[HN Gopher] The failure of self-checkout technology
___________________________________________________________________
The failure of self-checkout technology
Author : LaksiMati
Score : 140 points
Date : 2024-01-16 09:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| To me, this seems very anglophone: although I also prefer the
| cashier and use self-checkout only if there's a queue, imx it
| always works and never has queues. (for large shopping we let
| them deliver, so in-store for us is always small numbers of
| items)
|
| (as for "retail shrinkage": here newspaper boxes do have a slot
| for coins but don't have a lock on the door)
| transfire wrote:
| I love them. How quickly people forget... waiting in line for
| over 10 minutes wasn't all that uncommon back it the day.
|
| Doesn't really matter though. The next gen tech is coming soon.
| You won't have to scan anymore and theft will be next to
| impossible.
| cpursley wrote:
| I assume you mean being able to walk out the front door with
| the goods and have them charged to you automatically. But how
| does this address the current US epidemic of people stealing
| goods by just walking in and out because there's no criminal
| charges under a certain amount in some jurisdictions? Seems
| like this problem will just amplified, leaving to more
| shuttered stores.
| garblegarble wrote:
| I'm sure at some point a company will identify people on
| entry and then simply sell the value of the stolen items as
| debt to a debt collection agency...
| Kathula wrote:
| >theft will be next to impossible
|
| This sounds like some tech utopia t thinking. What's gonna stop
| someone just grabbing something and walking out? The employees?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Probably it'll scan your card upon entry.
| dfox wrote:
| The general idea is to use something like UHF RFID to scan
| the whole shopping cart at once (there are even UHF RFID tags
| that can interoperate with EAS systems). The technology
| exists and is suprisingly cheap and is used by some some
| clothing retailers. And that points to the main issue: you
| have to somehow apply the tags to the items, that is easy to
| do if you work closely with the manufacturers and only sell
| your own brands, but somehow non-trivial for something like
| grocery store.
|
| In theory there is an standardized mapping of the whole GS1
| labeling system onto UHF RFID and the only thing that
| prevents universal deployment is some kind of critical mass.
| Somewhat surprisingly the standards even take into account
| the privacy issues inherent in that and the tags do not have
| fixed physical address (unlike HF RFID/NFC with 1wire-style
| deconflicting UIDs) and the contents can be progressively
| masked out, with command to completely disable the tag being
| mandatory.
|
| On the other hand, first demonstration of that I can remember
| was by Siemens in 1991, so there is probably another 30 years
| to go for that to become widespread :)
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Maybe a door that will not open.
|
| Although it sounds a bit too much for a store, technically it
| could be done.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| - Open the pod bay door, HAL.
|
| - Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
| flacebo wrote:
| I was really surprised how futuristic the shopping experience
| in Decathlon is. Every item has a unique rfid (or something)
| tag, and all you have to do is put them in a box at checkout,
| and it scans them automatically.
|
| Most of their items has this tag inside the regular tags, I
| guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular
| store.
| ale42 wrote:
| > I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular
| store.
|
| Also very uneconomical. RFID tags have a cost, while printing
| a barcode on a package that is anyway printed is totally
| free. Unless there's a clear economical advantage that
| compensates for the lost revenue, this is a no-go for less
| expensive items like what you find in a grocery store.
| noirscape wrote:
| Auto-payment stuff has been tried before in some places, but
| it's largely a failure. It's too prone to generate false
| positives in both directions (not detecting purchased goods and
| the usual rigmarole of failing to properly identify a customer
| because facial recognition tech isn't that good).
|
| Self-checkout seems to be the happy middle ground where the
| lost turnover/angry number of customers is reasonable enough
| for it to be possible.
|
| People really don't like "computer says no" when their money is
| involved and that's the barrier you need to clear before auto-
| checkout is a thing.
| darajava wrote:
| I think they work quite well on average. Very efficient space and
| time-wise in densely populated cities like London.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I don't use a cashier if self-checkout is available.
|
| Supermarkets where I live have 2-6 kiosks, and there is usually
| one employee overseeing it and helping people. Once in a while a
| kiosk will beep and the employee has to pick out a few random
| items and scan them. If they scan something you didn't pay for -
| you're in trouble.
| scott_w wrote:
| I'm surprised to read this because my personal experience is
| they've gotten better now they're at critical mass. I feel like
| I'm able to get through them quicker than a staffed checkout.
|
| I definitely see the issue with theft. I do suspect that this is
| a result of tech failures. Customers just go "fuck this, it
| doesn't scan so I'm not paying." It's not unreasonable, given the
| issues with staffing them when there are technical issues.
| fredley wrote:
| It's interesting that despite being a BBC article, the customers
| supposedly ditching them are nearly all US retailers, with only
| one very minor UK retailer mentioned. From my experience (in the
| UK) they tend to work well if staffed appropriately, and are easy
| and quick to deal with the vast majority of the time.
| polotics wrote:
| In the US, I would never trust a shop's self-checkout to be
| honest and fair, I would expect some half-built AI to
| misclassify me as a thief, then get swatted, tazed, or worst. I
| think self-checkout implicitly relies on a degree of social
| cohesion and trust, freeloading on shards of societal good
| whilst contributing only de-humanization in return.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Curious. Obviously this is just just anecdote, but all the shops
| I use regularly (in the UK) have been increasing the number of
| self-checkouts and upgrading the systems. My local Waitrose has
| stripped out a whole load of basket tills and replaced them with
| a larger self-checkout area with upgraded hardware that is
| noticably better/more reliable.
|
| Perhaps this is a location or shop specific effect?
| curiousgal wrote:
| For UKer, is it just me or is the M&S self-checkout system by
| far the worst one ?
| jimbobjimface wrote:
| Yes! They have the worst scanners, no idea where you're
| supposed to position the barcode so I end up waving it around
| for 10 seconds before it gets scanned.
| chippiewill wrote:
| The software on the system itself is, but M&S is my favourite
| experience of all because in my store they have twice as many
| self checkouts as anyone else, they have an appropriate
| number of attentive staff directing people to empty self-
| checkouts / sorting issues, and they haven't bothered with
| scales which slows things down.
| odiroot wrote:
| I find ASDA's to be the worst. Visibly very old computers,
| lagging and failing to react to touches.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| It varies between shops. Some M&S seemingly have the slow old
| ones with the tiny bagging areas, but some of the recently
| renovated shops have the Waitrose-style faster machines with
| no bagging scale at all.
| gregoriol wrote:
| This article looks like written by a 60+ years old: it's
| definitely not a failure for 30-something technology-able
| people. It may be complicated for people with habits of
| cashiers and non-techy, but the near-future is going to be
| self-checkout. The real future will be no-checkout though: just
| take the stuff you need and go, shops would be able to detect
| what you got there and bill you.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Where I often see these things, their UI/UX is horrible. I'm
| a bit of a gadget-geek and rather a tech-savvy person, and
| yet I did make mistakes with them and wasted time because of
| the UI/UX.
|
| > The real future will be no-checkout though: just take the
| stuff you need and go, shops would be able to detect what you
| got there and bill you.
|
| I really hope not. That would be a privacy nightmare. And how
| would I then pay in cash?
| gregoriol wrote:
| Well, maybe there will be some validation at the exit of
| the shop, maybe a message on the phone to check that you
| indeed bought those things. But cash is going to be gone
| too in the future-future.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| > But cash is going to be gone too in the future-future.
|
| Like famine, poverty, cancer and CSS? ;-)
|
| Yeah, sure.
|
| Seriously though: history shows that if official money is
| not trusted (for some reason), another form emerges. So
| no, cash will be there as long as humankind exists.
| gregoriol wrote:
| It'll be marginal at some point, like people riding
| horses to work.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Maybe, though I doubt it. Cash has some advantages which
| make it very appealing in certain circumstances.
| Anonymity is only one of them, and probably not even the
| most important one - cash does not rely on network being
| available.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Where do you live where there isn't 24/7 internet
| saturation from at least three different sources? When
| the internet goes out, the stores just close.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| What about when the internet goes down for several weeks
| or months...?
| red_admiral wrote:
| There certainly seems to be a variation in quality of the
| machines across different UK retailers, or maybe some have the
| tolerances in their scales set much more finely than others.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Same in my local area. Also I find it very good for my own
| usage, and there's variance of different self checkout machine
| systems.
|
| One where you use a remote to scan the products as you add them
| to cart, then just put away the remote. The other one where you
| scan at the station.
|
| I would say I see 5x reduction of actual people working behind
| the checkout.
|
| And I basically rarely wait in queues any longer.
|
| I have never witnessed a singular tech failure either.
| chippiewill wrote:
| > I have never witnessed a singular tech failure either.
|
| The newer gen hardware is much better than the old stuff and
| is now pretty reliable. Some of the older machines were
| painfully unreliable.
|
| My closest big Sainsburys only just upgraded from the
| original generation stuff and they perpetually had a quarter
| of their self checkouts broken for various reasons. I once
| saw them have a technician out to service all the machines
| one day, and the very next day 2 of them were already broken.
| garyclarke27 wrote:
| I'm surprised RFID hasn't taken over. Scanning the whole basket
| in one go is way more convenient and faster than fiddly labour
| intensive Barcode scanning of individual items. RFID is now very
| cheap and the benefits of saved: labour, time, theft prevention
| etc are huge. Decathlon is the only retailer I have seen use
| this.
| seszett wrote:
| RFID doesn't work that well when more than a handful tags are
| present at the same time. Even at Decathlon it doesn't always
| work perfectly.
|
| As I said in another comment, I think it works for Decathlon
| because you usually only buy a few items, but it probably
| wouldn't work for a supermarket where people have a dozen
| identical things in their cart, and often 50 or 100 total
| items.
| red_admiral wrote:
| My guess is the price of a RFID tag on every single product is
| still uneconomical. Decathlon can do it for clothes and sports
| equipment, but are you really going to stick a tag on every
| PS0.27 can of baked beans?
| 6510 wrote:
| In NL, for a long time, you get some money back when you
| return glass bottles and large plastic ones to the store. A
| few years ago they added small plastic bottles and after that
| all drinks in aluminum cans. The goal is to add more
| packaging. (Disposable plates, cups, forks, spoons and knifes
| are now banned.)
|
| Checking out is much less dirty than checking the packaging
| back in.
|
| It isn't unthinkable for all products/packaging to get an
| RFID tag. On that scale they will be cheaper and perhaps some
| can be reused. Passive tags cost only 8 cent atm.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Supermarkets typically only have a gross profit of a few cents
| per item. Even ignoring the logistical complexities of getting
| those tags onto the product, it's a complete non-starter simply
| because of the cost of the tags.
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| Uniqlo is using RFID too at least in France. Both work pretty
| well and the speed of checkout is unmatched. But this works for
| Uniqlo and Decathlon because they only sell their own products.
| Supermarkets come with more hurdles, as products don't
| typically have any tag attached and are also selling bulk.
|
| I also suspect you need an average price per product that's too
| high for supermarkets to make it worth it.
| seszett wrote:
| I haven't had the same experience either as in this article,
| whether in France (where self-checkout has been a thing in most
| supermarkets for ten years or so I'd say), Belgium where it has
| arrived more recently, or the UK from time to time.
|
| It works fine in most stores, and the queue is not infrequently
| _longer_ than in manned tills because many people seem to prefer
| the convenience of self-checkout, that 's my case too. The few
| stores I knew which had painful self-checkout machines (usually
| related to weighing items, and needing precise timing between
| putting the scanned item on the right-hand platform and scanning
| the next item) seem to have fixed their problems in the last few
| years.
|
| Many stores are moving to scan-as-you-go, you scan your customer
| card when entering, get a handheld scanner, and just hang it down
| and pay when leaving. With a random but infrequent check by
| personnel. This is by far the most convenient method and I see it
| in almost all supermarkets now (well, the French and Dutch chains
| that operate in Belgium at least, but now that I think of it, it
| seems the Belgian ones don't do it). There's also the Decathlon
| system where every item has an RFID tag and you just put
| everything down and it detects things without scanning, but I
| think it works because people generally don't buy lots of things
| at once at Decathlon (a large sports apparel and equipment
| store). I don't think this is viable for supermarkets.
|
| Also, being "caught" not having scanned something (just
| forgetting to scan before putting something in the cart must be
| rather common, it's human) never seems to be a problem, it
| triggers a full rescan and probably increases the chance of
| getting checked later one, but even that doesn't always seem the
| case.
|
| So from my point of view, it's clearly not a "spectacular
| failure", customers certainly don't hate it, and it's not going
| to be abandoned anytime soon.
| sschueller wrote:
| There are benefits to self-checkout not mentioned in the article.
| Space.
|
| This is probably not an issue in many countries but for example
| in Switzerland where space is limited in many stores this makes a
| huge difference. You can have double or triple the checkout
| points than if you had regular checkouts.
|
| I have seen optimized regular checkouts (no conveyor belts) in
| super markets now as well but they still require double the space
| than a self checkout.
|
| Generally I also only see 1 attendant for 10 or so self-checkout
| machines. They carry a special phone which lets them deal with
| age checks or random inspections. In some places the random
| inspection can even be done without the attendant (the attendant
| can release the register to allow you to follow the steps
| yourself.).
| kioleanu wrote:
| I'll leave a comment I've made last time this came into
| discussion:
|
| Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with
| stores rushing to put them to use and namely:
|
| 1) they have very bad interfaces
|
| 2) they don't trust customers at all
|
| 3) it's easy to report cases to the police and
|
| 4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive
| is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the
| person caught)
|
| Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not
| insignificant number of people having police files for missing an
| item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on
| Reddit.
|
| Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because
| they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the
| store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the
| store's app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without
| me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning
| for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say
| me having to operate two devices that I've never seen in my life
| and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I'm glad
| they didn't call the police.
|
| I don't use self-checkouts anymore.
| jdietrich wrote:
| I think that's a Germany problem rather than a self-checkout
| problem.
| soco wrote:
| I tend to agree on this. I never heard such (horror) stories
| in Switzerland where self-scanning is also present for the
| two major retailers.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Thats more of a thieve problem facing the consequnces of
| their actions.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone living here, besides all those points, I have seen
| what these machines have made to employment in supermarket
| chains in Portugal, hence I tend not to be yet another
| statistic of people adopting them.
|
| Rather have my actions support the employees.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| However surely 'riding shotgun' (i.e. being there to help
| customers when things go wrong) on self checkouts is more
| interesting than mindlessly scanning items all day? (I don't
| know, I've done neither)
|
| Furthermore, if there is less work to be done in
| supermarkets, then people can spend more time doing more
| interesting/productive work or simply enjoying their leisure.
| The issue is not that this (or any) automation is destroying
| people's livelihoods, but that the value added is being
| predominately captured by the already wealthy.
|
| Portugal does suffer from an excess of 'work is for the
| workers' mindset, which is part of the reason it is so poor
| (compared to other Western European countries).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah like gettting unemployment support money.
| seszett wrote:
| Cashiers in the age of self-checkout machines are IMO a good
| example of a useless job, I'd rather prefer these people do
| something else with their time.
|
| I would even feel guilty to make them work when they aren't
| actually needed. Indeed, in the current system if they don't
| work they don't get money, but to me it's a wealth
| distribution problem. I'd rather have them get the same money
| and do whatever they like. It would be a net gain for society
| and a loss for nobody.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Assuming there is usefull job to get instead.
|
| I bet many would rather do a useless job than staying at
| home getting Hartz IV.
| seszett wrote:
| That's the wealth distribution problem I was talking
| about.
|
| I bet many would rather do hiking, writing or going to
| the cinema if they were paid the same. And since their
| job is useless already, it wouldn't change much. It
| wouldn't actually be a loss for anyone compared to the
| situation now (modulo the price of the machines and their
| maintenance, which is much less than a cashier's salary).
| However, replacing them with machines _and_ giving them
| less money is a win for the shareholders, and that 's
| what counts most in our system.
| byyll wrote:
| It's a loss of even more human interaction. And there are a
| lot more useless office jobs.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Cashiers in the age of self-checkout are attracting old-
| fashioned customers. Without those cashiers you would lose
| a large customer base >60. So in itself it's not useless as
| people can't cope with technology and need human
| interaction.
|
| I've seen whole development teams that were more useless
| then that.
| V__ wrote:
| This is not my experience at all. Can you tell what retailers
| you are using, so I can avoid them?
|
| If I don't have to otherwise, I only go to the store with a
| self-checkout near me. There are some ux problems which they
| should improve but all in all I'm happy.
| fallenhitokiri wrote:
| Same here, not my experience at all. It would also be
| interesting if the stores are franchises vs corporate owned.
|
| We have Rewe, Kaufland and IKEA supporting self checkout
| around here and the experience is decent. The interface is
| not the best. Sometimes a scan fails, but there's always
| someone close by who can help.
| kioleanu wrote:
| My problem was with Obi. Most stories I read on Reddit were
| from Rewe, especially when using those self scanning guns.
|
| DM has indeed some pretty good self checkout tills. IKEA is
| pretty good also. Obi and Bauhaus are abysmal.
| notahacker wrote:
| That's a store policy problem; it shouldn't be difficult for
| them to confirm that a payment has been made for the equivalent
| set of items within the last 5 mins, and even possible for them
| to cross reference with your card.
|
| When I got stopped walking out of a supermarket with an item
| with an RFID tag on it, I don't think the security guard (who
| had no direct view of the self checkouts) even bothered to
| check that, just asked me to confirm the checkout that I'd used
| and roughly how much I'd paid for it. And sent me on my way
| with the advice that it might be a good idea to ask for a
| receipt when buying electronic items in case they were faulty
| and I needed to return them!
