The grocery store I shop at has handheld scanner guns for customer use. I check out a gun by scanning my loyalty card, then make my way around the store, scanning each item as I put it in my cart. When I’m done, the handheld scanner displays a barcode that I scan at the self-checkout scanner. My entire order shows up on the screen there, along with the total cost. I pay, take my receipt, and head out to the parking lot.

I like scanner-gun shopping a lot. I like it because it’s efficient, but also because it puts me in control. I can see the real price of everything I take off the shelf, in real-time. If something doesn’t ring up at the price it’s marked, I know instantly. The device keeps a running total as I shop.

Most days, my entire grocery experience involves no direct interaction with any store employee whatsoever, except maybe to exchange pleasantries with a stockperson. I do 100% of the work of checking myself out. I imagine the money the store saves on me in labor might make up for a lot of the money it loses in shrink.

But the store gets something else from my use of its scan-as-you-shop service. It gets to collect a huge amount of data on the way I shop. Not only does it record everything I buy, but it knows when and where I buy it. It knows the patterns of how I move through the store. It can compare my patterns to the patterns of all the other shoppers who use store scanner guns. It can analyze these patterns for useful information about everything from store layout to shoplifting mitigation.

One of the ways the store mitigates shrink from scanner gun shoppers who might accidentally “forget” to scan an item they put in their cart is point-of-sale audits. Not usually, but every so often and on a regular basis, my order will be flagged for an audit when I go to check out. When this happens, the cashier running the self-checkout area has to come over and scan a certain number of items in my cart, to make sure they were all included in my bill.

My main point in all of this was to offer a narrative that runs counter to the narrative I picked up from the article. I prefer to have more control over my checkout experience, and I will willingly choose to surrender personal information about my shopping habits and check-out procedures in order to gain that control, every chance I get.

“Consumers don’t like self checkout”‽ Are they crazy? I love self checkout! You know what I don’t like? When I have to wait for a self checkout to become available because there’s not enough human checkouts.

My local Walmart has about 25% of their checkouts as self checkouts. They’ll have 4 lanes open with humans and 1/3rd of the self checkouts won’t be operational. This is the worst of all possible options!

If you only plan to have 4 human checkouts why do you have so few self checkouts‽ Arg! It frustrates the crap out of me every time I go there.

Another thing that pisses me off is that the human checkout lanes are designed so inefficiently. In the self checkout I can pick up the scanner and scan everything in my cart at about twice or three times the speed of a human checkout because the human lane has a horrible setup that necessitates taking everything out of the cart to get it scanned whereas with the self checkout one can scan everything while it’s still in the cart.

You can scan scan scan at super speed, grab a bunch of bags, then put everything in the bags as needed in your car afterwards. You can be done in seconds!

Or be even more efficient like me and just keep your own bags in the car and skip the whole, “grab some bags” step.

This way also makes the door receipt checker person’s job so much faster because they can visibly see everything in your cart; no need to peek into every bag looking for expensive items that may not have been purchased.

Let’s move forward, society! Give us 100% self checkout lanes and just have people there to assist with scanning and bagging for the people that need help.