If you are neurodivergent and prefer to use self-checkout, well, screw you!
See, Walmart has been implementing policies about the use of self-checkout. These policies have come to the Walmart where I shop. The self-checkout lanes are now 15 items or less, or they are Scan & Go.
Judging from the articles I’ve found by searching the Internet, I know they are pissing off a lot of people. Do you know who they will piss off the most with this policy change? Neurodivergent people. As such, this change is ableist bullshit peddled by Walmart. Checkout lanes is something that we, neurodivergent folks, discuss amongst ourselves from time to time. Overwhelmingly, neurodivergent folks prefer the self-checkout lanes because it helps us avoid being in a social relation (writ small) with some random cashier.
It is true that some of us do prefer the staffed checkout lanes, but this is a minority of neurodivergent folks. This minority is not directly impacted by the changes I’m detailing here. It may be indirectly impacted by longer waits at the staffed checkout lanes, however.
I discovered the new policy when I went to my local Walmart two weekends ago. I was scanning and bagging my items when I heard an clerk tell another customer that they needed 15 items or less to be able to use the self-checkout line. I was lucky. I think I may have had 14 items in my cart. I looked around and, sure enough, there were signs saying “Scan & Go” and “15 items or less.”
I had used Scan & Go before, but I did not like it. I did not remember why exactly, but this lapse in memory would soon be fixed. The next weekend, I did use the Scan & Go, and I remembered immediately the issues I had with it.
Here is the way I use the Walmart app to shop at Walmart:
- I fill my electronic cart at home. I’m going to call this cart the regular cart, by opposition to the Scan & Go cart that I’m going to discuss below.
- When I’m at the store, I remove the items from my regular cart as I walk down the aisles.
Scan & Go messes this up completely. To use Scan & Go, you need to open up the app and then select Scan & Go mode. When you are in this mode, the items you scan go into a Scan & Go cart that is separate from the regular cart that you can access at home. The items that you put in this cart are not automatically removed from the regular cart, either. You can fix this by manually flipping between the Scan & Go cart and the regular cart, but the app does not make this a seamless operation. You have to go through a bunch of screens to do it.
During my last shopping trip, I had to buy bananas. These need to be weighed. There was a scale near the bananas that, in theory, I could have used, but it did not seem to work. Truth be told, I’m not sure that I wasn’t the problem here. At any rate, I told the app that I’d weigh the bananas later.
I got to the self-checkout and tried weighing my bananas. When prompted, I scanned the self-checkout QR code with my phone, but my phone kept rejecting it. I asked for help, but the clerk was as puzzled as I was. I said that I would just pay for what I had in the Scan & Go cart, and then start a different order for the bananas. Just before trying this, however, I tried one last thing: I told the app that I was ready to pay. It then said that I’d have to weigh my bananas. It presented me with the option to do it at checkout. From this point on, everything worked as expected, but getting there was highly unintuitive.
From what I can tell, the app was confused earlier. It was expecting the QR code of a scale, but I gave it the QR code of a self-checkout machine. It is only after I told it that I wanted to pay now that it gave me the option to weigh at checkout, and that I was finally able to scan the QR code of the self-checkout machine.
Okay, so Scan & Go sucks, but it allowed me to avoid the restriction that Walmart imposed on the self-checkout lanes. It is not ableist, then, right? As if. It is still ableist. You can use Scan & Go only if you pay extra for Walmart+. I pay for it for reasons that I shall not detail in this article. Do you know who has a hard time making ends meet? Neurodivergent people.
I’ve heard about Walmart setting up sensory friendly hours in their stores. I’ve personally never experienced these hours. Still, at the end of the day, these hours mean little if they also force neurodivergent folks to use the staffed checkout lanes.
This is bullshit! Ableist bullshit.
Do note that comments merely telling me to not shop at Walmart will be flagged as spam. Read this piece if needed.
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