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I've accidentally failed to scan an item in the UK before which
| was caught during a random check. They just said "don't worry,
| it happens sometimes" and took me to pay for the item.
|
| I do wonder how differently it would go down if I was a young
| black man.
| acd wrote:
| I prefer to talk to a real human.
|
| 1. Human is nicer than cold robot 2. Liability to scan items is
| the stores responsibility
| camkego wrote:
| Number 2 is a big deal. Another comment in this thread is by a
| shopper who has been banned from a store for having missed an
| item. This might be a good reason not to use self check out.
| tnbp wrote:
| Both are true, #2 is huge. I would like to add: 3. Self-
| checkout displaces workers to the benefit of stores and the
| detriment of society at large.
| piva00 wrote:
| I have almost no issues with self-checkout in Sweden. There's the
| odd one requiring me to weigh every item after checking them in
| the cashier but most do not require that.
|
| I blip my card, scan my items while bagging them, and finish the
| purchase on the terminal. Random checks from an employee happen
| every 10th/20th time I use one and it's pretty painless.
| rimeice wrote:
| I find it interesting that the experience of having a human
| interaction with a cashier is rarely discussed in this debate.
| It's such a good opportunity to impart your brand as a retailer
| through a human to human conversation and leave a customer with a
| positive impression. I'm less loyal to a machine than a person I
| recognise through several interactions from my local community.
| There must be a cost associated with this for the retailers
| leaning on this strategy.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| This. I know the people at my local grocery store and always
| chat with them.
| 6510 wrote:
| Here they use to sit behind conveyor belts and now they do
| almost nothing and stand at the self check out.
|
| You can still chat with them, they have time for it now but
| even if you couldn't, if I had to chose between those 2 jobs
| I would rather not chat with you. That's putting it
| politely...
|
| We have 3 systems, the conveyor belt, a hand held device with
| which you can scan products while shopping or you can scan
| everything at the check out. They check 3-4 products for one
| in about 5 customers.
|
| It's a great system. I can do shopping during rush hour
| without standing in line or having to dump everything on the
| conveyor and bag it again in some neurotic ritual.
| rimeice wrote:
| > if I had to chose between those 2 jobs I would rather not
| chat with you. That's putting it politely...
|
| Why not? I think I'm missing the insinuation there...
| wao0uuno wrote:
| Not having to interact with a cashier is the exact reason why I
| prefer self checkout. I dread the thought of a cashier trying
| to have small talk with me. What disgusts me even more are
| fake, paid for smiles. I don't want any of that.
| secretsatan wrote:
| This is why I love self checkout, I find chatty customers in
| front of me to be immensely frustrating when I just want to get
| my shopping done.
|
| Other irritants are the ones who watch the cashier scan every
| item and waiting to pay before they even think of clearing
| their items from the conveyor thing, so you have to wait for
| them to mess around putting their wallet away, then get out
| their shopping bag and start packing
| chasd00 wrote:
| If grocery stores wanted to promote their brand through the
| checkout process they'd tell their cashiers to not say a word.
| Most cashiers at my local grocery store are teens who hate
| working there.
| Faaak wrote:
| I really like those that you can find in Switzerland (either in
| Coop or Migros).
|
| The basic assumption is "trust the customer". Thus, the self-
| checkout devices don't have the annoying "you must weight the
| article you just scanned".
|
| You just scan them one by one, add them to your bag, pay at the
| end, and that's it. Sometimes (it happens to me around 1/year)
| you get a random search, which is not that bad as they just
| randomly scan ~10 articles from your cart and it just beeps (i
| guess ?) if they're not paid for in your receipt.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Co-op in the UK has that as well. I don't know if it's the same
| for every area, but the one near friends of ours that we pop
| into on the way to theirs just has a scanner.
| baloki wrote:
| They also run facial recognition on anyone who uses them
| though :/
|
| This article mentions the south of England but they've rolled
| it out country-wide since:
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coop-facial-recognition
| pjmlp wrote:
| Trust like in Switzerland is a very rare thing in most
| countries, you will seldom see newspaper stands with money
| boxes where everyone is expected to take one single paper out
| and leave the money in the tiny box, anywhere else this would
| fail.
| seszett wrote:
| I don't know about newspapers in Switzerland, but self-
| checkout machines don't usually weigh items in France or
| Belgium either (or the Netherlands, if AH stores in Belgium
| are representative of those in the Netherlands) and these
| countries probably aren't as fetishised to be trustful as
| Switzerland seems to be.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In some models, you can just open the lid and take the
| newspaper if so inclined.
|
| https://www.gettyimages.de/detail/foto/row-of-newspaper-
| vend...
| vjjsejj wrote:
| > Trust like in Switzerland is a very rare thing in most
| countries
|
| I'm in an Eastern European country and have the same machines
| in some supermarkets, no scales, no gates just scan the stuff
| and go.
|
| That would've been unimaginable 15-30 years ago. Theft and
| violent crime rates were sky high. Having your home broken
| into or even getting mugged in broad daylight wasn't that
| special (these days you have a high chance of getting a story
| in a national newspaper at least if you get mugged).
|
| Of course it's far from perfect and there are other issues
| that need to be solved. However under the right circumstances
| significant change is possible even during relatively short
| timeframes.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| These are a thing in the _United States_ , the country about
| which the article is written:
| https://l450v.alamy.com/450v/c8xnfn/usa-today-news-racks-
| new...
| rimeice wrote:
| Agree, the experience could be _signiifcantly_ improved with
| this assumption of user behaviour. Would be interesting to do a
| study to see how many people acutally take advantage of the
| "non weighing" systems.
| ale42 wrote:
| Same experience for me, those in Coop and Migros work very
| well. Good barcode readers and fast UI, you can actually scan
| your stuff quickly if you know where the barcodes are. Those of
| Manor have a less reactive UI and strange touchscreens (you
| have to push softly for them to work or the ignore your tap).
|
| Have also used some in the UK a few years ago, and the UX was
| much worse. Usually slow user interface, some of them are even
| speaking to ask you to put down every single article... might
| be fine as tutorial, but so slow if you actually use them
| regularly.
| cmullaparthi wrote:
| Waitrose in the UK is like that. They seem to place trust in
| the customer which feels nice. I don't know if they have some
| clever ways of monitoring customers, but it feels good not to
| be treated with suspicion. I've never had anyone check my bags.
|
| Sainsburys annoys me every time. The slightest delay in putting
| the scanned item on the scale and it starts nagging you, very
| loudly. I avoid them as far as possible. M&S is the same - nice
| place to shop in, but self checkout is unpleasant.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The machines at one supermarket chains in Denmark are exactly
| the same as at Sainsbury's, even with the same woman's voice
| if you set it to English on the starting screen.
|
| However, they are much less annoying here. I assume it's all
| just parameters that are tuned to local requirements.
|
| (Have you swiped your Nectar card?)
| rimeice wrote:
| The funniest thing is that when you're stopped in the flow for
| some weight discrepency in the UK, the attendant will quickly
| type in their code and null the error without investigating it
| at all, move on to the next customer who's blocked with the
| same thing and repeat. Seems to totally void to point of having
| these anti-trust systems.
| secretsatan wrote:
| The Coop and Migros ones generally work well I find too,
| although if you get an age checked item, they can be a bit slow
| in some stores to acknowledge you.
|
| The touch screens for the ones in Manor are terrible OTH, they
| seem to require a very precise light touch, but not too light,
| I find it strange that the more "upmarket" Manor has the worst
| ones.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I only go to self-checkouts if forced to use them, I rather spend
| my time keeping those employees on the job, plus there is hardly
| a time there isn't some kind of error with those machines anyway.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > They're not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts
| estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures.
|
| The link the BBC article has to cite this is unavailable, so who
| knows what it means, but "run six figures" presumably is a little
| over PS100k. That cost, for 4 kiosks, is actually much more
| reasonable than I expected. Compare that to the salary and other
| costs of 4 cashiers and that probably pays back extremely
| quickly.
| robocat wrote:
| Definitely not failing in New Zealand. More being installed at
| large retailers all the time. Even smaller grocery stores have
| them. New Zealand is a high trust society and I haven't yet heard
| of problems with them.
|
| The User Interface on them is often pretty crappy, but they do
| work even if you need to get helped sometimes.
|
| I've never been checked, except for the scanner system at
| pak'n'save where you scan as you pick items into your cart using
| a handheld scanner and only pay at self-checkout on exit (don't
| need to scan items on exit).
| ssss11 wrote:
| Sorry I didn't read the article. I will vent though.
|
| I'm not going to go on about the surveillance tech used in
| Australia as part of the self check outs but here are a few
| gripes, the problem is a lack of trust of the customers.
|
| 1. You have to tell it you have bags (fine) then it seems if you
| have lots of bags on the platform (or bags with items in them?)
| you have to wait for an attendant to check you're not doing
| something dodgy
|
| 2. If you have other stuff in the trolley, say, your handbag or
| bags from other stores, or you put the grocery bags back in the
| trolley before you pay, you have to wait for an attendant to
| check you're not doing something dodgy
|
| 3. There are other inexplicable reasons the system gets locked up
| and needs an attendant, I haven't found rhyme or reason to some
| of them. I have though seen the attendant required to review and
| 'Ok' photos of stuff I've scanned and put in the bag.
| soco wrote:
| I believe there are self-checkouts and self-checkouts. In some
| places they don't weigh the products just rely on you scanning
| the right label - much simpler for everybody (including
| thieves).
| c1sc0 wrote:
| Not my experience at all in Belgium and the Netherlands. I have
| had zero problems with the checkouts in e.g. Albert Heyn. I even
| actively choose those over a human checkout because the
| experience is so much better.
| edh649 wrote:
| Self-checkouts, like many problems, seemed to be solved when I
| visited Japan. They have 3 stations, 1 where an employee scans
| your items and then puts them back into a new basket. They then
| direct you towards (one of many) terminals where you pay. There
| are then more spaces where you can bag your groceries.
|
| Once you've seen it you'll be baffled as to why it isn't a global
| solution. No need for the employee or others to wait while you
| count your coins or bag up, and no need for anyone to wait behind
| you while you wait for the self-service checkout to weigh each
| item individually, fail to scan etc.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| Aldis has a similar flow. One or two cashiers can handle the
| whole store as they just do scanning and collect payment.
| They're also concerningly fast at scanning. It really baffles
| me why more stores don't adopt some of their policies.
| paradox460 wrote:
| I've seen groceries that use either cart-bound computers, hand
| held scanners, or phone apps for check out as you shop systems.
| The latter two are kind of a wash when it comes to convenience,
| as you trade time at the till for time when you pick an item up
| and decide to put it in your cart or not, but the cart bound
| computer used RFID, and would automatically update as you added
| and removed items.
|
| Of course there's also things like Amazon's system, where you
| literally just walk in and out. Which is a lot tech heavier, but
| a lot more convenient too
| dagw wrote:
| By far the best self-checkout systems are the ones where you scan
| your groceries as you go and just pay when you leave. Not only
| can you pack your stuff into bags directly in your shopping cart
| as go, but you also get a running tally of how much you
| everything in your cart will actually cost you. Also if something
| cannot be scanned or gets scanned at the wrong price you notice
| instantly and can deal with it right then and there, rather
| having to deal with it when you are trying to pay and just want
| to get out of there.
| soco wrote:
| And I'm not using on-the-spot-self-scanning because almost
| every time it tells me "go to the counter for randomized
| checks" which I can understand but is actually increasing the
| hassle for me. So I'll stick to the "normal" checkout where you
| scan the bunch at the exit, and sometimes even traditional
| where you can chat the cashier when there's no line.
| rlkf wrote:
| In Norway, the trend is that shops that have a mix of both, now
| remove more and more of the cashiers and increase the number of
| self-checkouts. This wouldn't happen if the shops lost money and
| the customers hated it, so it's strange that this is the opposite
| of the U.K. Population more tuned to automation, perhaps?
| ugjka wrote:
| Norway has much less crime!
| byyll wrote:
| And why is that?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| As a UK resident, I honestly find the article a bit
| incredulous. The article doesn't justify its claim of it being
| a "spectacular" failure and all the examples are from the US.
| In the UK, despite their problems, increasingly more self-
| checkout systems are being installed, even in shops that
| previously avoided them like Lidl and Aldi. There is one high-
| profile case of them being removed in a minor chain (Booths),
| but aside from that, most shops are continuing to install them.
|
| You do get people complaining about them on
| Twitter/Facebook/Nextdoor - mostly old people - but in reality,
| I find people usually prefer to use the self-checkout. Even if
| they can be a pain sometimes.
| agubelu wrote:
| I frequently hop between Spain and the UK. Self-checkout is
| ubiquitous in the UK and people seem to almost universally favor
| using it, manned tills are a minority and generally reserved for
| larger purchases. In Spain it's quite the opposite: manned tills
| are a majority and people _actively_ avoid using self-checkout,
| even when it means going through a much longer queue.
|
| I found it an interesting cultural difference, and I can't help
| but wonder to which extent it's influenced by the preference for
| human interaction in both countries.
| iteria wrote:
| I'm American, but i have a serious preference for self-checkout
| because I can avoid tje annoyances of regular check out.
| Waiting on the person who forgot their wallet. That person who
| wants to argue about one dollar on a one hundred dollar
| purchase. The person who realized they bought to much and now
| needs to figure what they want to put back. And more.
|
| Cashiers are nice, I guess. But stores are not a social call
| for me. I want to buy my stuff and not deal with ridiculous
| people in front of me.
|
| Also self-checkouts just move faster. This probably wouldn't be
| true if stores had the same number of cashiers they used to,
| but it really reminds me of mu youth where you could be in and
| out of a store without a significant wait to check out.
|
| I lived in France for a bit and the stores were completely
| different. Speedy and plentiful lines, so that's probably the
| difference between Spain and the UK
| D13Fd wrote:
| I'm also American. I'll jump for the self checkout if there
| is an open one, but if there is a line for self-checkout, I'm
| going for a register. The self-checkout lines move so much
| slower than the regular cashier lines, because people get
| hung up on things and have to ask for help.
