Check out this research

We here at the Totally Unscientific Research Center (which doesn't make for a very cool acronym, so we are thinking of changing it) have taken an interest in those self-checkout lanes that are becoming so ubiquitous at grocery stores and other fine establishments near you. Our unscientific study (based on a sample of about 4.35 people) reveals that consumers either love them or hate them. No one has, of yet, admitted to being indifferent toward them, although some people clearly are confused by their purpose, such as the young boy who insisted that if his mother put the frozen pizza they were purchasing on the belt, it would come out fully cooked at the other end. (He was a little off, yes, but so have all great inventors been a little off. We therefore expect great things of this young man in the future.)

Although a self-checkout machine can speed up the checkout process, it also has a great capacity to annoy people. One way in which it accomplishes this is to give contradictory commands. It will tell you, for instance, that the bagging area is full and that you must bag some items before proceeding. Barely have you squeezed by your cart to follow these instructions, however, when the machine (gleefully, so it seems) reminds you that it is waiting, and that if you are finished shopping to please finish and pay. (As if it has anything more important to do.) Saying to the machine "You told me to bag some items, so have a little patience while I bag some items!" does not do anything to placate it (this is a finding from our own research), but it does tend to make one feel better, in the same way kicking a flat tire makes one feel better. We highly recommend having a shoe on when you kick a tire (also from our own research).

For my mother, self-checkout lanes are definitely a love-hate relationship. She loves the feeling that she has mastered something modern, but she is exasperated by the unending demands the machine places on her. One day the machine -- in one of its favorite tricks -- pretended to not recognize that my mother had placed her item in the bag, and it promptly admonished her to do so.

"But I did place the item in the bag," she wailed at it.

This aroused the sympathy of the other shoppers in line with her -- which should tell you something about my mother, as most shoppers would merely get exasperated at such a delay -- and one said, nodding vigorously at the machine, "She did put the item in the bag. I saw her!"

More and more we appreciate the sentiment of the woman who got in the self-checkout lane one day and peered at the machine, then said with some disgust, "Is this one of those check-yourself-out lanes?"

She was assured that it was.

"Oh, I don't believe in those," and off she went.