Ethnography Study

The ethnography I chose involved the study of individuals at the self-checkout lines at Kroger. My main emphasis was to study their performance. I recorded the time it spent for scanning and bagging, paying, and ultimately leaving the station entirely. I gained a lot of insight about the customers who struggled with the idea. I found that the machine works in a very serial way while the operators felt they could be more efficient working in parallel. The users who could operate the machines most efficiently followed the machine's instructions obediently. Whether they have had enough experience to know this is the best course of action or whether their thought process matched with the setup is beyond what my data provided me. I also found that no matter how expert or inexperienced the user was, produce was a major time sink. Overall, i found this study to be interesting and informative.