| mrbadguy wrote:
| I think the self-checkout suffers from a fairly common fact: it
| doesn't actually save any labour, just now the customer does the
| scanning instead of an employee. Of course, the argument goes
| that you can have more of them as opposed to staffed tills but
| that doesn't actually seem to be working out as per TFA since
| they're expensive to install.
|
| One thing that I have seen actually adding value is where there's
| a scanner that you carry around and scan items as you pick them
| up (some shops can let you do this with your phone's camera).
| This does save time and you simply pay at the end and don't need
| to scan and bag everything since you've been doing that on the
| go.
|
| Of course, these days I use the delivery service and get
| groceries delivered once a week so that's kind of the ultimate
| convenience ;)
| shellfishgene wrote:
| Why would stores invest so much into the self checkout tech if
| it does not save labor/cost?
| dekleinewolf wrote:
| The point is that the labor is moved to the customer (and is
| now unpaid labor). So it's not 'less labor' but it is
| definitely 'less labor costs'.
|
| Think 'serverless' technology - there is still a server, it's
| just no longer owned by you.
|
| Seeing how the customer had to wait for the labor to be
| executed anyway in the past, I see this as a win.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I end up with better-packed bags at scan-at-the-end self-
| checkout than with scan-as-you-go or clerk-and-conveyor.
|
| I wander around putting things in the cart, and then at self-
| checkout I sort and balance it all into bags. If I was scanning
| as I went, I couldn't carry everything. If I put it on a
| conveyor belt for staff to scan, then I don't have time to sort
| or balance when repacking.
| Solstinox wrote:
| It's nice to interact with people who are strangers. Grocery
| store employees, baristas, mechanics, service people etc.
|
| As you get older, a lot of the people you interact with regularly
| you have a responsibility for/to. Co-workers, bosses, family,
| kids.
|
| With strangers, even the grumpy interactions are fun. No
| responsibility.
| wao0uuno wrote:
| > With strangers, even the grumpy interactions are fun. No
| responsibility. So you're saying that you can be a jerk to
| these people because they don't know you? Am I missing
| something?
| ajdude wrote:
| Recently, all of the Walmarts in my area still have their self
| check out machines, but now there is an employee in front of each
| one and they treat it like a normal register.
|
| I would bring my cart over to them, and an employee will scan
| each item at the self check out. As someone who would rather just
| use the self check out to get in and out, it's been a bit
| annoying.
|
| When I asked an employee why they are staffing the self check out
| machines instead of the actual registers (which are still empty),
| she responded in saying that the self check out machines have a
| simpler interface than dealing with the traditional cash
| registers so they have begun using the self check out machines
| instead.
| punyearthling wrote:
| I prefer self-checkout simply because I'm better at bagging my
| groceries than people are. Employees don't care if your food gets
| crushed by a carton of milk, or under fill the plastic bags; and
| that's another thing - human cashiers use plastic bags here in
| the US. I like having control over my bagging situation.
| fomine3 wrote:
| This is one of a reason to prefer self checkout. Here in Japan,
| cashier people are careful but they move products from basket
| to another basket. After payment is done, I need to move
| products from basket to my bag. It's two LIFO-like moving
| operation, it's inefficient. Though in defense of traditional
| system, it should be efficient for POS system utilization .
| delichon wrote:
| > The biggest problem is theft. Not only is it easy to steal from
| self-checkout machines, it can be hard not to steal from them.
|
| This is me. At a Walmart this weekend the machine booped instead
| of beeped, and I didn't get that meant it didn't scan, and
| dropped the item into a bag. An employee was watching and swooped
| right in and fixed it. But paying that much attention meant that
| she might as well have checked me out herself, probably a lot
| faster.
|
| AI could change the economics soon, but apparently not yet.
| icedchai wrote:
| Around here, whenever there's any sort of problem with self
| checkout, the employees don't even try to diagnose the problem.
| They're not paid enough to bother. Recently, a self checkout
| machine started beeping because I had used an e-coupon that
| exceeded the total price of all the items by a couple of
| pennies. It appeared to generate a receipt, but still wanted me
| to wait. Cashier comes over, looks at the receipt, enters
| something into the machine, says it's fine, waves me out. I
| look at the receipt more closely when I get to the car: it
| literally says "transaction canceled" on the bottom. Not only
| was my purchase "free", but the electronic coupon was still
| good!
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| And do you really think that would have been different at a
| full service check out? It's the same person who still
| wouldn't care.
| icedchai wrote:
| Probably not! I naively assumed the cashier is paying more
| attention during checkout.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > This is me. At a Walmart this weekend the machine booped
| instead of beeped, and I didn't get that meant it didn't scan,
|
| I routinely forget to scan whatever is on the bottom of the
| cart. Usually cases of water but a few times it was the box of
| 32 hamburgers. I never had a cashier catch it - and they're
| invariably surprised when I come back into pay.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| A Walmart I visited recently had a camera at ankle level
| specially to show the bottom of your cart for the cashier to
| see.
|
| Another store (I forget which) had a full cart camera and
| prompted me to check my cart for remaining items because I
| had unused reusable bags in it.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > A Walmart I visited recently had a camera at ankle level
| specially to show the bottom of your cart for the cashier
| to see.
|
| I've seen that, now that you mention it. It must have been
| on a trip. None nearby have it.
|
| > Another store (I forget which) had a full cart camera and
| prompted me to check my cart for remaining items because I
| had unused reusable bags in it.
|
| That's a new one. I'm not sure if getting flagged would be
| more annoying than having to go back.
| fencepost wrote:
| My last few trips have required an employee override
| because I left the paper ad circular in the cart. Put it in
| a bag and get dinged for bagging something not scanned,
| don't bag it and get dinged for something in the cart.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Have you tried eating it before getting to the check out?
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| At the supermarket, I often plonk some loose fruit onto the
| self-checkout machine and then think "what kind of pear was
| that again?" and guess. Maybe that gets counted as 'theft' if I
| guess incorrectly and accidentally charge myself less than I
| should have.
| jljljl wrote:
| It always seemed like a huge disconnect that retailers were
| expanding self checkout and cutting hours, at the same time that
| they were complaining about higher shrink rates.
|
| While I often prefer self checkout for small purchases, the
| counter-shrink measures at make the entire experience worse --
| locked up products, weird checkpoints after you finish
| purchasing, etc.
| klyrs wrote:
| This has hit me a few times recently, in a store that installed
| self-checkout, reduced staff and started locking everything up.
| The result is that I can't find a person to unlock the product
| I want to buy. So now I drive another few blocks and skip that
| horrible experience.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > While I often prefer self checkout for small purchases, the
| counter-shrink measures at make the entire experience worse --
| locked up products, weird checkpoints after you finish
| purchasing, etc.
|
| This would be legit terrible. My shopping trips are almost all
| groceries and the few locked-down things are behind the service
| counter or at the Rx. Pseudoephederine is only restricted item
| I buy.
| hackan wrote:
| I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but
| still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the
| self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I
| suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful,
| simply drop everything in! And wait, there's more: did I say drop
| everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything?
| just put it in that basket, insert your CC and it's done. You
| don't get easier than that... So yes, let's keep self-checkout,
| and focus on improving it!
| devilbunny wrote:
| I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for
| groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is
| going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries'
| margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even
| now).
|
| But groceries are one of the _best_ examples of where this
| would be a big time-saver.
|
| I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience
| stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for
| groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big
| shopping day.
| filcuk wrote:
| For larger shopping, I like to use the scanning gun. I get
| that it's used to track me, but the fact is I get to track
| the price, pack items as I go and just pay on the way out.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| You kind of need it for the big & heavy stuff. I hit
| somewhere without one and of course half my basket was 50lb
| this and 32ct that.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Some of the UK supermarkets are bypassing the scanning gun
| now and just doing self-scan with an app. Works really
| well. Nice price checking feature in some of the apps too.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| When I started looking at RFID tech in 2004, the disposable
| tags cost maybe $.50-$1 but general consensus was the costs
| would follow a Moore's law like trajectory, halving every 2-3
| years until they were on even the cheapest items. And yet
| here we are 20 years later and I don't see RFID checkout
| systems very often at all. Are the tags still really
| expensive? Or is it the extra cost of attaching them to
| packaging?
| ky0ung wrote:
| RFID tags are ~10c (Impinj) and are getting cheaper each
| year. they're widely used in apparel stores. think it'd be
| tough to justify attaching them to low value items in a
| grocery store. self checkout prob more effective using
| computer vision
| manmal wrote:
| Are you suggesting to put trillions of copper, silicon, and
| aluminum parts on disposable items like bananas, so people
| have a slightly better shopping experience?
| nothercastle wrote:
| Absolutely worth it
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I am not suggesting it. It was widely presented as
| inevitable once the costs dropped enough. Retail
| inventory management and checkout is expensive.
| manmal wrote:
| Apologies for the strawman then. I just hope humanity can
| pass on that one, for once.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| We kind of already do that, just with plastic, adhesive,
| and ink.
| byyll wrote:
| My bananas don't have plastics, adhesive or ink and
| regardless, adding another chip to them won't make it any
| better.
| bombcar wrote:
| You've yet to experience the glory of individually shrink
| wrapped produce. Bananas and oranges especially egregious
| but the shrink wrapped watermelon was whole nuther world.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I was thinking more along the lines of produce stickers.
| manmal wrote:
| Yes, that should be reduced, not added to.
| infecto wrote:
| We already use plastic bags, paper bags, takeout food
| boxes, wrap products in plastic and sometimes styrofoam.
| From an economic perspective its not too far off to think
| that if the part gets cheap enough you can put it on
| everything.
| claytongulick wrote:
| When I was messing with RFID for a fulfillment line to
| improve handling returns, the biggest challenge was
| orientation.
|
| The cost for an RFID tag is minimal if you can guarantee
| the proper orientation. If you can't, they get very
| expensive (relatively speaking).
| djbusby wrote:
| Metrc charged $0.40 for single use RFID for cannabis plants
| starting in 2014.
| bluGill wrote:
| things like razors interfere and so they are not accurate
| enough to use. They probably work great in niches, but they
| are not a universal answer.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be
| a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are
| (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).
|
| something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery
| stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it
| just isn't worth it anymore?
|
| or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying
| other things in the store...
|
| maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let
| people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Produce is not a loss-leader. Pretty solid margins if you
| compare market prices on produce with what the supermarkets
| sell them for.
|
| And if you've been in any UK supermarket near closing time
| on a busy weekend day, you'll see that they routinely sell
| out of many/most items before restocking overnight. Stuff
| that hits its best-before date gets marked down to sell.
| Generally speaking, there isn't a huge amount being wasted.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege
| on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of
| tonnes of produce to rot.
|
| Check out getfairaboutfarming.com
| Reason077 wrote:
| It is certainly unfair to growers if supermarkets are
| reneging on purchase agreements. But the link you sent
| has just a single anecdotal "case study", and the site
| seems to be a marketing site for an organic food box
| supplier. Hardly by itself evidence of a systemic
| problem.
|
| Besides, if a purchase agreement falls though with
| produce already grown, normally what happens is the
| produce is sold on the wholesale market instead. In that
| case, growers might receive a lower price, perhaps
| resulting in a loss, but that's not as bad as leaving it
| "to rot" and getting nothing at all.
|
| Produce would typically only be dumped in the case of a
| huge market glut (when prices are so low that it is not
| even worth harvesting/transporting them), or if there are
| labour shortages making it difficult or uneconomical to
| harvest.
| Mochsner wrote:
| You ever shopped at kroger? Their produce selection is so
| bad and/or rotten that I don't even want to buy produce
| when I shop there. They don't even care and I think use it
| to drive buying more predictable goods (like canned). Their
| subsidiary Pick N Save in the midwest was similar, but not
| near as bad as Kroger in the south.
|
| We buy produce from the _cheaper_ Aldi instead, or worst
| case, the overpriced Publix (if Aldi doesn 't have it).
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead
|
| Funnily enough, in the UK, Aldi produce is generally very
| fresh and still cheap. There's plenty of turnover,
| precisely because people shop at Aldi so much.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's really the key I've found - fresh deliveries of
| produce are about the same everywhere; what matters is
| how fast the turnover is. And it varies by area which
| store is "the good one".
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Supermarkets have put a lot into adding more organic
| options and just greater variety in general in their
| produce sections. I don't think they lose money or that
| they are going anywhere.
|
| Bananas for example sell for around $0.58/lb around here.
| Which seems unprofitable but you wouldn't believe the size
| of the banana rooms that these grocers have at their
| warehouses. It is easily the largest space dedicated to a
| single sku in the warehouse.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| How much to swim in the banana pit?
| Shinchy wrote:
| Not seen it on groceries, but I know Uniqlo use this same
| method and it's fantastic.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I've used a few libraries that work like that, probably going
| back 10 or more years now. I was a little incredulous the first
| time - "You mean I really just plonk down a pile of books and
| press 'loan'? No individually placing each one spine-first in a
| tag-deactivator?"
|
| I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with
| tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with
| disposable ones
| bombcar wrote:
| Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still
| uses barcodes.
|
| No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they'd use
| RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions
| of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
| gmcharlt wrote:
| That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library
| uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with
| other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with
| the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the
| other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners
| are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much.
|
| Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not
| panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory,
| not only do they want to verify the existence of the books,
| but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for
| libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading"
| accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but
| for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that
| it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode
| scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically
| been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics
| don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.
| bombcar wrote:
| So many of these "technological solutions" end up being
| "spherical cow" type things.
|
| RFID might speed up checkout at a library by a small
| fraction, but you still have the issue that most patrons
| check out a book or two, you still have to check that the
| DVD is in the case either way, and the self-checkouts
| aren't backing up anyway.
|
| (Similarly most libraries have given up on fines, at
| least around here - the overhead of dealing with them and
| "scaring" patrons away was much worse than the people
| actively "stealing" books.)
|
| Not to even get to barcodes (like CVS files) are quite
| interoperable, and you can relatively easily change one
| barcode system to another, just my importing the data.
| RFID readers often need specific RFID tags and it locks
| you to a vendor (who often promptly goes out of
| business). Over time things like that get noticed.
| a1o wrote:
| It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body
| of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The items are also all high enough margin to cover the extra
| tag cost. Isn't going to work for supermarkets.
| hackan wrote:
| Yup, tagging and all the related costs are only reasonable
| for high-margin/relative high value products, not food
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It's not just for payment though, it also helps for theft,
| and I suppose inventory management is improved on many
| aspects as well.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it
| automatically computes everything!"_
|
| Yeah, I've seen this in a few clothing stores (Uniqlo, H&M,
| Zara). UHF RFIDs embedded in the tags.
|
| It's more for the store's benefit than anything (makes stock
| takes very easy, for example!), but the neat self checkout is a
| nice side-benefit.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It seems that in general, the US lags behind in retail
| technology.
|
| In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not
| entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like
| hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout.
|
| The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it
| instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
| govg wrote:
| Data point of just 1, but even in a small college town in the
| Midwest US, 50% or more counters at the grocery stores I've
| visited have been self checkout. Some places are almost
| entirely self checkout, to the point where if you need
| assistance it's hard to find an actual person employed by the
| store.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Same experience in a _very_ small college town in Midwest
| US. Though, the walmart did just "upgrade" their self
| checkouts. They improved nothing! They added a bunch more
| cameras and apparently the thing now has some predictive
| visual algorithm that will not allow you to scan multiple
| identical items at a time. They still haven't added the tap
| to the card terminal! Just let me tap! Everyone else does,
| crazy they haven't figured that out yet. They also have
| started making their greeters check receipts, which is
| insane knowing the culture of the again incredibly small
| town. I just walk right past them. Check my receipt in
| hell, nice old lady or wheelchair bound man, i got places
| to be!
| shric wrote:
| The ones in Australia aren't perfect though. I use Coles and
| Woolworths mostly in the Sydney CBD:
|
| - bad touch screens that lag.
|
| - even more lag when you're trying to pay.
