Yahoo Finance Coles apologises to fired-up customer teeing off over self-serve checkout: 'What's next?'
Joe was furious he had to scan a trolley full of groceries and the supermarket has now responded.
A Coles customer has gone on an epic rant after having to scan his own groceries at a self-serve checkout. Some shoppers prefer scanning and bagging their own items, but Joe Salanitri wasn't too happy about doing the supermarket work for free.
The Aussie comedian found it incredibly frustrating because he had a trolley full of products during a recent shop. He said it was such an exhausting experience that he felt Coles should pay him because he was working so hard.
"So I'm going to send you my tax file number so I can start getting f**ing paid," he said in a video on TikTok.
Have you struggled with a supermarket's self-checkout recently? Email stew.perrie@yahooinc.com
"We're not gonna do it. What's next? I'm going to make my own f**king Cocoa Puffs."
Plenty of people agreed with the comedian, with one saying they never used the self-serve checkout because they didn't like the idea of taking someone's job.
Coles responded to Salanitri and said his video was a "hard watch" for them.
"We're sorry we let you down," the spokesperson said.
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"We should always have a range of checkout options open for the convenience of our customers, but we hear you loud & clear that this didn't happen when you visited and we will share your feedback with our Ops team (feedback as in, your actual video!) because we are always listening and learning, and your vid makes your point clearly."
Customers are 'working for free'
But Salanitri isn't the only person speaking out against the likes of Coles and Woolworths deploying self-serve checkouts en masse.
Chair of sociology at Drew University in New Jersey, Chris Andrews, questioned the value of automated, and often frustrating, till services.
“They haven't lived up to their promise, they haven't saved stores money, they're not faster or more convenient,” the author of Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-It-Yourself Economy told 3AW.
“When we originally designed the modern supermarket, the premise was if consumers did more of the work, the stores would offer them a discount on food.
"But for consumers today, self-checkout doesn't really offer any sort of economic incentive. It just invites you to do work for free for the supermarket.”
Andrews warned the practice was not limited to supermarkets and claimed hotels, airlines and other retailers could see customers as “the next frontier of not even cheap, but free labor for them”, which would slash their bottom line.
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