Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Serve others grocery shopping

When you are grocery shopping, you can serve others
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When you go grocery shopping, you choose what items you want to buy, and then an employee of the shop has to handle and count your groceries and take your money. This employee costs the shop money, and you are paying for that along with your groceries.

Some shops have self-service checkouts where you scan your own groceries and put your money into a machine. But you can tell that people don't really like these because they will queue at manned checkouts in preference. And there has to be a shop employee on duty anyway to deal with the inevitable machine malfunctions.

So the idea proposed here is a new third way. Cut out the middleman. Serve other customers.

How it works. You the shopper selects your groceries as usual and approach the tills. If a till is manned, you can queue at it and pay as usual. If a till is not manned, you can volunteer to man it, and serve other customers who will then queue at your till. You have to sit there at the till for an allotted time, and the corresponding hourly wage is credited to your shopping bill. At the end of your "micro shift" you can queue with your shopping at another till and pay and leave.

The whole thing is run by an app which (as I think happens now) monitors the number of customers in the shop, and which opens or closes checkouts corresponding to demand.

I imagine that any shopper wishing to volunteer to man a till will need to provide some kind of accreditation (maybe just scan the invisible embedded microchip implanted in their forehead or something innocent and innocuous like that).

Sometimes you will go to the shop and there will be enough cashiers and there won't be a chance to volunteer to man a till. SO you just pay as usual. Other times you will be at the shop and it will be hoaching and there will be only one cashier on and there will be plenty of other tills with the "cashier wanted" sign flashing. So stop complaining and sit down and log in and start serving your fellow customers.

pocmloc, Mar 11 2022

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       I knew there was a better category than vehicle for my valet post lol
21 Quest, Mar 11 2022
  

       Hmmm... interesting concept. [+]
21 Quest, Mar 11 2022
  

       I'm liking this idea thread. [+]   

       Creativity spawns creativity! What I love about this place.
doctorremulac3, Mar 11 2022
  

       If I could go man a register while my wife does the shopping, I'd be all for that.
lurch, Mar 11 2022
  

       Ha! ^
21 Quest, Mar 11 2022
  

       [lurch], that's brilliant.
neutrinos_shadow, Mar 13 2022
  

       Yes its an obvious way to use the system. Person A's service credits can be applied to person B's bill, no problem with that at all. (As long as person A consents...)
pocmloc, Mar 14 2022
  

       [+] It's worth pointing out that many years after all the hype regarding checkout-free supermarkets, Amazon and others still haven't started to spread their legs. Last I checked, Amazon had readjusted the concept so that now the camera/scanner was embedded in your personal cart.
4and20, Mar 20 2022
  
      
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