Self-service checkouts in, for example, Lidl are German precision. Self-service checkouts in Biedronka, on the other hand, are a Portuguese fantasy. Only Polish workers are a pity.
Self-service checkouts are a great convenience. Of course, personally, I preferred the system, but the knowledgeable cashier or cashier will bounce twice and be serious, but… I guess most of us still prefer it when this happens. Thanks to this, the self-service checkout is the best way to avoid long lines in Biedronka, Lidl, Carrefour or several other networks. Auchan, it doesn’t concern you, get out of Russia first.
Ladybird however, there is a lot of room for improvement in this area
However, self-service checkouts in Biedronka are not thought out in the best way. They are definitely the most irritating compared to the competition. When I am in Carrefour, or maybe with a more adequate format and model of Lidl’s operation, usually all cash registers work efficiently, and in addition, a specially delegated employee moves between them, who solves all problems with a dance step. I think that is how it should work, and we are throwing the conservatives out of their hands of the argument about machines taking away people’s jobs.
In Biedronki, however, it does not look like that. Of course, I did not visit all Biedronki in Poland, but I believe that there were enough of them to signal a problem that requires reform at the level of jobs and procedures.
Self-service checkouts in Biedronka work on your word of honor
Let’s agree on one thing – Ladybug is fine. It has good prices, nice goods, and pays very high taxes in Poland. Perhaps the more surprising is the fact that the subject of self-service checkouts was so poorly organized. Someone on the board of Jeronimo Martins rightly said “let’s do them”, but did not assign them any specific policy of action. Big computers have been put in place and let everybody get along somehow.
Therefore, I am notoriously visiting chain discounters, where even 4 self-checkout counters have been placed, but at least 2 are out of use due to a temporary failure. It doesn’t make sense.
The worst thing, however, is the lack of respect for Biedronka’s employees and customers
As already mentioned, in competing networks, special employees are assigned to solve problems using customer self-checkouts. But not in Biedronki. Or maybe so, but in that case I am signaling: in practice it does not work for you.
So when the self-service checkout is wrong, and unfortunately these are extremely unreliable devices, these two out of four currently operating checkouts can be blocked for the next minutes, not to mention the rarer cases, when it was a quarter of an hour. And there are no special employees of Biedronka to help. And a desperate extraction of cashiers from their “human” cash registers begins, which is not so simple – there, after all, they also bother to serve customers. Or just calling free ladies around the store. Imagine the procession of an impatient employee who has to operate de facto 3 cash registers at a time and is distracted from his own work every 5 minutes.
The queue is getting longer, customers are looking more and more reluctantly at their fellow brothers while shopping, and sometimes it really takes a long time for a lady to come and confirm by hand that the weight of the grapes is correct, the system has made a mistake and the customer is ultimately not to blame for the accusations acts in the form of spectacular theft of fruit for the amount of PLN 3.14.
The problem of self-service checkouts in Biedronka seems to be systemic
Is this a first world problem? Of course, it depends on the perspective we take. Certainly, this is not a problem for people who have to run after the buffalo before they can even eat meat every 100 days.
On the other hand, however, we live in the reality of supermarkets that bid for modern mobile applications, their own “markets”, clothing lines, and I think that in this context it would be nice to organize a self-service checkout system that does not have such PRL influences. And here, Ladybug, you have room for improvement.