My experience has been exactly the opposite. I absolutely love self check-out. It makes things go much more quickly. And I'm sure it is cheaper for the grocery stores, lowering the overall cost of groceries by some small but significant amount. Critics might argue that this reduces jobs for low-income people, but on the other hand, low-income people spend a large proportion of their income on food, so lowering the price of food will benefit them greatly.

Classic example of a case where retailers tested this idea with consumers in advance- and the consumers just LOVED the idea. So the big guns went ahead and installed the technology.

Maybe I'm anti-social, but I actually like avoiding the small talk at the check out counter, where invariably, I'm asked if I'm having a nice day, if I want a store card, etc. I just want my stuff. And I want to go. This isn't a New England village country store experience I'm after. (I'm a New Yorker living far away from NY.)

I think that like a lot of these things, consumers will get better at using them over time and they'll be as much a part of our retail landscape as the shopping cart.

I wonder about the future of impulse buy items at the registers. If stores are too savvy and enable you to check out too quickly, their customers will miss out on buying the high-margin People Magazines and soap opera guides and even the packs of Bubble Yum. They have to find the optimal wait time. Sounds like a good management consulting project.

On the other hand, years ago, my mother predicted that no-one would use ATM's to deposit money because she couldn't imagine trusting some "machine" to deposit her money.

One generation later, I can't imagine standing in line to do business with a bank teller. In fact, I don't even know what the inside of my bank looks like since I use the machines in the lobby.

Maybe I'm the less-than-average intelligence customer who gums up the works, but I don't think I've ever tried self checkout where I didn't end up having to get help. I'm the person screaming at the screen "I just put it in the bag!" I've had bad luck at Home Depot, and I went to Wal-Mart with my sister and I think we had to start over 3 times. So, I usually avoid self-checkout. (I have a subscription to People magazine, so I'm immune to the impulse buys!)

I also find that self-checkout only works some of the time for me. I'm not good at handling a scanner or at bagging my own stuff, and I sorta feel like I'm noodling around pointlessly and doing things wrong until someone shows up to bail me out. But maybe I'll learn. They don't seem that popular to me yet, based on my anecdotal observations.

Self checkout at grocery stores is great. I have little difficulty scanning goods or bagging my own stuff, duties that the grocery store delegates to teenagers in the full-service checkout lines. My only frustration with self checkout is the fact that I can't scan and pay for a six-pack of beer or a bottle of wine without having a manager come over to approve the purchase, even though no physical checker has carded me for alcohol for at least 20 years. (Alas!) I accept, however, that for the sake of controlling underage drinking, there probably is no effective alternative.

More to the point, one of the major grocers in my area has gone to self checkout in a big way on the theory that customers will turn to it as a time saver -- time being the one variable that really matters to so many us nowadays. To explain a basic flaw in this business model, I must digress.

Self checkout purports to be a replacement for express lanes in grocery stores. Express lanes once lived up to their billing. The store reserved them for customers who would pay with cash. No more.

With the advent of debit cards, grocery stores have totally abandoned "cash only" express checkout. Now I get to wait in line for 15 minutes behind some bozo who cannot remember their PIN, then wants to argue with the checker about it, then the manager, or even the CEO of the grocery chain. Good heavens, why not carry a $20 bill (or more than one) in your wallet? I still do so. It's very frustrating having to wait behind some Big Spender who wants to buy a 12-pack of Pepsi but doesn't have a fin in their wallet.

Grocery stores have thus turned to self checkout, in the belief that this will help customers get the heck out of the store with the goods they want in the minimum amount of time. A great idea, but a lot of details must yet be worked out.

The real solution is for grocery stores to establish options for checking out and paying for goods that key on the competence of the customer.

1. A truly speedy checkout line for cash purchases.

2. A self checkout line for customers who can deal with the "complexities" of scanning and bagging their groceries.

3. A third (and very long) checkout line, or as many as are needed, for everyone else.

The ACLU would come down on such business practices in a heartbeat, of course.

As someone whose first paying job was scanning and bagging groceries (Breaux Mart, Metairie, LA), I love self-checkout. All those $3.35 hours in the 80s apparently did not go to waste, since I can still operate the scanner.

The Stop & Shop supermarket in the NW Bronx introduced self check out a few months ago. It is horrible. It is slow because people have to read instructions, choose the correct options. If you have vegetables, you have to type on a virtual keypad on the screen to get to the correct set of choices, i.e. for onions type "on" then choose the type from the pictures. We need more cashiers not fewer. I buy less at the store since their introduction. Good thing Garden Gourmet is across the street.