inputs/outputs

I went to Giant last night to buy some ingredients for my famous Orzo-Asparagus-Mushroom-Shrimp concoction, and I noticed something interesting. Most of the aisles in my local Giant food store were self-checkout. Only a few years ago, it was the special aisle for the tech savvy people who wanted to speed through checkout, while most people cowered in fear, running to their Giant employee to charge and bag their goods.

Now, most of us are weighing our vegetables, scanning items, and having the attendants bag our stuff and put them in a cart for us. Less interaction, more efficient. It makes the world seem like a colder place, now that technology is becoming smarter and taking the place of warm human blood. But the typical user, in this case, probably doesn’t care too much.

Grocery shopping can be an intimate experience. Any on-lookers are given a look into your homelife: what you are feeding your kids, what medicines you take, your habits, the magazines you read, and how much you spend on these items. Computers don’t judge.

The other side of the coin is that as simple as the system is, it still ends up being a problem for the users. Almost every time I’m in a self-checkout store, I see a “call for help” bulb light up on my station, or on someone else’s station. Or I have to remove something to re-weigh, or the belt sends it back.

Either way, incompetent users aren’t going to stop grocery stores from saving money with self-checkout registers. Once you get used to it, the whole process is really quite fast. Especially since you’re the one doing it, and it’s a chore that needs to be over as quickly as possible. There are some things that are much more intuitive than they appear to be - technology is can be one of those things. I mean, we all know how to use an ATM, right?