Yeah, a good self-checkout is amazing and a competely different category from the garbage you see elsewhere.

In the Netherlands at Albert Heijn the only verification consists pretty much of occasional random checks and in the one closes to me they replaced two of the manual counters with eight self-checkouts, meaning that the queues are pretty much gone. You can also self-scan while shopping, if you want with your own phone in which case payment is 90% of the time just scanning a barcode and paying at a debit-card terminal.

And while you are not supposed to, nobody ever cares if you use your own backpack instead of a shopping basket/car, in which case you don’t even have to pack up your stuff. If you do get a random check with it, you just open it up wide and let the employee pick a few random items to scan and they won’t even say a word.

The only other delay is age-verification if you buy alcohol, which in my case means that an employee looks over from across the room and sadly decides that I’m an old enough fuck to not need my ID inspected. (Then again, being trans without legal stuff having happened yet (soon though!), it does make things easier.)

Could you steal? Of course, but you can do the same with regular counters!