My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Check This Out

I’m an enthusiastic fan of the new self-check-in kiosks that the airlines have installed. Having gleefully checked myself in on many occasions, I was eager to try self-check-in’s retail cousin, self-checkout. The local Home Depot has four such devices, and last weekend my husband and I paid a visit.

From our cart, Ed handed me one of seven identical piping clamps. I whisked the UPC code over the scanner as I’ve seen the pros do. Nothing. Ed fished a different clamp from the cart and ran it over the scanner successfully, establishing a baseline of resentment and rancor for our self-checkout experience.

Since the machine seemed to respond to this particular clamp, Ed suggested passing it over the scanner seven times rather than struggling to make the scanner register the UPCs of the other six. The machine took issue with Ed’s sensible and innovative checkout strategy.

“Please Place Item in Bagging Area.”

“Why?” replied Ed, and here was the start of his undoing. A talking machine will talk to you—endlessly, bossily, repetitively—but it will not, no matter how fascinating or urgent your words, listen to you. It is my belief that these machines infuriate men because they remind them of the less pleasing aspects of talking to their spouses.

“Please Place Item in Bagging Area.”

I put a bag onto the bag holder, and Ed dropped the six clamps into it. Now the machine had a new gripe. “Unexpected Item in Bagging Area. Please Remove Item.”

As it turned out, there was a scale underneath the bagging area, enabling the machine to ensure that the two-ounce clamp you scanned is exactly what goes into the bag, rather than the two-ounce clamp plus the Makita cordless drill kit you are endeavoring to steal.

From the cart, Ed next picked up an eight-foot length of conduit pipe. The UPC code sticker had been placed midway along the shaft. Scanning the thing would entail knocking over a display caddy of roofing tiles and Roof Wear Warning Signals (“1. Loose granules…”) located on the far side of the machine, while simultaneously tripping up customers passing by behind us.

At a store that sells lumber and toilets and bags of cement, self-checkout isn’t a convenience—it’s a Chevy Chase movie.

Ed was perturbed, and this takes some doing. Ed is the most level-headed person I know. You could take one of the carpenter’s levels from Aisle 5 and place it on his head and the little bubble will always be right there in the middle. I mention this by way of explaining why it was that at this particularly tense juncture, I chose to further aggravate my husband by idly asking what’s inside the little bubble on a carpenter’s level.

Ed looked as if he was trying to decide who—me or the machine—more clearly deserved to have their granules whacked loose with a conduit pipe.

“Liquid,” he said, in a not overwhelmingly cordial tone.

In any other store, I might have stalked off to go flirt with the customers. This isn’t possible at Home Depot. A man in Home Depot can’t even see a woman.

A woman appeared at our side with a handheld scan gun and a marriage counselor. She explained that self-checkout was for small items only, and then she scanned the piping and reset the machine. Though self-checkout has enabled Home Depot to hire fewer checkout clerks, it has had to hire instead a team of special self-checkout troubleshooters.

I asked the woman how her new job was going. She looked like she was ready for self-checkout of the personal, I-quit variety. “Sometimes customers get so mad they throw stuff on the floor and walk away.” And then the self-checkout machine makes them sleep on the couch.