|
| - frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff
| because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging
| area, or some other reason
|
| - unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards
| programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me
| alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap
| and pay.
|
| I still use them most of the time because there is almost
| never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or
| almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.
| scme0 wrote:
| My wife and I have found that the self checkouts at Coles
| that have the conveyor belt (like the manned checkout
| lanes) are the best as they don't have a scale so you can
| scan stuff fast and it won't make you wait for it to check
| the weight for each item. The smaller self checkouts are
| horrible though. Only ok if you're just grabbing a few
| items.
| vintermann wrote:
| On a trip to a sparsely populated part of Norway I hadn't
| been to before, I ran into my first unstaffed grocery store.
| You checked in with a bank card (they did that thing with
| reserving a 0.50 transcation) and it was self-service in
| there. Presumably someone would be in from time to time to
| restock the shelves.
| guappa wrote:
| Want to buy this vegetable? Now try to find it among these 300
| icons of vegetables! Enjoy!
| krastanov wrote:
| Or just type the name of the vegetable or just copy the
| 4-digit code on the sticker attached to the vegetable. At
| least in the US there is no problem with buying vegetables in
| self-checkout.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| The tiny stickers on all the veggies at my grocery store
| all scan just fine.
| guappa wrote:
| There are no stickers here. Just the peel. But It doesn't
| scan so well.
| downut wrote:
| I just find it almost impossible to believe that you
| regularly buy vegetables or other bulk goods via checkout
| and have few or no problems.
|
| How about that bar code label on the
| spinach/parsley/cilantro? It's paper and it gets watered
| regularly so it is not uncommon for it to be illegible,
| even to the expert parser, the human.
|
| Those stickers do fall off.
|
| Is every brussel sprout going to have a sticker? Jalapenos?
| Okra? Mushrooms? Cherry tomatoes? Now according to the
| industrial/minimize human costs imperative you buy a
| prepacked batch, and in that batch are stinkers hidden
| below the visible top layer. Onions have dry skins that
| occasionally shed... whoops there goes your sticker.
|
| Let's talk about lentils. Obvs they're going to be batched
| "for you" now, and how big a batch do you need? How about 3
| lbs, if we're following along with the Costco Walmart
| paradigm. I mean you're all happy with your 3 gals. of
| Walmart dill pickles for $3, yes? No more does the pantry
| maintain a steady less than a 1 lb inventory each of a
| dozen different legumes for you... well who does their own
| cooking these days, that's what door dash is for!
|
| And now for that "oh just look it up on helpful screen!"
| Except for at least a half dozen times the screen, either
| via the picture section or the "type the name" option, does
| _not have the item in its inventory_. For instance Pasilla
| /Poblano and Anaheim/Cubano chiles (names not precise
| anywhere) are often not present in the system. In our
| stores there is a small section containing up to half a
| dozen specialty types of tomatoes. You know, the ones that
| potentially have flavor. Since these inventories change
| more rapidly than the straight industrial space ship foods,
| I know those are at risk of not being in the system.
| Contrast to at the checkout line the checker either knows
| the name or takes my word for it, and occasionally just
| asks me the price and we're good to go. At the automated
| checkout, I just pick something close as presented (but
| cheaper, oh yes) and I move on to the next indicated item.
| Maybe I enjoy the frisson of being an industrially nudged
| criminal... it's certainly novel.
|
| All this said, for some reason where I live, in suburban
| Atlanta, the automated checkouts are quite a bit more
| popular than the human checkers, so there's typically a 10
| deep line for the automation, and maybe 2 deep occasionally
| but usually less for the humans. That's a no brainer.
| krastanov wrote:
| I do not know what to tell you, I have never had any of
| the problems you list (I live in the Northeast, but I
| doubt that matters). Apple-sized things have little
| stickers, smaller things are batched with a barcode, and
| when somehow these fail, typing the name (or synonym)
| takes less than 10 seconds.
| hackan wrote:
| Indeed, you just start typing and usually 3 letters is
| enough to click something at the screen. Of course, this
| depends greatly in the buyer being... honorable, so I can
| understand if it doesn't work in many places.
| wreckdropibex wrote:
| Your thoughts are limited by the environment you live in
| and your imagination.
|
| In other countries eg brussel sprouts, mushrooms,
| tomatoes, etc are weighed by the consumer at the
| vegetable section.
|
| - Next to the specialty tomatoes there is a label that
| says the name, price and _number_ for the specialty
| tomatoes
|
| - Pick an individual tomato or put multiple in a small
| plastic/paper bag from next to the tomatos
|
| - Put the tomatoes on a scale right next to them
|
| - Enter the _number_ from the label, no need to search
| for or type anything complex
|
| - Get a sticker with the price + barcode
|
| - Put the sticker where ever is reasonable (on the tomato
| or on the bag or where ever, no one cares where you put
| it)
|
| - In self checkout scan the sticker
|
| Or even better, use a system where you are carrying a
| scanner when pickig stuff from shelves and at self
| checkout you only have to pay, since you have already
| scanned everything.
| guappa wrote:
| Vegetables don't have stickers. They are vegetables.
|
| Ah the name... but is it a golden extra apple or a yellow
| apple? Or perhaps a extra fresh guaranteed apple?
| gosub100 wrote:
| at that point, is it really stealing to just make your
| best guess? are they going to detain you because you
| input an apple that is $0.04c cheaper than the real one?
| vonmoltke wrote:
| I believe the GP is referring to price look-up codes
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_look-up_code). These
| are often applied via sticker to the produce, as shown in
| the Wiki images. Every self-checkout system I have used
| has allowed me to directly type in the PLU for produce,
| which is what a human cashier would normally do as well.
|
| Additionally, my personal experience with things like
| this is that human cashiers aren't any better than me at
| looking up produce in the absence of a PLU code. In fact,
| I'm generally better because I know what I picked up (or
| intended to pick up), so I just look for the right name.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Ha! Even the checkers at my grocery store have problems
| with vegetables. Always a big lurch while menus are gone
| through and labels squinted at. Maybe a manager called.
|
| Ok I buy Swiss Chard and persimmons and so on, the usual
| teenage checker has never seen them before, so maybe I'm
| having more trouble than most.
| atvcatole wrote:
| Some stores here in Norway uses computer vision to identify
| the produce, I tried it out last summer and it successfully
| identified ~9/10 with the rutabaga being the one it didn't
| manage, but the touch keyboard was responsive and easy to use
| for that one.
|
| For things with more than one option (e.g. organic/non-
| organic lemons) it would show the 1-4 products it though was
| relevant and I just had to click the touch monitor on the
| correct one.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That sure is a lot of single use NFC tags though.
|
| These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned
| with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and
| helping lower our environmental impact.
| aceki wrote:
| RFID tags are already used for inventory management for some
| items/retailers. A system like this can just piggyback on the
| existing tags.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It would need to expand to every product though, right?
| From produce to packs of gum, they would all need tags that
| can be reliably scanned by the bag/cart.
| tylerhou wrote:
| I've seen it at stores where each item is relatively more
| expensive (e.g. a Uniqlo).
| imtringued wrote:
| We nowadays have disposable smart labels with integrated
| screens.
|
| Look up ynvisible
| _heimdall wrote:
| Those seem really wasteful too IMO, why do we need them?
|
| Disposable is really in the eye of the beholder. Just
| because it can be single use, or even if its biodegradable,
| doesn't change all the resources that go into manufacturing
| them in the first place.
|
| Just toss a bunch of unlabeled apples in a bin and let a
| human cashier who has already learned all the product codes
| for produce just type them in. Or if we really want self
| checkout, put a barcode at the bin and no labels on the
| apples at all.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Uniqlo's system was discussed here in December:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| bill burr has a funny bit on this.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I'm so used to self checkout, last time I used a manned checkout
| I started bagging my stuff by habit.
|
| (Only used it because I bought an electronic with a security
| hockey puck that had to be unlocked.)
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| I usually help bag my stuff if there isn't someone there
| already to help. I really don't mind and it gets me out of the
| store faster + helps the next person get through faster. I
| don't understand the mentality of just standing there
| helplessly waiting for someone to come. It's really not that
| difficult. It feels like the same energy as folks who can't be
| bothered to throw away their trash at counter-service
| restaurants and cafes that do not actually have people whose
| sole responsibility it is to bus tables. Is it really putting
| one out that much to carry their coffee cup and napkin with
| them as they walk right by the trash next to the door on their
| way out?
| kugelblitz wrote:
| In Germany you always bag everything yourself and in the
| discount stores you have 1.4 seconds per item to pack stuff
| while the cashier is sliding stuff towards an area of maybe
| 60cm x 100cm (2 feet by 3 feet) where if you bag it too slow
| you'll hold up the line and people will look at you.
| inejge wrote:
| I usually handle this by dumping the purchases back into the
| cart and bagging everything someplace to the side after
| paying.
|
| Lidl is famous (or notorious) for its demon-speed cashiers,
| and they actually worked hard both to train them and to make
| packaging easier for the scanner to "see"[1]. I don't see
| them implementing self-checkout soon.
|
| [1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/114753219/LIDL-Packaging-
| Gui...
| wiredfool wrote:
| There is self checkout in some lidl uk stores.
| itronitron wrote:
| This is why you should pay cash, folded in half, and in
| awkward denominations as it can give you those few extra
| seconds to finish bagging while the cashier puts the bills
| away and gathers the change :)
| kugelblitz wrote:
| By now I'm quite efficient, haha.
|
| Heavy stuff in the beginning, fragile stuff at the back,
| from large to small (so that I bag the heavy and large
| stuff in the bottom and then fragile and small I squeeze in
| carefully).
|
| I recently heard of a tip from people who become anxious at
| the cashiers: Fruits and veggies at the end, because often
| they need to weigh it and sometime also input numbers
| manually, this gives those extra few seconds at the end.
| 3x35r22m4u wrote:
| Back in 2006 IBM already had predicted how self- checkout should
| work[1].
|
| Their TV ad made was so cool, so well done and so "I want to live
| in this world" that became one of my favorites even today:
|
| https://youtu.be/wzFhBGKU6HA
|
| [1]https://mashable.com/article/ibm-predicts-amazon-go
| nothercastle wrote:
| And Amazon delivered and actually made it happen but still too
| early
| genman wrote:
| What country they are talking about? UK, US? I'm not sure that it
| does apply to other countries - looks to work well by my
| observations.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Just here in the US from what I can tell.
|
| I'm happy with SCO. That is, I am happy now that registers
| stopped monitoring the bagging area for weight. That was a
| miserable disaster every trip. Like when I'd buy 50lb bags of
| cat litter and cases of water.
|
| Grocery stores (I can afford) stopped the weighing and checkout
| is a good experience. I take packed carts thru SCO because
| that's usually faster than the cashiers.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It would be a nightmare to lose self checkout at Target. It would
| be a blessing to lose it at CVS. It can be done very well or very
| poorly.
| didntcheck wrote:
| Often it seems to depend on the machine settings too. E.g. in
| the UK Morrisons and the Co-Op seem to use the same hardware in
| many branches, but the former is very reliable and most
| "unexpected item events" I see are user error, whereas the
| latter seem to have a good 30% chance of complaining about the
| weight of your item even when you've done everything right
|
| The other big difference in smoothness of experience is having
| sufficient staff to come and deal with problems. Firstly,
| because user or machine error will _always_ be non-negligible,
| but also because age challenges are quite common too. It 's
| frustrating queueing and seeing a good 4 or 5 machines in a
| blocked state (and sometimes abandoned due to it) and there
| being no or insufficient staff around to unblock them
| eappleby wrote:
| Not at my CVS. They have one checkout clerk, and if there are
| more than 3 people standing in line, it can take 10+ minutes to
| checkout. With self-checkout, I'm in and out in 30 seconds.
| Presumably, they'd add more checkout clerks if they remove the
| self-checkout, but I wouldn't count on it
| ky0ung wrote:
| agreed. i've found CVS self-checkout to be the best of all
| retail stores i go to
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Right, they'd have to add more clerks to compensate. I prefer
| self checkout, but their implementation is horrible.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Our Dollar General closes the SCO at 8pm, the same time
| they send the 2nd cashier home.
|
| So for the last 2 store hours there's 1 cashier - and
| they're in back performing the 12 other duties they have.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Then it's not just my local store! CVS cashiers are
| unbearably slow, self-checkout there means i don't dread
| going there or at least can avoid the awkward conversation of
| asking to pay for sundries at the pharmacy checkout. A local
| 711, granted it's one of those concept stores with lots of
| bells and whistles, also has self checkout. They're pretty
| fast at the regular cashier line but self-checkout at 711
| makes grabbing a soda/coke and paying for it while getting
| gas even faster.
| ironSkillet wrote:
| Personally I just wish the self checkout voice at CVS didn't
| sound so aggressive when telling me to put the item in the
| bagging area. I'm on it lady, no need to be so pushy. It makes
| me uncomfortable lol.
| Havoc wrote:
| >The biggest problem is theft.
|
| That sounds like a societal failure more than a shopping tech
| failure.
|
| I personally like them...as long as they aren't the kind that
| weigh the items. Those always end up needing staff override
| because the stupid thing is too sensitive
| happytoexplain wrote:
| It is, but we don't get to declare a solution a success just
| because the thing that killed it was environmental. It must
| work in the target environment, and it seems that,
| unfortunately, US society has failed the theft test in most
| places. I live in a somewhat diverse but mostly upper-middle-
| class suburban area, and even here theft shot up with the
| machines. They couldn't sustain it.
|
| The weight thing is often enabled _because of theft_.
|
| It might not be the solution designer's "fault" if they
| couldn't figure out a workable way to account for the problem,
| but it does make the solution a "failure".
