Like others here, I don’t necessarily hate self-checkout in practice, they are OK for express lines at the grocery store, but in theory I dislike that they take away a few more lower paying jobs with automation.
So they take away three or four cashier’s jobs and replace them with one who has to sit there and do a combination of customer service and security.
They are a godsend at the local pharmacy. I used to really hate checking out with some chirpy 18-year old clerk while I was buying hemorrhoid cream, or something equally mortifying. Nice to have some privacy.
Same, i prefer self-check out. Most of the time i don’t have a ton of items on me and it just makes sense to self check out. When i have a ton of stuff then i’m happy to go through the regular line.
Self checkout is largely useless to me. When i only have a few things it’s admittedly great, but i prefer to shop as infrequently as possible and therefore make larger trips. Honesty, i prefer interacting with cashiers. Turns out people are really helpful and usually quite nice. I would never presume that they automatically hate their job.
You can buy alcohol in the self-scan in Michigan and Ohio. I haven’t tried in other states. Same deal, clerk checks the ID and either enters the birthdate or hits the “over 40” button. (Incidentally, that is now an “over 50” button at Meijer stores. Which changed immediately after I turned 50. 
)
Like all the introverts commenting on this thread, I greatly prefer self-check.
My god the US is still super obsessed about alcohol, here, they only card you if you look under 25 (and boy has that ship sailed for me)…
I like the self-checkouts, for all the reasons everyone already said. I didn’t like them at first, because they seemed kinda slapped together, and the sensors they used were a pain. But now that they’ve gotten better, and I know how to use them, they’re a breeze. Not sure what it says about me that I don’t really think about the jobs they’ve replaced, but there it is. Can’t speak to the shrink issue, but I don’t trust any retail outlet that puts the blame for any business decision on theft. They lie, all the time.
My uncle is like this, and I don’t understand. Is it a privacy thing?
It’s fucking stupid. Doesn’t happen if my son is with me, though, he is biologically impossible if I am under 21 years of age.
At his current age, I would’ve been 6 at conception. As I said, biologically impossible.
Everything.
Besides, I don’t work for free.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned, and was specifically a problem the last time I went through a staffed checkout lane (Costco): the bagger very carefully separated each frozen and refrigerated item to make sure that each one was surrounded only by room temperature items instead of each other, even stacking them vertically to make sure as much surface area as possible was exposed to ambient temperature, and produce in net bags were placed directly on top of the 2 items of clothing.
There are very few times when a bagger is as good or better than I am at bagging. When a straight shot to get home to a fridge is at least 30 minutes by car, that matters.
Another vote generally in favor of self-checkout. When they were started, there were lots of issues, but better equipment and a better understanding of the process flow has greatly improved them. 80% of the time I use the self-check.
Up here near Seattle self checkouts are increasingly everywhere and they seem to work pretty well.
I flew though LAX recently and there was a bar with deli selection that had a fancy “place your items on this surface not overlapping each other” and no scanning was necessary. If it wasn’t for airport prices I would have been buying things all evening just to keep trying it out.
I like them for the convenience and speed.
I hate them because 60+ year old former till operators have to spend their shift standing up servicing them.
I went to a sports equipment store in France that had that kind of check out. decathlon. It was very cool!
Our local self checkouts were glitchy and annoying at first, especially if you brought your own bags, which I do. They’ve sorted it out, though, and now it’s easy breezy. I used to work as a cashier, so the bagging is no biggie, and I end up doing it 3/4 of the time even at staffed registers because they’re low on baggers. Some people just stand there while the cashier rings everything through, then stands idly by while they bag everything. Always strikes me as an odd cultural phenomenon.
@anon67050589 - that is some next level masochistic bagging! Gotta appreciate the attention to detail, though. 
This is such a weird and alien concept to me.
And I’m not alone. When WalMart tried to establish their bridgehead over here, the baggers were the first to go.
I can’t stand them, for reasons that are a mix of petty and practical.
The petty first- I spent a chunk of my teenage weekends scanning other people’s groceries, now technology has moved on, and I now have to do it myself, with worse equipment.
That brings me on to the practical- The machines are slow, I can’t use them to pack efficiently, as the anti-theft system expects each item to be placed slowly in the bag- so any rearranging of the items or moving the bags around locks the thing up with the dreaded “unexpected item in the bagging area”. And they don’t scan quickly, there often isn’t a clear “beep” to let you know an item has scanned, and the terminal front end is badly designed, making having to look up a price a chore- Is my pastry “bakery” or “sweet bakery”, then two layers of menus before selecting a quantity. And most annoying of all is that you can’t switch off the robot voice barking orders at you all the time.
And breathe.
So, yeah, I much prefer manned tills. where they’re available.
When I was a kid (mid-1980s) every grocery store here in Maine had a bagger (or several) at every checkout. They’d not only bag the groceries, but often wheel or carry the bagged groceries out and put them in the car for the shopper.
It’s in decline, though, for sure.
