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Comment by kugelblitz | Hacker News Reader

In Germany you always bag everything yourself and in the discount stores you have 1.4 seconds per item to pack stuff while the cashier is sliding stuff towards an area of maybe 60cm x 100cm (2 feet by 3 feet) where if you bag it too slow you'll hold up the line and people will look at you.

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I usually handle this by dumping the purchases back into the cart and bagging everything someplace to the side after paying.

Lidl is famous (or notorious) for its demon-speed cashiers, and they actually worked hard both to train them and to make packaging easier for the scanner to "see"[1]. I don't see them implementing self-checkout soon.

[1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/114753219/LIDL-Packaging-Gui...

There is self checkout in some lidl uk stores.

This is why you should pay cash, folded in half, and in awkward denominations as it can give you those few extra seconds to finish bagging while the cashier puts the bills away and gathers the change :)

By now I'm quite efficient, haha.

Heavy stuff in the beginning, fragile stuff at the back, from large to small (so that I bag the heavy and large stuff in the bottom and then fragile and small I squeeze in carefully).

I recently heard of a tip from people who become anxious at the cashiers: Fruits and veggies at the end, because often they need to weigh it and sometime also input numbers manually, this gives those extra few seconds at the end.

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