OPINION: Self-checkout in Dutch supermarkets: either trust me or pay your employees

There was a time when going to the supermarket meant you could fully switch your brain off for half an hour.

Wander the aisles, accidentally buy €4 olives you didn’t need, stare blankly at yoghurt for six minutes, then dump everything onto a conveyor belt while a cashier handled the difficult technological challenge of scanning a cucumber.

Those days are gone. Now we all work at the supermarket.

I don’t even grab a basket anymore without instinctively reaching for one of those handheld scanners, especially at Dirk. The expectation is clear: congratulations, sir, you are both customer and unpaid employee.

Fine. I’ll play along. I’m an honest citizen. I will dutifully scan every item myself like the little tax-paying adult I am.

But why is this process still somehow so terrible?

The barcode battle is real

Half the time I’m rotating products like I’m trying to crack a safe because the barcode is hidden under six layers of packaging.

Then the scanner refuses to recognise it anyway. Or it scans the wrong thing. Or I’m suddenly in a life-or-death standoff with the machine because I dared to buy two of the same bread rolls.

And yes, there is one beautiful promise behind the whole system: scan items directly into your bag while shopping. Efficient. Elegant. European. In theory, you should glide majestically past the tills afterwards and leave within seconds.

But no. Because first, you need to queue for the self-checkout anyway.

The random inspection lottery

Then comes the real fun: the random inspection. Now, I have nothing against the employee doing the checks. They didn’t invent this nonsense.

But why does it feel like I’m selected approximately 50% of the time? Especially when I’ve bought enough groceries to survive a medium-sized apocalypse.

And they never check a few items, do they?

READ MORE | Dutch woman and daughter jailed after forgetting to scan three items at self-checkout

No, no. They start pulling things out like customs officers at Schiphol. Tomatoes. Crackers. Frozen spinach.

“Ah yes, and this paprika?” What are we doing here exactly? I’m already doing your scanning for you while the supermarket quietly reduces its labour costs. The least you can do is pretend to trust me.

When the whole thing collapses

Inevitably, something goes wrong. A bread roll needs a mysterious bakery code from 1987. An item scans incorrectly. The machine freezes. Someone needs to enter an employee code. Then another employee code. Then a supervisor appears like the final boss in a video game.

In the past month alone, three out of maybe ten supermarket visits ended with some sort of self-checkout disaster.

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One time, I had to rescan the entire order from scratch. The entire order. At that point, just hand me a name badge and schedule me for a shift on Thursday.

And yes, obviously, this is a small suffering. The world contains war, climate change, and Microsoft Teams meetings. Perspective noted.

But still.

Either trust me, or hire cashiers again

You cannot simultaneously make me do the work, monitor me like a criminal, interrupt the process every four minutes, and then still have the system collapse because somebody bought an “artisan multigrain triangle roll” that requires authorisation from head office.

If self-checkout is the future, then at least make it work smoothly. Some Dutch supermarkets have been experimenting with checkout-free shopping entirely and, well, that’s going about as smoothly as you’d expect.

Otherwise, just bring back the cashiers who scan 43 items per minute with the speed and precision of an F1 pit crew while I stand there dissociating next to a Toblerone display.

If you’d rather avoid the whole ordeal, there’s always grocery delivery. Honestly, at this point, the cashiers were better at this than all of us.

Have you had a self-checkout meltdown recently, or have you somehow mastered the system? Let us know in the comments.