute, but by default they don't even do all of the announcing that the other one does anyways. I try to support the store with the worse self checkout when I can because it is a union shop whereas the other is non-union, but it is frustrating as a customer when the non-union store is just a better experience most of the time.
I don't think that's the case. It's impossible to hear those things when busy. Maybe that was corporate thinking. My best guess is for old people thh
If it was for old people, I can't imagine why they would have taken away the ability to just mute it if you don't need it. When the transaction finishes, it unmutes by default for the next person.
I just don't think it being audible is for the attendant as you can't hear them with so many sounds, and you have a screen already that shows everything. For old people seems to be the most obvious, but why would they remove the mute of that is the case. In all reality it's likely some corporate decision, that in their testings made them more money with no mute button vs with mute button. When I worked at a huge national grocery store chain (ahold) it seemed like every decision was made by people who've never worked in a grocery store. So wouldn't surprise me if the reason was some nonsense.