I remember Aldi having no prices and no barcode scanner at the end of the nineties. Cashiers were supposed to know articlecodes by heart and type them in the cash register system.*
One of the better supermarket chains in the Netherlands have fast cashiers , also rated by their speed but without losing a customer friendliness that doesn't look fake. I worked a while for the corporate office of that retailer as a consultant and looked at the procedure manual for cashiers which has details like: when you're dealing with a customer and a new customer arrives behind that customer, look at him/her and nod as a sign of having seen him/her.
Another example, for the shelf fillers: if someone asks you for the place of a product, you never tell them where it is, but walk with them and show it on the shelf.
In DR they mostly say: 'pasillo 3', or 'no hay' without even knowing or checking, since it's easier to say we don't have it than invest time and effort to find out.
yesterday i went to Jose Luis and bought 8 identical 15 peso chocolate bars for the kids in the area. took them to the counter, and the cashier scanned them individually. i would have thought that she would have *realized they were all the same, scanned the first one for price, and multiplied by amount...
optimistic thinking. she scanned them all, and when she got to number 7, the barcode would not take. so, the line in building behind me , while she is entering the code manually, hoping for it to register. after 5 tries, it finally did.*
i wonder how long these people would hold a job in a first world country.