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The weight thing is often enabled because of theft.
|
| I guess the scales might also be there to help confused
| customers. A little bit. But I believe it was really about
| theft.
|
| The scales also made the experience terrible. The last
| Walmart in the area with scales got rid of them. Their SCO is
| much improved. I can't speak to Walmart's bottom line but I
| do appreciate being treated better.
|
| FWIW, this whole region has tons of poor areas and massive
| homeless communities.
| g-b-r wrote:
| There are some with good and very reliable scales and some
| where they never work, though
| steelframe wrote:
| I wouldn't mind these machine so much if they always accepted
| cash. The problem is that more often than not they don't.
|
| When I was on vacation in London about 5 years ago when Visa had
| an outage:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
|
| I was trying to pick up some food at the only grocery market that
| was within walking distance of where I was staying. The grocery
| store only had self-checkout machines. As the checkout line piled
| up, the payment system failed to process my card. I gave it
| another try with another card, and after a long wait that one
| went through. By that time as I was looking around, I noticed
| that pretty much everyone else around me was stuck at the
| machines and weren't moving on. I assumed there was some sort of
| outage going on.
|
| I guess I came within a few seconds of needing to scramble to try
| to find a way not to go hungry that night. I had plenty of cash
| on me, but that wouldn't have helped me complete the purchase
| because the machines simply didn't accept cash. There was no
| obvious way to get an employee's attention so I could give them
| my money. They were probably stuck with some of the other
| customers scratching their heads as to why the magic card
| charging system, which appeared to have been the only possible
| way to pay for food at that grocery store, wasn't working.
| atmavatar wrote:
| Agreed - that's been a huge annoyance to me as well. What's
| worse is many of the self-checkout stations around where I live
| used to accept cash, but the stores have been transitioning a
| larger and larger proportion of them to card-only.
|
| Another annoyance I've run into at one store in particular is
| that the self-checkout machine no longer pre-calculates the tax
| amount. Now, I have to hit the pay button before I'm given the
| true amount due.
|
| The self-checkout machines are getting worse over time. It's
| quite reminiscent of how ATMs have evolved.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I wouldn't mind these machine so much if they always accepted
| cash. The problem is that more often than not they don't.
|
| Ooof. I haven't seen a SCO with no cash capability. I know
| cash-handling equip costs but if they don't want pay for that,
| they might need a cashier.
|
| Walmart may have a couple SCO that won't do cash temporarily -
| but there will be 10 more fully working.
| steelframe wrote:
| I'm seeing mixed responses, so it may be a locality thing as
| to whether machines generally accept cash. For example I
| remember almost all machines in Japan accepting cash.
|
| The machines at the Whole Foods near my house, for example,
| only accept cards, phones, or palm prints. Only half the
| machines at a Safeway near my house accept cash. The machines
| at another grocery market (Haggen's) are card- or phone-only,
| and they furthermore show a video feed of you on the screen
| with a "You're Being Watched by AI" warning to try to cut
| down on thefts.
|
| The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it
| flagged me as trying to steal something because the system
| didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with
| the sandwich I bought.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The last time I tried checking out at one of those
| machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because
| the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were
| free with the sandwich I bought.
|
| I hit that a couple of times but I scan stuff quickly. I
| also live in a house of 6 adult guys. It's lots of buying &
| lots of scanning.
|
| Cashiers had it sorted before I figured out something was
| up.
| coderjames wrote:
| This may be regional or brand-specific. As a data point, the
| Winco I frequent has seven SCO stations - three accept cash,
| four are card-only. There is a single cashier monitoring all
| seven stations.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Here a lot of places have these auto-cash-counting machines
| you just throw the money in and it counts it and feeds back
| to the PoS; MASSIVE noisy machines that are stuck half of the
| time. So while stores must accept cash & cards, cash is often
| simply broken and the employee cannot really help anything as
| they are not allowed to process manually, so they can only
| throw their hands up.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Every machine I've seen can be _built_ and _configured_ to
| accept cash, but they 're always "broken down" and "can't
| accept cash"
| fencepost wrote:
| There's likely a way to use cash, but it probably requires an
| employee override and a receipt that you take to a customer
| service desk to continue the transaction.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The fact that a credit card CAN have an outage is ridiculous.
| They were invented as an eventually-consistent system first!
| Just save up the credit card info, and charge the bank when the
| network connection is back up.
| zinekeller wrote:
| It no longer works that way in Europe (or basically anywhere
| outside the US): most customers and banks insist that they
| see payments in real-time (in the name of fraud prevention
| (user-controlled credit card locks are a thing here) and
| convenience).
| lxgr wrote:
| This capability is actually built deeply into the chip
| payment specification used by most credit and debit cards,
| but it's fallen out of fashion in favor for online-first
| processing:
|
| The original motivation for offline capabilities was that
| phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked
| via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and
| phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores.
|
| Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-
| only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it
| does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of
| outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts,
| lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification
| becomes much easier etc.
|
| That said, merchants are still free to accept any card
| offline - they just bear the full risk of that card being
| overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible
| outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing
| up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping
| cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards.
|
| I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit
| and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects.
| Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage
| or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be
| actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small
| unattended card-only gas station - not that uncommon in the
| US!)
| 7952 wrote:
| The original implementation of credit cards was paper
| based. You made a carbon copy of the bank card and a
| signature taken. And the pin can be verified using the card
| alone.
| bombcar wrote:
| Smaller places in the USA will still bust out the carbon
| copy machine during outages, but they then have to bitch
| at the processor to get lower fees (often the fees are
| higher for non-instantly verified transactions).
| lxgr wrote:
| That can't be true anymore, at least not the carbon copy
| part: None of my US credit cards are even still embossed
| in the way necessary for them to work in these.
|
| Merchants can just note down the card number and manually
| charge it, though. I've definitely had that happen in the
| past somewhere. The downside is that the merchant is
| fully on the hook for chargebacks for such payments.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| I completely agree. When I worked as a cashier, we had no
| problem letting people pay with credit cards even in the
| event of a full-on power outage. We just used a credit card
| imprinter, which was quick, cheap, and easy to use.
|
| Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like
| outages are rare.
| bombcar wrote:
| Outages are short and rare enough that newer cashiers may
| never have seen the imprint machine (and the store, if it
| has one, it's probably buried in customer service
| somewhere).
|
| Where outages are more common it's more likely people have
| workarounds - kind of like how when there was a power
| failure and the power company told the local store it would
| be 4+ hours to recovery they declared "discounted dairy".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Modern cards aren't always embossed anymore. Most payment
| networks still have offline and eccentric ways to make a
| transaction, but it all comes down to one thing: If you
| don't do the most modern, 100% online method of credit card
| processing, you will be on the hook for any and all fraud,
| including fraud you can prove was fraud, and it usually
| costs more.
|
| It's just cheaper to say "Sorry nothing we can do"
| bilsbie wrote:
| We're almost at the point where we can just replace cashiers with
| Tesla Optimus paired with an LLM instead.
|
| How wild would that be.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Based on the recent Twitter post, let's just cut out the human
| controlled robot and have the human do it.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I don't think Optimus will be nearly capable enough to even
| replace the least motivated checkout attendant in the next
| decade at least.
|
| Groceries and such are some of the trickest bits to handle
| (especially since another human is stowing them on the belt
| this way and that, in piles or spread out), and a robot what
| could handle a conveyor at Aldi even 1/100th the speed of an
| employee would be a mind-boggling result.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Big user experience gap between self checkout in The Netherlands,
| Albert Hein, vs Walmart/King Soopers etc.
| healsdata wrote:
| Multiple stores I shop out provide me with a hand scanner that I
| can use to scan my groceries either as I shop or at the checkout
| stand. This is my preferred checkout experience. I'll be bummed
| if it goes away.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The biggest chain of supermarkets where I am just let you use
| an app on your smartphone to do the scanning. It doesn't
| require a login or anything, as all it does is collect the
| barcodes as you go along and then dump them to a payment
| terminal at the exit. (they also have a rack of some kind of
| generic android devices to loan for people who don't want to
| install stuff)
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I like the self-checkout machines that let you get cash out.
| They're often safer to use than an ATM on the street. Plus I can
| stand there for 5 minutes getting $5 notes out one-at-a-time to
| fill my wallet with low denomination notes instead of higher
| denomination notes.
|
| If you want to make a cab driver happy, pay them with a wad of
| low-denomination notes at the beginning of their shift. I did
| this once in Melbourne and the cabbie was effusive. I asked for a
| receipt for my work, and he wrote an amount that was about 50%
| higher than what I actually gave him. And now I've admitted an
| alternative (unintentional) form of theft.
| rambojohnson wrote:
| nightmare for who? go stand in line with everybody else if self-
| checkout bothers you so much.
| steelframe wrote:
| > go stand in line with everybody else if self-checkout bothers
| you so much
|
| The last time I bought something I got through the human-
| staffed checkout much faster than anyone got through the
| machine-staffed checkout. I'm starting to see cult mentality
| that the self-checkout must necessarily be faster or more
| desirable, and that's causing people to put up with longer
| waits for them.
|
| Also when Visa went down in the UK, the grocery store I was
| shopping at only had self-checkout machines. None of which
| worked because of the Visa outage, and the machines didn't
| accept cash. So there's a problem when the mentality of "the
| self-checkout is clearly better" gets too ingrained in the
| minds of pointy-haired bosses.
| akerl_ wrote:
| This article feels like it's a collection of anecdotes more than
| a market shift.
|
| My local Walmart recently did a major renovation that doubled the
| number of self checkouts. My local target usually has as many
| self-checkout slots open as cashier-operated lanes, and there
| aren't caps on number of items.
|
| Several parallel commenters have pointed out that self-checkout
| can be good or bad (pretty much the same way there's places where
| cashier-operated checkout is good or bad). But I also think it's
| heavily dependent on things like regional crime rates / customer
| volume, among other variables.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| It also depends on the type of store. Grocery stores seem to
| experience more loss with the machines than big box stores,
| even though those often include a grocery section.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >employees who get taken away from their other duties to help
| customers deal with the confusing and error prone kiosks.
|
| I have seen these customers. I do not understand.
|
| What are they doing at the self-checkout that is confusing? I
| have used dozens of different implementations and they are all
| simplicity incarnate.
|
| So I just lump them all in with the folks who don't know that
| cars need oil changes, take more than 45 seconds at an ATM, get
| flustered by airport self-checkin machines, or sit in the drive-
| thru line of a fast food restaurant staring at a menu whose items
| have scarcely changed in 40 years confused about what's for sale.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Some of those customers are indeed clueless. But the machines
| themselves aren't that great either. Automation and efficiency
| almost always come at the cost of decreased resiliency. They
| work great as long as you're on the happy path.
|
| To give a practical example, fresh produce have that 4-digit
| code to identify them (e.g., 4011 for bananas). But some fresh
| produce comes in containers that have barcodes on them, like
| grapes in plastic bags or clamshells. The machine expects the
| 4-digit code (printed on the container), but the customer
| expects to be able to scan the barcode just like everything
| else that comes packaged. The barcode fails to scan, and the
| customer will hold up the line to have a worker explain the
| mismatch in expectations. All because the machine designers
| built in an assumption (for efficiency's sake) that doesn't
| match the real world, and the machine can't adapt to it on the
| fly.
| joecot wrote:
| As someone who uses self-checkout machines effectively, this
| happening is fine. I have a moment of confusion, then find
| the code, then move on to the next item. What is terrible is
| when instead of the self-checkout machine throwing a warning
| about it not being scanned correctly, so I can find and input
| the code, it just locks up the machine and says "Customer
| needs assistance". Then I'm in the same boat as the clueless
| folks, because the machine won't trust me to correct.
| Reason077 wrote:
| The modern machines have nice big pictures to help identify
| produce that doesn't have a barcode on it, helpfully sorted
| with the most popular items first. Failing than you can
| search with the first few letters of the produce name.
| Haven't seen one where you need to enter a numerical code for
| many years.
| coderjames wrote:
| > >employees who get taken away from their other duties to help
| customers deal with the confusing and error prone kiosks.
|
| > I have seen these customers. I do not understand.
|
| One applicable scenario I have observed at my local super
| market is people for whom English (or the otherwise locally-
| dominant language) is not their first language. The machine may
| have a 'clear' error message displaying and speaking "return
| last scanned item to bagging area" but imagine that you don't
| understand the language the machine is using very well. At a
| register with a human, a person can unload groceries on to a
| belt, hand the cashier some bills that they may or may not
| entirely understand the value of or swipe a government-provided
| benefits card, and get back their items and any applicable
| change without needing a firm grasp of the spoken or written
| language.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Indeed. Could you understand "unexpected item in bagging
| area" in, say, Russian or Arabic? Hell, I have no idea how to
| translate "bagging area" from/to my second-best language and
| I've been learning it for over 10 years.
| currymj wrote:
| if you accidentally scan something twice, frequently the
| machine requires an employee to delete the entry for you.
| g-b-r wrote:
| I've actually never seen one where you can delete stuff
| yourself
| shellfishgene wrote:
| I wonder why, as the alternative are hand scanners that you
| carry around the store, and those even have +/- buttons to
| adjust product amounts. Is that not the same opportunity to
| cheat?
| g-b-r wrote:
| The employees check that you're scanning the stuff before
| you drop it in the beg, it's a lot harder to notice
| someone deleting things afterwards (although they could
| simply add a distinctive sound for it)
| sureglymop wrote:
| In Switzerland that's possible in all stores who have them.
| You can also change the amount of a scanned item.
|
| Also, for everything that can't be scanned (like freshly
| baked bread etc.) there are images and a search function to
| find these items.
| smileysteve wrote:
| A few things trip me up at the grocery store
|
| - bringing my own bag and a bag blows over triggers a theft
| check
|
| - purchasing alcohol distributor or many medicines in my state
| requires an id check
|
| - multiple upcs on an item requires a void
|
| - large item like dog food and you don't get to "skip bagging"
| quickly enough
| g-b-r wrote:
| Many of them have some confusing states, you've probably just
| not run into them
| jen20 wrote:
| Typically the confusion is caused by under-spec'd hardware or
| web-grade software making something that should respond in 2-3
| milliseconds take a second per interaction. They're only simple
| if you've never experienced something that works correctly and
| in accordance with HCI standards.
|
| Airport self checkin machines are the same - but also lacking
| the range of options the expert member of staff has.
| chrisdhal wrote:
| At BJs (smaller version of Costco), they have self checkout
| almost exclusively. They also have a constant deal of "mix and
| match" 2 types of potato chips. The problem is that their
| system is not setup to ring those up correctly, so when you
| scan one bag it immediately stops and lights up the "need help"
| light. Then you need to wait until the attendant comes by and
| clears it up. After about the 3rd time you realize that they
| just scan a code that's taped to the register so you quickly
| start doing that yourself. This product also prevents you from
| using the app to do the "scan and pay in the app and skip the
| checkout".
|
| This is obviously something that should be fixed in the system,
| but it's nothing that the consumer can do anything about.
| workfromspace wrote:
| Obviously this sounds like such a US problem. Self checkout in
| the UK and Europe (Estonia and Barcelona) IME works perfectly:
|
| - No thefts
|
| - Many people with card payments
|
| - Working self checkout machines
|
| Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is pioneering
| so many tech but fail to implement any, such as:
|
| - Payments: No SWIFT/IBAN, still lots of cash usage, no
| e-invoices (ie for utility bills), still using paper checks,
| physical emails
|
| - No national identification cards or numbers
|
| - Very limited e-government services
|
| And the argument I've been hearing the most is freedom; which
| also sounds oxymoron, coming from the country with the worlds
| strongest 3 letter agencies.
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't think it's got much to do with freedom (although it's
| commonly used as one reason to veto change).
|
| To me, it seems like given the size, market maturity, but
| especially the legal and political environment of the US, any
| change requiring large-scale coordination between multiple
| actors, especially public and private, has become very hard.
|
| Single-actor innovation requiring no cooperation of existing
| stakeholders has become the way to go: That (plus large
| existing car-based transport stakeholders) is why there is Uber
| instead of a working public transit system in most cities.
|
| That's true for most systems you list: Anything payments
| related - the US has over 6000 banks; even given the population
| size, that's enormous! Identification cards - it's about
| immigration status at least as much as it's about people being
| skeptical of the federal government. E-government: Ok, that one
| is probably due to a lack of trust in the federal government's
| tech capabilities, which at this point has become a self-
| fulfilling prophecy.
| workfromspace wrote:
| Thank you for your analysis.
|
| I don't think it's a numbers issue. Japan with 127 million
| has multi-provider solutions such as IC cards, and I've heard
| India has Aadhaar and China has similar services.
|
| But I agree with the federal part. I guess it makes things
| harder as federal states of Europe (Germany, Switzerland,
| Spain) has some centralization and bureaucracy issues, but at
| least they still manage to get a national systems such as ID
| cards.
| lxgr wrote:
| You're right, it's not a matter of size alone.
|
| Japan is much more homogenous than the US, as far as I
| understand, and trust in government institutions also seems
| to be much higher. Both advantageous preconditions for
| establishing a national eID system!
| g-b-r wrote:
| You're generalizing a bit too much saying "Europe"
| workfromspace wrote:
| You're right. But I've seen almost every country in Europe
| continent and lived in few of them, including non-EU
| (including WB-6, EFTA, UK), so I thought I could generalize
| Europe a bit to my experience.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is
| pioneering so many tech but fail to implement any
|
| > Estonia
|
| >> Population * 2024 estimate
| 1,373,101[2] * 2021 census 1,331,824[3]
|
| You can do most of projects in Estonia in a week or two, just
| because their popcount is low.
| kalleboo wrote:
| China is also way ahead of the US in all the same stuff
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| You can say the same about individual US states more or less.
| Rolling out every innovation nation wide is not necessarily
| the optimal goal..
|
| Of course comparing the entire US with tiny individual
| European countries is always silly.
| byyll wrote:
| UK is part of Europe.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| A bunch of banks closing uk-nationals-with -eu-residencies
| accounts? Oh, and passport control? Remember Brexit?
