Emilee Chaffin, Charger Staff
Have you ever had to wait in line behind that one family who bought enough food to feed the entire population of Cookeville? Behind the man with three small children screaming that they want more M&Ms?
Your problems are solved. As most of you may know, the newly remodeled Kroger of Cookeville has a self-check-out system to speed up purchasing items without having to wait in those long lines. Sometimes, however, the self-check-out takes longer than waiting in the regular lines.
At Kroger, Meg Ivey, Leigh Ivey and I purchased an orange, a carton of chocolate milk and a bag of frosted animal crackers. Arriving at the check out, we discovered the lines, as normal, to be long, so we decided to try the U-Scan at the end of the lanes.
It looked pretty simple, consisting of a touch-screen and a scanner. Not hard, right?
First, it asks for a Kroger Plus Card. Realizing I had one, I began the dig to the bottom of my purse to grab my keys. The machine became impatient and angrily repeated for me to scan my Plus Card. After accidentally scanning it three times, the machine told us to scan the first item and place it in the bag.
The animal crackers were easy enough to scan. But when we came to the orange, we had to choose the "produce" selection and then type in the number of the fruit. Of course, we had to go back to the fruit section to see what number oranges were, then type in the number. But that wasn't all. We then had to "place purchase on the scanner and wait." We had to wait a while for it to register the weight.
After scanning the chocolate milk, we had to select our payment type. Next to the cash button there was a choice for WIC vouchers. My finger slipped and I accidentally pushed the wrong button. So then we tried to figure out what a WIC voucher is and why we didn't have one. The not-so-helpful help lady finally guided me back to the "select payment" page, while mumbling something about high school students under her breath.
One good thing about the regular lanes is that your money doesn't have to be crisp and new for the clerk to accept it. On the self-scan things, it does! We fought with the money, trying to get it in the slot. Finally after getting new bills and putting them in there the right way, the machine tells us to "please take the receipt."
We left the store thinking frustrated and reminiscing of the days of normal checkout, and thinking it might be easier to just let the people who know what they are doing scan our purchases from now on. The U-Scan seems like a pretty good idea, but it makes waiting in line to check-out look pretty good to me.
This page created by Curtis Cooper