it was weird, a lot of stores around here have never adopted self checkout, but many of them did during the pandemic and still have substantial floor space devoted to them. my usual store has 8 of them, but in recent months they have gone from only having them available at certain times of day (usually off-peak hours), to not having them available at all (although, oddly, they are still always turned on)
while as far as i can tell they haven't hired any more people since the pandemic to keep up with the increased foot traffic. they are betting (probably correctly) that at least for a while, people will put up with really long delays because there aren't many other stores nearby
