That is not okay! They were lying.
it had me pretty peeved off that night so i pretty much gave up- but today since i had to get passport photo pictures taken anyway i decided to give it another try. i will make sure to never go back during the night again, one of the employees even got into a tiff with a woman who didn't want to do the self check-out and so was waiting on the regular check out line; he was like "it's so simple just do it" and she said she didn't want to so he just grabbed all her stuff and was like "here, here" and started scanning everything very brusque manner :/