St. Louis Finds Common Cause in a Divided World: Anger at Schnucks

Too often, our differences can seem insurmountable. In these divided times, we tend to function as a fractured society almost by default, one that pits us against each other over the most inconsequential of differences — red vs. blue,  woman vs. man, west of I-270 vs. those who prefer to live adjacent to such novel things as "culture" and "civilization."

But once in a while, some unifying force comes along with a pull so strong it can't help but bring us together. Like a pair of magnets of opposite polarity joining as one, we unite — and we are stronger for it. This past week has offered the St. Louis area one such moment, as citizens of all stripes set aside the things that make us different and embrace that which makes us the same.

That's right: We're talking about our collective hatred of Schnucks' new self-checkout guidelines.

St. Louis' largest homegrown grocery chain unleashed its new policy (henceforth dubbed The Calamity) upon an unsuspecting St. Louis on Thursday, February 1. The fine print of The Calamity limits self-checkout purchases to just 10 items or less — fully half of the previous limit, and now also rigorously enforced.

Union leadership touted the change as a win-win for both employees and customers.

“A more full-service operation has the benefit of being good for our hard-working union partners and will help Schnucks conduct more efficient business,” said UFCW Local 655 President David Cook in a statement on February 2. “Our partners in these stores enjoy interacting with customers and making connections, and it gives those shoppers a greater overall experience."

A more full-service operation does sound nice! Some of us even remember the days when we didn't have to deal with any sort of self-checkout whatsoever at the grocery store, a time when a full force of actual people were instead employed to scan our items and bag them for us. A return to even a fraction of that experience would indeed surely be welcomed by both customer and employee alike.

The situation on the ground, however, has not lived up to the promise of its implementation. Ever since The Calamity was introduced, Schnucks shoppers across the St. Louis region have taken up arms in a show of unity not seen since back when we collectively ran Stan Kroenke out of town on a rail. Social media has been in an uproar, with neighborhood groups abuzz with dissatisfied customers who were forced to shuffle through the overcrowded full-service lines to make their purchases. Even as I type, the top post on St. Louis Reddit is one titled "Schnucks lines," with 284 upvotes and 279 comments.

"This new policy is a total disaster," that post, by Reddit user burritofan41, reads. "There is still no one checking people out and the self-checkout sits empty. Just waited 1/2 hour to check out. Looks like it is Dierbergs or Fresh Thyme from here on out until the policy changes."

The responses to that post are similar. Simply put, the reviews are in — and the people are not impressed.

"Here's me at Schnucks Arsenal around 2:00pm with a 16 item cart, staring longingly at the 7 open self-checkouts," writes madanthony. "I got shoo-ed out of self-checkout. By the time I checked out, the full-service line had ballooned back to the red sign where the self-checkout line starts. Shockingly, 5 out of 7 full-service lanes were staffed. Still not enough."

"This whole thing has been strange," a Redditor identified only by a string of numbers adds. "Obviously if they are clamping down on self-checkout they need more staffing but it seems some of the locations didn't get that additional staffing. It's almost like they don't want this to succeed."

"Oh, it makes total sense," allenkcrain writes. "They don't want people to steal things from self-checkout, but they also don't want to hire more employees to make regular checkout lanes go smoothly, so their clever solution is simply to give their customers an extremely bad experience."

That last poster in particular seems to hit the nail on the head. It's true that self-checkout aisles have been notoriously bad for loss prevention efforts in stores where they've been introduced. (In my defense, I have not been properly trained on these machines.) Scaling back on those would certainly make shoplifting far more difficult, but that comes at a price, and that price is the cost of labor for a proper workforce.

And while the union did indeed celebrate The Calamity upon its implementation, we have to think they'd be even happier with more jobs for their workers. The haggard looks on the faces of the poor employees forced to police the new policy tell us that the rank-and-file is less enthused than advertised as well. Things would be a lot better for everyone if corporate would just loosen up those purse strings.

A full-service force of trained employees getting paid a fair wage for their important work? Now that's something we can all unite behind.


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