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| You need to stop generalizing.
|
| Plenty of large swathes of the U.S. have plastic cards,
| e-invoiced bills, and yes, even zero-cost non-drivers ID cards
| which work across state lines, along with several forms of
| national ID if one chooses. Hardly anyone writes checks or uses
| physical mail -- a common joke is that you have to buy a pack
| of 50 envelopes to send 1 letter every few years. Widespread
| cash is a benefit, not a demerit, as it gives one purchasing
| power even if out in the countryside with zero internet --
| indeed the physical dollar is so powerful that I can take it
| nearly anywhere in the Americas and spend it directly, down to
| the poorest most remote villages.
| workfromspace wrote:
| You may be right about generalizing the US, but
|
| > even if out in the countryside with zero internet
|
| I think I can safely say even the remote countryside of any
| part of Europe has card payments now.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| > SWIFT/IBAN
|
| You might be thinking about SEPA. SWIFT is slow, expensive and
| also available in the US.
|
| One reason is that credit card fees are much higher than in
| Europe (up to 3% or so) due to lack of regulation (of course a
| significant proportion of those fees are returned to the card
| users as cashback, so it's not like American companies are much
| more greedy, it's still not a very efficient system of
| course..)
| workfromspace wrote:
| You're probably right about SWIFT/SEPA part. My bad,
| apologies.
|
| And it's just not the credit cards. Many people here
| (including high school students) are provided and using debit
| cards for virtually everything.
| anticensor wrote:
| The US has debit cards as well, the security assumptions
| regarding bank accounts are very different and there is
| also a culture of building a credit score that reduces
| debit card use.
| QVVRP4nYz wrote:
| Ignoring the question if USA is actually behind: there is a
| very strong technology catch-up effect. Some countries started
| mobile phones with 3G, and never wasted money on quickly
| outdated analogue/2G hardware. New banks created in 90s in
| Eastern Europe also benefited from not having 30 years old
| legacy mainframe systems running COBOL.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Comments here are always wild. I've double scanned numerous times
| (they either actually come to the kiosk or remove it remotely)
| and they more often than not accept cash. Amazing how such adroit
| engineers can't use SCO.
| mmvasq wrote:
| I had a pretty significant attack from individuals trying to
| demonstrate just how much data they can access on native systems.
| The self checkouts are less of a concern than the amount of
| harassment that can already be done utilizing fraud analytics and
| loyalty programs.
|
| I am glad to see biometric pay become a thing at Amazon, it has
| been too slow for this to progress. Being able to take a walk to
| the store, and not carry a wallet is a huge convenience. Shame I
| am not shopping with them much other than the occasional Whole
| Foods purchase after being thrown into the law enforcement vs
| local response loop when analytics were being misused.
|
| The palm biometric solution is a decent happy medium (vs
| fingerprint or retina scanning) and something international
| travelers are already used to.
|
| They didn't show me any examples of RFID issues other than some
| guy obtaining a wand and taking inventory of the dogs in the
| neighborhood. Not a big deal compared to the personal bias and
| insults they could chase one around with - all over internet
| platforms using fraud and marketing analytics.
|
| The loyalty programs are in pretty bad shape. I dropped a bunch
| of them wasn't worth maintaining for the level of griefing
| someone can do on games and social media about purchases.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Stores across the country are reversing course on the
| machines"_
|
| Umm, what? I see no evidence of this. There are more self-
| checkouts than ever. Many shops in London are almost entirely
| self-checkouts now, with just one or two token staffed check-outs
| for people who want to buy vapes or whatever.
|
| Besides, where would they even get the staff to go back to manual
| checkouts? It's already super frustrating when a shop doesn't
| have enough self checkout machines and you have to line up!
|
| Many supermarkets are offering self-scan via apps now anyway, so
| you can skip the check out entirely (except that you still need
| to use the self checkout machine to do the final payment).
| advisedwang wrote:
| I wonder whether part of the motivation for stores to deploy
| self-checkout is to prevent unionization/as a bargaining chip
| with unions. Even if you deploy just a few self-checkout in
| stores, it serves as a constant message to the workers that the
| company might start firing people in favour of machines if they
| demand too much.
|
| Even if self-checkout results in more theft or other issues, some
| companies may figure that is worthwhile to keep the workforce in
| line.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I avoid self checkout if possible. If I'm paying for the
| groceries, why should I also do the work of scanning and bagging
| everything? I'll let someone else handle it for me.
|
| And don't try to pass it off as a "convenience" for the customer.
| It was never about that. I would call it "automating" a job away
| but that would be too generous. No, it's just asking the customer
| to do a job for free and selling it as more convenient. No
| thanks.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Honestly this feels a lot like pumping your own petrol, having
| someone operate the elevator for you, or going in to a physical
| bank. Eventually no one will care and it frees up people to do
| more useful jobs.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the corp using self-checkout to increase
| their profits through cutting the headcount, but I always
| prefer shop workers to do the actual inventory and other
| _floor_ tasks than sitting at the cash register.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not freeing people to do more useful jobs. It is just
| making them unemployed. I like self checking, sure, but the
| employment result of it is not better jobs.
| chris-orgmenta wrote:
| > It is not freeing people to do more useful jobs. It is
| just making them unemployed.
|
| Only if the creation of jobs is slower than the
| displacement... Which I agree it is, with this tech (and
| our slow response in gov, universities etc.). But sometimes
| (sounds callous but just pondering this small part of the
| equation), maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel
| workers to move on? And this tech will open up other
| opportunities.
|
| Else we are just all herders/farmers/hunter-gatherers
| indefinitely.
|
| Regardless, it's quicker for me to scan my goods than for
| someone else to do it (and with half the people, since I've
| freed someone up). Same for most other people around me,
| from what I see (1/4 or 1/5 seem to need help or prefer
| talking to the cashier). It's a net win for society in the
| long run - And I think that employment changes are very
| liquid in this industry, so I am not as concerned as if it
| were a coal miner for example.
|
| (My concern is more that supermarket workers probably
| correlate strongly with hand-to-mouth living, and
| governments should ensure there are appropriate
| retraining/growth paths. Which they don't, at least to my
| satisfaction. Which loops us back to us both pretty much
| being in agreement, I would guess)
|
| I don't want us to handicap ourselves (tying our bionic arm
| behind our backs to artificially reduce productivity, in
| the name of keeping jobs)
| watwut wrote:
| I like self checkouts too. I am not arguing against them.
| It is just that these jobs going away is not helping
| former employees nor freeing them up. Economy is always
| going through changes, I am not arguing to stop progress.
|
| > maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to
| move on
|
| Nah. This is just lying to ourselves to feel better.
| Workers do not need to be compelled and it does not help
| them at all. The changes may be helping overall economy
| in the long run or just be irrelevant overall, but
| individuals on the receiving end are just not helped.
| civilized wrote:
| Your theory predicts ever-climbing unemployment rates, but
| the prime-age labor force participation rate is near its
| all time high [1] and unemployment is at an all-time low
| [2].
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
|
| [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
| watwut wrote:
| It does not. I never ever said or implied that self
| checkouts are the only process going in economy that
| would influence how many people are unemployed. "My
| theory" would predict "ever-climbing unemployment rates"
| only if:
|
| - self checkout was only thing going on in the economy, -
| cashiers represented overwhelming majority of employees.
|
| Otherwise you are making overly large prediction from a
| single small data point.
|
| -------------
|
| Let me say opposite theory: if self checkout would be
| "freeing people for more useful jobs", cashiers salaries
| would be raising prior self checkouts. As employers would
| compete for people, they would pay cashiers as much as
| those "more useful jobs".
|
| That did not went on. These were and are minimum salary
| jobs.
| g-b-r wrote:
| For many others instead it's convenient, so I hope they will
| keep being one of the possibilities
| crazygringo wrote:
| For me it's because there's zero line rather than a five minute
| wait or worse.
|
| I'll do the work so I can save the time. It's a godsend that
| way.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Translation: It costs more than minimum wage employees to
| operate.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Walmart has 'scan and go' in the app for Walmart/ subscribers.
|
| https://www.walmart.com/cp/scan-go/9679980
|
| And I believe Sam's, the Walmart wholesale club, has it in store.
| t8sr wrote:
| I was surprised how bad these machines were in the UK and the US.
| It's possible to implement the idea better. A big source of
| friction seems to be the (IMO) unreasonable focus on theft
| prevention, and the second is that stuff in the store isn't
| labeled properly.
|
| Somehow, the self checkouts in Switzerland are mostly free of
| both problems. I'm guessing they're more willing to take the
| theft risk, to increase throughput.
|
| My point is that giving up on this technology seems rash, when it
| could be tweaked to work well with a software update and a policy
| adjustment.
| fy20 wrote:
| I think part of the problem is the technology hasn't changed in
| the last 20 years. During college I worked at a large UK retail
| store when they had the self checkouts installed, and other
| than a slightly nicer design, today it is effectively the same
| as it was then.
|
| For example today I still struggle to scan things with the
| laser barcode scanner, where as cameras are much more reliable
| for scanning barcodes today.
|
| The system could collect data when an item does not match the
| weight in the database and 'learn' that it should be different,
| but this is impossible as behind the scenes it's still using a
| POS system that was designed 30 years ago.
| 6510 wrote:
| Right, it should be able to tell what kind of fruit or
| vegetable is on the scale and [at least] highlight it in the
| maze of menus. The larger the supermarket the funnier the
| search. Likewise it could see I have 2 croissants with cheese
| in stead of having me search though a list of packaged bread
| half of which isn't even on the shelve. It should be able to
| see the shelves too. It doesn't need good vision, if it can
| see there are 5 big piles from afar and people purchase 5
| kinds it gets rather obvious which are the most likely
| candidates. If 3 out of 5 shelves are empty you shouldn't
| display all the nice things I cant have. It seems a fun
| project to work on.
| rcbdev wrote:
| > Somehow, the self checkouts in Switzerland are mostly free of
| both problems.
|
| You're experiencing the difference between high- and low-trust
| societies.
| Aeolun wrote:
| My problem with self-checkout (in the Netherlands) is not the
| interface or the system itself. I can navigate that. But then
| when I've finished checking out and bagging everything myself,
| the guy from the store came to do the whole thing again!
|
| I just stood there in utter disbelief as they rummaged through my
| neatly packed bag to mess everything up, scan only a handful of
| items, and then present me a bill that's several euros lower than
| it was before they started re-scanning stuff (e.g. they missed
| items).
|
| What is the point of self checkout if you are not going to trust
| that your customers scan everything?
|
| Conversely, I've been self-checking in Japan for years, and
| they've _never_ checked the contents of my bag.
| namdnay wrote:
| that's a random fraud check, it's usually about 10-20% of the
| time?
|
| i'm surprised by the bill though, are you sure it wasn't due to
| discounts or something? usually they just scan 5-10 items (and
| will try to scan the most expensive ones)
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Also in the Netherlands. These random audits are annoying
| indeed, especially when I have a lot of very carefully packed
| items.
|
| However, they don't happen to me too often, and it's as common
| with 3 items as with 30 so I think it's truly random. It seems
| like about the right frequency to catch thieves.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| The main problem with the way they do the check is that it
| isn't going to catch any theft. They make you unpack your bag
| and they start asking for items to scan. They literally let
| you choose which ones they scan. And they want to scan like
| 10 items lately so it really makes you unpack the whole thing
| which is annoying. But never have I had them actually trying
| to find an item in my bag that is not something I declared.
| They seem pretty focused on finding things I did scan and
| confirming them. Mostly because it's done by a teenager who
| just wants to get the scan done and move on.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| That teenager also doesn't want to deal with someone caught
| stealing. That's a bother that is way above their pay
| grade, with only downsides for them even if everything is
| handled with a minimum of fuss.
| em500 wrote:
| They do random spot checks (and do not scan each item in your
| bag) for the same reason that ticket inspectors do random
| checks in public transport: there is probably some optimum
| between checking each and every item/person/train (which is
| very costly) and never check anything at all (at which point a
| significant number of people might consider payments to be
| entirely optional).
| guappa wrote:
| I've had the checkout machine reject my backpack as an approved
| container. So I had to balance everything on the tray, pay,
| THEN bag everything.
|
| Another thing I really hate is that I've seen locked exit
| barriers that open when scanning the receipt. In sweden there
| is a real disregard for workplace safety :(
|
| I guess other than "honoring the people who died in the disco
| fire in the 90s in the local museum", there is no will to do
| anything practical.
| mrintegrity wrote:
| >Another thing I really hate is that I've seen locked exit
| barriers that open when scanning the receipt. In sweden there
| is a real disregard for workplace safety :(
|
| Here in Sweden you can just push those out of the way (it
| sets of an alarm but if you push it back to closed position
| the alarm stops). FYI Sweden has strict workplace safety
| rules, not sure why you think there is a real disregard for
| this.
| guappa wrote:
| > you can just push those out of the way
|
| Try to do that on a wheelchair or with crutches now.
|
| > FYI Sweden has strict workplace safety rules, not sure
| why you think there is a real disregard for this.
|
| I'm sure the rules are there. They are just ignored, like
| the supermarket case.
|
| Most buildings (including office buildings) have doors that
| have unreasonably strong springs (for no reason whatsoever,
| a much weaker one would suffice), and require 2 hands to be
| opened from inside to get out (a latch and an handle). Try
| getting out of those doors on a wheelchair if the
| electricity is out. That's an easy way to have multiple
| people die in a fire.
|
| What they would have if they were safe is this thing: https
| ://www.toolshopitalia.it/imagecache/uploads/images/ninz...
|
| The fact that you are getting triggered and rushed to
| respond without even stopping to think is a problem.
|
| But, living in Sweden, I'm kinda used to the smug (and
| unjustified) sense of superiority of the locals.
| mrintegrity wrote:
| Not triggered at all, had you mentioned wheelchair access
| from the start I might have agreed that it could be
| better (not that I have any personal experience). I will
| be sure to observe these things from now on. No need to
| get snarky friend :)
| guappa wrote:
| Not just access, but fast exit as well, also when there
| is no power.
|
| Not being able to access sucks, but isn't a safety
| concern strictly speaking. Not being able to get out
| quickly and potentially blocking the path for a crowd is.
| mayniac wrote:
| Supermarkets here usually require an employee to approve
| backpacks. You put your bag on the scales, hit a button
| saying it's a bag, then an employee comes round to confirm.
|
| In practice, it usually takes longer to get an employee's
| attention and have them come press the button. So I don't
| bother. It's usually quicker to bag everything at the end,
| and I tend to get fewer "unexpected item in the bagging area"
| issues when balacing everything on the scales.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Never seen that in Poland and I use self checkout all the time.
| robk wrote:
| These seem to work fine in high trust societies. Today's America
| and the UK fail miserably at this owing to lack of customer
| honesty and organized crime exploiting the loopholes that are
| designed for individuals not organized groups that exploit them.
| arsenico wrote:
| I prefer self-checkout and use it pretty much every time I see an
| opportunity to do so. Living in the Netherlands, somehow self-
| checkout in Dutch supermarkets is very different from the ones I
| encounter in France or UK. Every time in France or UK I have
| issues with it primarily because the self-checkout tills have a
| very cumbersome and poorly working area where I have to put the
| checked products. Either they're doing a weight check or
| something, but it just doesn't work 75% of the time, which is
| extremely frustrating. Dutch supermarkets went with cheaper tills
| without this weight-check tech, and it just works every time.
| scott_w wrote:
| Interestingly, Marks & Spencer _don 't_ have scales for your
| shopping (unlike all other self-checkouts). I wonder if there's
| cultural and demographic reasons for this. M&S is a very
| upmarket supermarket, so a potential thief (typically quite
| poor) is going to stand out like a sore thumb and end up with a
| security guard stuck to their waist.
|
| The larger supermarket chains (Tesco, Asda, Morrisons) have
| low-cost lines to cater for the wider market. That means it's
| harder to distinguish between a thief and a genuine customer,
| as they'll come from the same socioeconomic backgrounds i.e.
| they'll dress the same way.
|
| I wonder if there's crossover with what you see in the
| Netherlands?
| bregma wrote:
| That sounds more like the Brits have been socialized into
| letting the toffs get away with stealing. After all, that's
| just the way it's always been.
| framapotari wrote:
| How would you identify a shoplifter at M&S based on their
| socioeconomic dress code?
| resolutebat wrote:
| Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I make it a point to never use it.
| TomK32 wrote:
| I my city we have to large supermarkets very close to each other
| with an optional self-checkout. In one supermarket there is still
| a person who helps shoppers when they are using the self-checkout
| the first time or hit a problem like the age verification. The
| other supermarket doesn't have that person and instead some other
| personell from the supermarket can be rung for, which takes ages.
| Want to guess in which supermarket the system is used constantly?
| One person overseeing four self-checkouts does work, but you
| still need that one person.
| KronisLV wrote:
| In the stores here in Latvia, I've had reasonably positive
| experiences with self-checkout.
|
| I can pack stuff in my bags with no rush (there's usually no line
| for self-checkout, since not everyone uses it), just scan the bar
| codes for products that have them and pick from a menu/search for
| those that don't (e.g. freshly baked goods in paper bags). Then,
| I can pay with my card, or sometimes have to verify my ID with
| the shop attendant when buying something like energy drink.
|
| Smaller stores probably won't have self-checkout any time soon
| and some stores like Lidl don't seem to have it either (the
| prices there are nice, but bagging your products always seems so
| rushed), but where it's available, it works pretty well (like
| Rimi, Maxima).
|
| I really appreciate it being optional, though, as well as having
| the more traditional option with shop attendants and the small
| conveyor thing.
