I hate it when my local Kroger has NO attended check out counters.

[CaptainTruth]

120. Too hard at my local BJs, they use a scale that weighs each item scanned.

We take insulated bags to put our cold & frozen items in. As soon as we set one in the bagging area the computer voice starts saying "Unexpected item in bagging area, please remove item." No, it's not an unexpected item, it's our insulated bag, we want to put cold items into it as we scan them. There's no option to "zero" the scale with the weight of our bags. So then we're trying to figure out how to outsmart the scale, maybe if we put a few heavy items on it, it won't notice the small incremental weight of one of our bags? That seems to work until my wife starts picking up items & bagging them & then we get the computer voice saying "Item removed from bagging area, please return item to bagging area" even though the item was picked up & put right back down in a bag sitting on the bagging area. The item has already been returned to the bagging area but their system isn't smart enough to figure that out no matter how many times we pick up the item & set it back down... so a manager has to come & clear something & review every item in the bagging area & we discovered that some of them didn't get scanned because the computer was too busy telling us to move items around. At this point I'm looking for a brand name on the checkout monstrosity in the hope that I can get user feedback to their software development team to please smack whoever wrote the code for this thing.

The whole thing would have made a hilarious scene in a movie. I was talking back to the computer in Spanish & Italian because it certainly wasn't understanding English. The thing is, they used to have self-checkout with a scanner & a conveyor belt, which was great. My wife & I made a great checkout team, I'd scan in the order I knew we wanted things bagged & she would be down the belt bagging as fast as I could scan. We flew through the BJs checkout at a speed that would make an Aldi checker jealous. But now? It took about 5x longer & was a lot more hassle. With the idiotic weigh every item, you can't bag as you scan, & the bagging area isn't big enough to hold everything in an every-6-weeks buy so you have to create an unbagged precarious pile & then bag everything back into your cart while people wait behind you & you hold up the whole line... no thanks. We don't ever want to use that system again.