Will Lubbock Accept This Controversial New Check Out?

There is hardly a day when I don't see someone from Lubbock complaining about self-checkout.

Sure, people want to complain about having to show their receipts, but I think it's a sense of entitlement and that they want to be "served" when they are paying for goods and services. In other words, they want to, just for a moment, feel like they are above other people when spending their almighty dollar.

I guess we could debate self-checkout all day long, but now I have a very peculiar twist for you, and that's a self-checkout, that's actually a check-in. Are you confused yet? I certainly was when I had to experience it myself.

I recently visited family on the West Coast and flew in and out of the Long Beach Airport. It is a small airport and not that bigger than the Lubbock International Airport. Size is where the similarities end because the airport is very high-tech.

As you know it's always a mad rush to get checked in, and I was a bit stunned to have to deal with self-check-in for luggage. On one hand, it seems like it's an easy process but on the other, who else is afraid they'll mess up and lose their luggage?

For the un-indoctrinated (and I'm far from an expert), you scan your boarding pass, enter a bunch of information and it spits out an extremely long tag (that is hard to pull apart) that you put on your luggage. You then take your luggage to the people who used to do all of this for you.

It's a weird process and the instructions could be better, especially when it comes to the instructions for putting the tag on your luggage, but it did appear to speed things up a bit. There were at least a dozen of these units so there was little to no waiting. I also should mention they were being used by SouthWest Airlines, so you can expect to see them here sooner or later.