I had to run to WalMart tonight to pick up a couple of things and, of course, the lines were excruciatingly long...and that was at 9:00 p.m. The self-checkouts were closed, though I may have had some trouble there anyway since I had alcohol (I'll tell ya that story tomorrow) so I queued up a prepared for the wait.
But they have a new system. Now, I'm not claiming that I breezed through by any stretch of the imagination, but it would have been much longer if not for their new fangled ring-you-up-while-you're-in-line set up.
Basically, a checker with a rolling cart for bagging scans a card which she gives to you, then she scans and bags your stuff. You give the card to the cashier when you get there and all you have to do is pay. So while the 'real' cashier rings up the items of one customer, the traveling checker rings up the items for the customer behind - twice the scanning/ringing/bagging in the same amount of time. Yay!
I used to do this at my store after we got our fancy fabric scanners. They were "strictly to be used at the cutting table", but I soon found they had many, many more creative uses - better/faster customer service was just one of them.