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| In Germany there are a few Lidl's with self checkout now. But
| haven't seen an Aldi doing it.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| All Lidls in Poland already have self checkout, and it's one
| of the best implementations I've seen, as expected from Lidl.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| Except the speaker screams at you, very loud.
|
| The best ones I've used are at Rossmann. Completely silent,
| and don't measure the weight of anything, so you never get
| to the "sorry, your shopping's weight is off by 1g" part.
| The UI is also very efficient, where in Carrefour they seem
| to periodically add more popups to the process.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Still better than Biedronka ones.
|
| I'm usually using ANC headphones when shopping, so it's
| not a big deal for me, I dislike all the usual peeping,
| squeaking and alert bells in contemporary shopping
| environment.
|
| >The best ones I've used are at Rossmann. Completely
| silent, and don't measure the weight of anything, so you
| never get to the "sorry, your shopping's weight is off by
| 1g" part.
|
| Agreed, but this is due to specific requirements of a
| drugstore - measuring weight is meaningless if you have
| 100s of nail polishes or toothpastes weighing pretty much
| the same.
| nicornk wrote:
| There are Aldis in Germany with self checkout.
| h1fra wrote:
| I don't know if this story is universal (but I have nothing to
| prove it just a feeling). In Paris, self checkout has taken over
| most mid/large stores, even some clothing and sportswear shops.
|
| If I had to complain about things (except that it increases
| unemployment): People are bad at it and it's probably because of
| the slow, buggy, difficult UI.
|
| I don't get that in 2023 we still have UI that bad, probably
| created by some agencies that payed some poor coder in an
| developed country to code this. You don't cherish your product,
| you get bad product.
| CM30 wrote:
| It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology
| come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even
| seem that effective at doing that. In theory, a system that let
| you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any
| weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would
| be incredibly efficient. Especially if you could do things like
| scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple
| copies of it.
|
| The problem is that companies don't want that, because they're
| worried they'd get robbed blind if they did. In a sense it
| reminds me of the problems with our travel systems; if there were
| no gates, no security checks, etc, then they'd probably be a joy
| to use. But people suck so they're not.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| That's exactly how it works in the Netherlands, you just scan
| your items and go. There are no weight checks and you can scan
| items more than once and edit and remove things from the list.
| Apart from getting a poorly executed random check sometimes
| (which is far from effective for the purpose of avoiding theft
| imho) it actually works really well.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all
| jealous.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Nah, don't worry. Theft at self checkouts is turning into a
| national hobby1.
|
| 1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-
| stij...
| Pepe1vo wrote:
| Every time I read one of these articles the naivety and
| tone-deafness from supermarkets over these self-checkouts
| amazes me.
|
| "In order to make more money we made customers self-
| report their purchases during a cost-of-living crisis
| while we were booking record high profits and now these
| customers are _under reporting_ their purchases, how dare
| they!!"
|
| They should've seen this coming from miles away.
| icoder wrote:
| The way you phrase it (but maybe I get you wrong)
| suggests that the customers are somehow in their (moral
| if not lawful) right to do this because of previous
| policies from the supermarkets. They (supermarkets) may
| have been wrong, but so is stealing. They don't cancel
| each other out, nor do two wrongs become a right.
|
| I'd say stealing is always a net negative effect for the
| whole.
|
| But if you're saying that the entire context explains a
| lot of the behaviour, and could possibly be predicted,
| then yes I agree.
| arp242 wrote:
| > booking record high profits
|
| According to the opening paragraph of that article that's
| doesn't seem to be the case. EUR80 million in profit
| (with EUR100 million theft) is not all that much.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society_
|
| "Homogeneous" in what way?
|
| Because in my experience the sort of "homogeneity" that
| leads to high trust is that of wealth/income, and it
| requires a generous social net.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Most ways, as the research of Robert Putnam has
| documented well.
|
| https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/downside-diversity
| david-gpu wrote:
| I see no mention of whether they adjusted for age and
| urban vs rural settings. Dense metropolitan cores, where
| most economic activity happens, tend to be both younger
| and highly diverse ethnically as the jobs there attract
| migrant flows. It is unsurprising that younger people in
| dense metropolitan "the fewer people vote and the less
| they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on
| community projects". That's what retired people do.
|
| And to be completely transparent about where I'm coming
| from: I'm the father of two mixed-race children and all
| this talk of "homogeneous societies" reeks to me of plain
| old racism that will hurt my kids. And I grew up in one
| of those European "homogeneous" countries that right-
| leaning racists love to talk about, too.
| owlninja wrote:
| Sam's Club does this in the US and it is great.
| logicchains wrote:
| Dubai also has self-checkout machines that don't require
| you to weigh anything, just scan and go, and it's an
| extremely heterogeneous, low-trust society. People are just
| very afraid of the police and being deported.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Seems to work similarly in Singapore. Low trust can work
| when there are harsh punishments for violations. But do
| we really want to live in that type of society?
| arp242 wrote:
| Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.
| alexanderchr wrote:
| It's not exactly Japan-level high trust, but it is
| compared to most other countries in the world.
| arp242 wrote:
| It really depends; in some areas it's exceedingly low-
| trust, almost paranoid. In some other areas it's probably
| not too bad.
|
| Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933489
|
| I used to live in Indonesia and things are much more
| "high trust" in many aspects. On the other hand Indonesia
| also has a lot of problems with corruption and that sort
| of thing. "High trust/low trust" is too simplistic.
|
| I don't have 200 other countries to compare it to, but by
| and large, Western countries are much less high-trust in
| many areas than people assume. This often becomes
| painfully obvious once you stray outside of the "standard
| happy path".
| hgomersall wrote:
| This exists to some extent in the UK with the self scan
| widgets. Waitrose had it before self checkouts. It works
| really well.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Same around here. Self-checkouts is hugely successful. I'm
| much slower going through the scan procedure than the person
| working at the conveyor belt is.. but that's more than offset
| by the fact that there are a large number of self-checkout
| counters and I don't have to queue up (for the most part).
| The only time I use the old non-self-checkout counter is when
| there are no customers and the person at the checkout looks
| bored. Then I go there.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| This is the same here in Hong Kong. There are no weight
| checks and self checkouts are rather efficient.
|
| That said I barely use them mostly due to ideological
| reasons. I don't like to live in a society that completely
| does away with human contact and until society is really
| built around a UBI, I think cutting away unskilled jobs is
| not necessarily positive for society.
| podgietaru wrote:
| That's not the full story though because there are random
| spot checks and they're very very annoying when they happen.
| Mo3 wrote:
| Annoying? A person comes and scans a few of the items on
| the counter, then leaves again. If that is already annoying
| to you, you must live a very stressed life
| camgunz wrote:
| It's super annoying. We'll often have groceries for the
| next few days, which includes a lot of baby food. So
| yeah, they're scanning like 40 items, and we have to
| repack the bag to not squash produce/bread and such.
|
| Another related problem is that you physically can't
| leave the store unless you buy something and get a
| receipt to scan. You have to tailgate someone with a
| receipt, or hop the turnstyle, etc. Hope you're not in a
| wheelchair and change your mind / the store's out of what
| you were looking for!
| gilbertbw wrote:
| In Waitrose (UK) stores at least this is not the case.
| When you are spot checked the staff member spot checks
| that a few things in your trolley have been scanned. They
| tend to check some higher value goods like alcohol.
|
| Also those stores, at least where I live, have no
| physical barrier to exit.
| camgunz wrote:
| Honestly why did you all have to Brexit. Would have loved
| to immigrate to the UK. Had to settle for NL.
| SamCritch wrote:
| Yeah, I think the UX here in the Netherlands is much simpler
| and easier than in other countries. When I go to the UK (e.g.
| Tesco Express) I have to select a bagging option, there's no
| "no bag" option at the beginning of the transaction even
| though I'm only buying a litre of milk, then when I put the
| carton down in the bagging area it triggers an alarm saying a
| store assistant is coming, but they never do because they're
| too busy serving all the other customers at the regular
| checkout. So I give up and try a different checkout, blocking
| the one I've just tried to use for 2 minutes.
|
| I posted about this on Linkedin too and got a few comments
| about the complexity in the UK, USA, France and elsewhere.
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samcritchley_it-hasnt-
| deliver...
| benoliver999 wrote:
| 99% of the time I use the 'weigh your own bag' option it
| asks someone to approve my bag. It's annoying.
|
| Also, the 'bagging area' is on different sides in different
| shops. Also annoying.
| folmar wrote:
| That 2 minutes is nice, in Poland a checkout station that
| was abandoned is blocked until an assistant notices it, so
| more like 30 minutes.
| camgunz wrote:
| Yeah, but these checks are bonkers. Whenever we get one
| (maybe 2x a month) the store worker literally takes
| everything out of our bag and scans it again. It takes
| forever, and then we have to repack the bag. Don't get me
| wrong, I vastly prefer it to the scales in the US, but
| they're terrible and do nothing to prevent stealing (in
| fairness anecdata, but Jumbo reported they lost millions to
| stealing and I know multiple people who say they steal from
| Albert Heijn every time they go).
| arp242 wrote:
| There _is_ a lot of theft though, and since supermarkets
| typically have fairly small margins this is also really
| cutting in to profit margins. I 'm not sure how it compares
| to the weigh-systems though.
| zilti wrote:
| Same in Switzerland. I got so annoyed the first time I used a
| self-checkout in Germany.
| ddmf wrote:
| Yes, exactly my thoughts - and they seem to use lower spec
| hardware leading to a perceivable delay between scanning ->
| putting on to weighing station -> able to scan next product.
|
| Unless this is as designed too, for whatever reason, but this
| is what stops me from using them as I get frustrated.
|
| The other thing that stops me from using them specifically in
| Lidl is that you cannot put a hazelnut croissant and an almond
| croissant in the same paper bag unless you take one out before
| you put it to weigh.
| CM30 wrote:
| That's another good point. Self checkout machines are likely
| designed with lower specs in mind due to shops needing to
| either needing to have more of them (since there are often
| only 1 or 2 regular checkouts compared to 10+ self checkouts)
| or because they feel the expense of a better touch
| screen/recognition system is better justified if it's for a
| system the staff are using rather than the general public.
| mjbeswick wrote:
| I work for a big UK supermarket as a developer working on
| their self checkout software. The tills have better specs
| than you would expect, as they are running 30 or so
| containers using Docker. They are not cheap!
| cameronh90 wrote:
| In Waitrose (UK), they often don't have any scales, and as a
| result, there can just be one staff member watching over 20+
| machines.
|
| By comparison, the other day I was at Tesco and they had
| introduced these new large self-checkouts for trolleys (aka
| carts in US), but about halfway through my trolley, I started
| getting an error for every item I scanned. Turns out, the max
| weight for the scale was 20kg.
| jefftk wrote:
| At the machines I've used in the US the way they deal with
| this is having you move your items off the scale into a
| bagging area (which is actually also a scale internally,
| though not one that needs to be officially calibrated).
| cameronh90 wrote:
| When I say scale, I did mean the one in the bagging area,
| not the produce scale. Turns out they'd increased the size
| of the bagging area but not the scale underneath it, so
| every item was giving me "please place the item in the
| bagging area".
| dazc wrote:
| Waitrose are in the process of updating the self-checkouts to
| full trolley-style machines. My local store is not that large
| but has 12 of these now in place of the previous 4 old-style
| machines.
|
| Despite many claims that people don't like them it is
| surprising how they are almost always in full use.
| zilti wrote:
| The thing with liking it or not is: do you dislike it
| strongly enough to wait an additional 10 minutes to be
| served at a traditional register instead?
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > scan the same product multiple times if you were buying
| multiple copies of it
|
| My local Walmart allows this. Not sure what the impact on their
| 'shrink' is, but they must've decided it was worth it to keep
| lines moving. It's a very busy store.
| bombcar wrote:
| It seems to be a setting the manager can choose to change.
| Some Walmarts near me basically seem to have the scale off (a
| ten pound unexpected item doesn't even phase it) and others
| seem tuned quite narrow.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they could change it based on time
| of day. And changing it based on rewards card or loyalty
| would also seem to be possible.
| Mashimo wrote:
| > In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way
| checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area
| rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient.
|
| I think coop/365discount has that. You scan the items with a
| mobile phone app while taking them of the shelf. You just show
| the digital receipt to the cashier while jumping the queue.
| rcxdude wrote:
| My experience with those is again they are ruined by
| overzealous anti-theft measures. Someone needs to come in and
| scan random items, which means you can't pack as you go, and
| it doesn't seem to let up even when it's tied to a loyalty
| card so they know you've used it before. After the system
| said the whole shop needed re-scanning, completely obviating
| the advantages, I've just stopped using it.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way
| checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area
| rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient
|
| How would it be more efficient than a traditional checkout?
| There's no way the average person can match the speed of a
| cashier who does that every day, and at least the supermarkets
| I've visited don't have enough self checkout machines to
| balance that out.
|
| Maybe it's just me but I genuinely don't get the point of self
| checkout. Are some shops so slow at reacting to long queues
| that it makes self checkout actually faster?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Because you don't stand in the queue to the cashier and don't
| have to wait minutes till the buyer in the front finds all
| the spare change they need.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The point is cost savings for the supermarket. That's it.
| Some customer prefer them, but usually that is the effect of
| deliberately understaffing the remaining cash registers, or
| the customer being completely unable or unwilling to interact
| with strangers.
|
| Supermarkets are now grudgingly admitting that self checkout
| systems cause a significant increase in loss due to theft,
| but that it is still cheaper than hiring actual staff for the
| registers.
|
| In the Netherlands the current state of affairs in
| supermarkets with self checkout registers is that theft is on
| the up. People justify 'forgetting to scan an item' by the
| (perceived or actual) greed shown by supermarkets in terms of
| shrinkflation and the rising cost-of-living. Supermarkets did
| really well during the Covid-years, but customers didn't
| benefit from that in the slightest.
|
| An additional problem is that the staff attending the self
| checkout registers are often young (because it is a position
| which would waste the skills of the more experienced
| employees), and they get bullied and berated by customers
| pissed off for getting selected for random (either actual or
| directed by the staff watching the cameras) checks.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder how much theft would be mitigated if you
| implemented a quasi-random "free item" feature - tune it so
| there's a chance the last item you scanned rings up free.
