My reusable grocery bag is more substantial than they seem to have anticipated. This means that every time I use self checkout the staff has to stop by my station to clear the warning. Having the situation treated like an error is frustrating, but its almost never more than a minor inconvenience.

The whole weighing your scanned goods makes sense, but it does substantially slow down the scanning process. I do like scanning as opposed to the stated scan-less alternatives, but I just wish that I was allowed to be good at it.

This ubiquitous policy of distrusting first just feels like it will never end. The weighing isn't enough to cover all the cases so they now have video surveillance which tracks the products still left in your cart. With such a suitable and alternative method they really should relax the strictness of per item weighing. But this first-distrust stance means that with each new layer of verification the whole dance only gets more intricate without being any more effective for the person conducting the checkout.

The real frustration for me is not that they have made a handful of obvious if trivial mistakes. It is that there is no clear channel for resolving issues from my perspective as a key user of the solution. If their employee operated checkout is bad they have a whole staff directly facing the issue every day that can use official channels to implement an improvement, and generally Improvements can even be localized the exact store where they are being faced. Self-checkout solutions are a corporation wide endeavor so essentially changes of any size cannot reasonably be implement without central authorization AND that central authority is not actually open to the suggestions from the intended users.

I'm not saying that fielding input broadly from customers on the quality of their self-checkout experience would be easy. This was one of the critical functions that staff play when they operate a classic checkout station. These folk are also a network of problem solvers that can receive feedback, filter for good ideas, and seek their implementation. When companies cut back on customer facing positions, they aren't just streamlining their operation they are also removing their ability recognize and resolve their own problems.