Hy-Vee is a major grocery store chain with over 280 locations in the United States. As with many grocery chains and retailers, they utilize self-checkout at their stores.

But not for long: Hy-Vee just announced that they will be phasing out those self-checkout machines and lines in favor of a human interaction.

Each Hy-Vee location has a choice on whether to do so — it’s up to local management.

However, those that aren’t phasing it out completely are going to move toward making the self-checkout areas speedy express lanes, with a ban on baskets holding 12 items or more.

Tina Potthoff, company spokesperson, says:

“We just want to provide a better customer experience in several of our stores by bringing back the face-to-face interaction with our employees that we had pre-COVID-19.”

We’ve all seen the memes that suggest that some of us would rather not have that face-to-face interaction — we just want to get in and out and not be spoken to or judged for our purchases.

If you want that luxury at Hy-Vee moving forward, you might have to search for one of their locations that still have self-checkout and grab less than 12 items so you can have no human contact.

The unspoken thing here is that a lot of Americans believe that self-checkout not only allows for shoplifting, it encourages it to a point. Phasing out self-checkout and saying it’s for more in-person interactions could be a guise to downplay shoplifting.

Only time will tell if this is a positive or negative for this grocery chain.