Flagged for Helping

An Interview Study of Self-Checkout Floor Attendants and the Assist Index That Scores Every Override Against Them

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 34 self-checkout floor attendants across nine supermarket and strip-mall sites, coding what triggers a bagging-area alert in attendants' own vocabulary and matching it against the same events as logged by the Assist Index. The two accounts agree closely on only one of four common categories, and attendants whose banks generate more logged assists now rank lower on the Index's shift-priority tier.

@misc{slop_icxqz9,
  author       = {Iben Chikere and Anneke Tolan and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Flagged for Helping: An Interview Study of Self-Checkout Floor Attendants and the Assist Index That Scores Every Override Against Them},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.icxqz9},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-self-checkout-floor-attendants-icxqz9/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}