My Experience with an all self-checkout Walmart Grocery

The Walmart Grocery (trashy, yes) by our house had previously had 6 cashier registers (of which, maybe 3 at most were ever open) and 4 self-check stands (or which, at least 1 was always broken, and all of them were turned off for the last 2 hours the store was open).

Last Sunday (8 days ago), the store closed early, and opened late the next day. During that overnight, the entire cashier area was revamped.

All cashier stands, and all current self-check out stands were removed. In it's place: 12 brand-new self-checkouts (scan and go)... and no cashier stands.

The scan and go machines were arranged in two parallel lines of 6 and 5, with a 12th on the end. The lines are parallel to the front of the store. There is a single entry point to the queue, and a line develops from there. There was a worker at the front of the queue, guiding shoppers to an open machine. In addition, there was an employee at a podium, in the middle of all of this, keeping an eye on things, and a third employee was kinda walking around seeing if anyone needed help.

The customer service desk was also open, and it appeared to be staffed and if you need an actual cashier, you could go to that line.

The neighborhood FB group Karens were all up in arms about this over the last week, but I went yesterday, and it seemed to work well. I'd rather 12 operational self-checkouts, as opposed to a couple of rude cashiers and broken self-checkouts.

Of course, I only go inside this store if I need a few things. Otherwise, I do the online order and pick-up thing.

The future is here, and $15 an hour min wages will just cause it to spread faster.