| Tune it to be a 2-5% discount at most, similar to coupons.
| Make the customer feel they won something.
| prewett wrote:
| That sounds like how Star Market does things: everything
| is overpriced by a dollar compared to normal grocery
| stores (which unfortunately are a thirty minute drive
| from me), but they have rotating "sales" that are $1.00
| off. I absolutely hate the store, because they aren't
| fooling me, just overcharging me and then claiming I
| "saved" money.
|
| I think this is how all Alberstons-owned stores work,
| because I've seen it an Randall's and other places, but
| until now could avoid shopping there. I always wondered
| why Walmart said "everyday low prices", because isn't
| that normal? Well, apparently not.
| bombcar wrote:
| The worst example of that I know of is Kohl's -
| everything there is insanely overpriced, but there is
| almost _always_ a combination of sales, coupons, and
| sacrificial goats that gets you to normal or below normal
| pricing.
|
| JC Penny famously tried to get _out_ of that and it
| almost killed them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmou
| rdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
|
| Walmart (and Costco, and Trader Joe's, and a few others)
| are so large that instead of making you dance around with
| coupons and such, they just tell the company to give them
| a discount and pass it on to the customer. An item at
| another store that needs a store app, coupon, etc, will
| just be dropped the same price at Walmart I've noticed.
|
| (I hate the Kohl's style, as even when I stack coupons
| and get to 75% off on clearance, I still feel I missed
| something and got cheated. But apparently lots of
| shoppers really _love_ that kind of "bargain hunt".)
| plg94 wrote:
| It depends how the self-checkout is executed. In our one
| supermarket here in Germany (Globus) each customer gets a
| mobile scanner unit and you scan each item as you go
| through the store and put it in your cart. This has
| multiple advantages: You only have to touch each item once,
| not three times. You always know the accurate total price -
| no more counting in your head. And the actual checkout
| process is just the payment (plus the occasional random
| spot check), so there's almost never any lines. All in all
| makes for a much quicker and more relaxed shopping
| experience.
|
| Unfortunately I don't know any numbers re theft, but it's
| still running 5 years later. Of course being in a suburban
| area helps.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It's about the cost of the checkout staff, not speed. Stores
| were told that if they bought 4 self-checkout kiosks they
| could eliminate 3 checkout staff (keeping 1 to monitor 4
| kiosks).
|
| What the vendors didn't say was that shrinkage would
| increase.
| Drakim wrote:
| At my local store there is 1 cashier with one of those
| conveyor belts machines, and 6 self-checkout machines. The
| cashier and the conveyor belt machine takes up about room as
| 3 of the self-checkout machines, and operates at about the
| same speed as one of the self-checkout machines. Plus
| obviously it's more expensive as you need to pay the wages of
| the person standing there just to grab your food and bring it
| to the infrared scanner one by one.
|
| So my experience is the polar opposite of yours, self-
| checkout is just superior.
| rascul wrote:
| > There's no way the average person can match the speed of a
| cashier who does that every day
|
| Most of the time I use self checkout at the grocery store but
| when I don't the human takes longer than me, sometimes wants
| to have an annoying conversation, doesn't group things in
| bags, and uses way too many bags. Quicker and easier to just
| do it myself.
| Tor3 wrote:
| > "There's no way the average person can match the speed of a
| cashier who does that every day,"
|
| Absolutely true, and not only that - the cashier has a
| conveyor belt while the self-checkout counter has a slightly
| inconvenient and much slower system.
|
| But that's totally offset by the fact that there's typically
| only one or two cashiers while there may be ten or twenty
| self-service counters. I don't have to stand in line.
| petergrace wrote:
| But having 1-2 cashiers is only the norm now because of
| self checkout. Prior to self checkout there used to be
| nearly all lanes staffed at our local grocery and wait
| times to checkout were low.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Well, not at my local Coop. They have three cashier
| stations, nowadays one or two of them are manned (and the
| third person is free to assist customers where needed).
|
| In my other living place, Japan, the MaxValu supermarket
| has, I think, around ten cashiers - not only that, those
| cashiers are super fast and use double-buffering for
| payment: You can pay while they're already busy with the
| next customer. But still - they have also introduced
| self-service. They still have nearly the same number of
| inhumanely fast human cashiers but they now also have
| lots of self-service desks (and a person there to assist
| anyone needing it).
| gilbertbw wrote:
| My coop has the worst of all worlds. There used to be
| four self checkouts, but they removed two during covid,
| and another one after it developed a fault. So you have
| one self checkout, with a member of staff that has to
| juggle baby sitting it and manning a basket checkout. It
| would be much quicker if they just removed the last self
| checkout and had the staff member man the checkout full
| time.
| julian_t wrote:
| Yes, some shops are, and I lost count of the times when me,
| carrying a basket with a few items, was behind several other
| shoppers with huge trollies full to the brim. Pick a busy
| time and all the lanes are held up like this. Now we have
| self-checkouts for baskets only, and life works much better.
|
| They still to have someone around, though, to satisfy the
| machine when it thinks that my newspaper is 25g too light, or
| I'm not old enough to buy alcohol-free beer (still haven't
| worked out the rationale for that one)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Traditional checkout takes two peoples' time: one scanning
| and the other waiting. Self-checkout only takes one person's
| time.
|
| So it'd have to be twice as fast to break even in terms of
| "time spent".
| jen20 wrote:
| What makes you think it wouldn't be twice as fast, assuming
| the same number of items was being purchased? That
| certainly seemed to be the case at my local Whole Foods
| before Amazon ruined it.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| In 99% of cases I don't have time to wait because the
| cashier is so fast I can barely keep up putting the scanned
| stuff back in the cart. If I do self checkout I have to do
| both of those things myself, meaning I am guaranteed to be
| slower.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| best self checkout is when the store gives you a handheld
| device to scan products right b4 you put them in bags in your
| cart. When you approach the cashier, they just scan your qr
| code and prompt you to pay. After that you just take your
| bags and go... Even faster if the bags are from bicycle and
| you just put them in the back and go...
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| My neighbor works at a Walmart in the US and observes the
| following: They won't usually have more than 2 or 3 cashiers
| signed in at once. The cashiers are either elderly people who
| can't scan super fast or young people who don't care. So most
| people go to the self checkout unless they have a cart
| brimming full of stuff, and even then she sees more than a
| few go through the self checkout anyway.
|
| Is this Walmart being cheap? Kinda, but I think the recent
| surge in living costs has made being a Walmart cashier an
| unattractive job. I think they have trouble keeping and
| retaining people who want to do the job and do it well.
| $15/hr. is nothing now, and the young people who are cashiers
| know that.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Many grocery shops in European cities are fairly small,
| especially near or in the city centre. They might only have
| room for two checkouts, or one checkout and 3-6 self-
| checkouts.
|
| If I'm only buying a few items, I find it faster to use the
| self checkout.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > There's no way the average person can match the speed of a
| cashier who does that every day
|
| Lots of people have at some point worked as cashiers, it
| isn't some completely rare skill. Average person, sure
| they'll be worse, but go up like one standard deviation in
| scanning skill and you can probably win. The cashier has also
| been there all day and can't leave, so they aren't in as much
| of a rush.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > The cashier has also been there all day and can't leave,
| so they aren't in as much of a rush
|
| Some chains track the speed. Afaik Aldi sets 1 scanned item
| per second as the goal on average, and that's so fast some
| people literally complain that they can't keep up with
| putting the scanned items into their cart/bag.
|
| No, there is no way a random person can match that if they
| don't have a lot of practice.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Maybe Aldi has unusually high professional standards.
| When I worked in retail as a teenager there was an
| obvious split between the adults who had been working
| there for ages (and were exceptionally skilled and
| quick), and the high school/college students who were
| there for summer jobs.
|
| The majority of the employees were in the latter group
| and we didn't have any special skill. I mean, lots of
| people work in retail when they are teenagers, so on
| average the people who _have done_ that in the past are
| more experienced that those who are _currently doing_ it,
| right? Unless there's a skew that is causing people to
| stick around longer in retail jobs as time goes by.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "How would it be more efficient than a traditional checkout?
| There's no way the average person can match the speed of a
| cashier who does that every day, and at least the
| supermarkets I've visited don't have enough self checkout
| machines to balance that out."
|
| Where I live, the speed of a cashier is not the bottleneck.
| The bottleneck is waiting in the line after 3-4 people,
| especially if one of them has some issue "eh, I didn't want
| Foo, I wanted bar, let me run for it real quick".
|
| Self-checkout parallizes the process, and if a single
| "Exception" is thrown, the other threads still run just fine.
| goosedragons wrote:
| It's 100% that. One of the grocery stores near me has no weight
| checks or baggage area rules. I can easily bag my groceries
| into my backpack directly, at other stores my backpack is too
| heavy to be considered my bag and so if I want to do that the
| attendent has to override it so I never bother. Then since
| there's no weight check you never run into the "unexpected item
| in bagging area" or "please place item in bagging area" issues
| ever where the scale/item weight isn't acting as expected.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's strange here. The Walmart is tuned quite lax, very
| forgiving.
|
| The local grocery store screams for an attendant if a fruit
| fly farts on the scale.
| spdif899 wrote:
| In my area there are two grocery chains across the street
| from one another.
|
| One has a self checkout that lets you bag your items
| however you want, has a wireless scanner for scanning at
| your convenience, and just has one polite attendant
| monitoring to help with issues or enter birthdate for
| alcohol.
|
| The other has one that screams at you about unidentified
| items in the bagging area if you so much as look in its
| direction, and cameras jammed in your face with a screen
| wrapped in white LEDs to make it obvious you're being
| recorded.
|
| Guess where I prefer to shop :-)
| k4rli wrote:
| I just scan the barcodes on my phone and place everything in
| bag as I go along. Before leaving the store a QR on the POS
| kiosk display is scanned with the store phone app and I just
| need to select on POS if I will pay through app (pre-added card
| info) or physical card/cash. As simple as it gets.
|
| No one checks the products. Occasional random checks happen but
| the checking frequency probably depends if past checks have
| found issues, so I get a bag check once a year max.
| htrp wrote:
| Where are you and which store is this (general terms)?
|
| I use the mobile phone checkout for one of the stores I go
| to. Every time when leaving, they manually inspect every
| single item in my cart.
| soziawa wrote:
| In Switzerland the two major grocery stores have this
| system. You need to establish trust first, for the first
| few months you'll get more inspections. But I haven't been
| checked in years now.
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| The chain "Meijer" has this option. It slows down the
| process while you're actually finding the items in the
| store, but drastically speeds up the checkout process as
| the cashier only has to "verify" between 3-7 items. They
| just randomly grab them from whatever is on top of the
| cart, scan them, and away you go!
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Walmart now has this. The first time I used it I was
| asked to allow a random screening of 3-7 items, but since
| then I have not had to deal with that. Just scan and go.
| soziawa wrote:
| In Switzerland it's similar for one of the two major
| retailers. For the other one you can pay in the app without
| every going to a POS.
| lexszero_ wrote:
| Here in Finland one retail chain (of the whole multitude of
| two that operate nationwide) is experimenting with scan-as-
| you-go approach in a few of their largest stores, and it's
| awesome. You scan your bonus/discount/client card at the
| terminal near the entrance, which then lets you take one of
| barcode scanners from a charging stand (it's only for
| customers that have said card, but most households have at
| least one already). Then you put your reusable shopping
| bag(s) into a cart or basket, and go collect your items and
| throw them straight into your bags after beeping with the
| scanner. The carts even have a nice holder for the scanner so
| your hands can stay free. When you're done, return the
| scanner to another charging stand near the exit, go to the
| self-checkout terminal and pay - it will match you using the
| same client card, which in my case is also linked to my
| primary bank account (yep, the retail chain runs its own
| bank, it's a standard Visa and works with GPay). If there are
| age-restricted items, it will take about 20 seconds for the
| store employee to come look at my ID and beep their card to
| allow the purchase to go through (there are also a few other
| common non-error cases when a human is called). Once in a
| blue moon they can do a spot check, beeping a few random
| items from the top of my bag, though that happened to me just
| twice in two years of shopping there weekly, one of the
| occasions was at 4AM when I was the only customer in the
| entire store.
|
| The biggest convenience for me is that I only have to handle
| the items twice: when I pick them from the shelves, and when
| I unpack the bags at home. Going to any other store that
| doesn't have this system now feels like there is a lot of
| redundant and unergonomic operations.
| valzam wrote:
| I have never understood the point of theft prevention at a
| self-checkout via the weight checks etc. If I want to steal
| something I just ... don't scan it? And keep it in my backpack.
| I don't see how the buggy weight checks serve any purpose other
| than annoying honest customers.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's a security feature sold to the stores against a possible
| but rare attack - barcode swapping.
|
| It even occurs with human checkers but it's quite rare
| (barcodes are fixed now, or the stickers destroy themselves
| if you try to remove them like at Goodwill).
|
| The attack apparently would have you swap a barcode but still
| on camera scan it which I guess theoretically makes it harder
| to prosecute but I kinda doubt it.
|
| It also helps catch misscans which is probably much much more
| common (someone scans an item, they thought it scanned, they
| put it in bagging area).
| HPsquared wrote:
| It can also help the customer - it stops you scanning twice
| (and paying twice) for a single item.
| solardev wrote:
| A pop-up could more easily do that without being
| annoying. "You already scanned Miracle Food. How many
| total are you buying? Just one / enter a number / I'll
| scan each one manually"
| Izkata wrote:
| More likely it's for absent-minded customers who don't
| realize the item didn't scan. If there's a sudden weight
| without a new barcode scanned, the error message on the
| machines at the store I use say something like
| "unexpected weight, please remove item and scan again".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In the early days of self checkout I remember being
| behind a woman who could not figure out how to scan
| things. She was basically presenting the items to the
| scanner like it was a photo shoot while getting
| frustrated that the machine only sometimes recognized
| what she was presenting to it.
| icoder wrote:
| I only just learned about the concept of weight checks, I'd
| assume they weigh whatever you 'present' to have bought and
| compare that to what you scanned.
|
| If you don't scan it _and_ you put /keep it in your backpack,
| that's not different from doing the same but going through
| the cashier checkout right? They already had that problem, so
| if they keep that as it was but reduce the amount of
| personnel, that's a net positive?
| DanielHB wrote:
| > In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way
| checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area
| rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient.
| Especially if you could do things like scan the same product
| multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
|
| The supermarkets in Sweden work like this, the only thing some
| of they do is random checks. In some chains you do need to sign
| up with your ID ahead of time though so they keep track if you
| get caught in a random check.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The big supermarkets in the UK have a "scan as you shop"
| system. There is a portable scanner you take along with the
| trolley and scan each item as you put it in the trolley
| (directly into a bag - avoiding the bagging step).
|
| You then just go to the self-checkout and pay for what you
| scanned.
|
| They do spot checks at the checkout, especially for "new"
| customers. It's tied to your identity (need to scan a store
| card to unlock the scanner).
|
| I think it's a timesaver... even though it takes a bit of
| time to scan each item with the portable scanner, you get to
| skip the "unload from trolley -> scan -> load into bags" at
| the checkout.
| DanielHB wrote:
| yeah that is the case in Sweden as well, but you can also
| scan at checkout if you want. The random checks are the
| same for either, but there is no weight system or cameras
| or rfid or anything else besides the random checks to
| prevent theft
| bee_rider wrote:
| We have that in some chains in the US. Stop and Shop, for
| example. It is much better.
|
| I think it is not as popular in some areas of the US
| because some parts of the country have very low trust.
| icoder wrote:
| Yeah some supermarkets in the Netherlands even let you do
| this with your phone (camera). Haven't used it for a while
| but even some years ago it worked quite good.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Sam's Club in my location is like this. Their self-checkouts
| are a computer screen with a mobile scan gun. You pick up the
| scan gun and scan all the items in your cart however you want.
| Then you pay, then someone checks 2 or 3 items randomly on the
| way out to ensure they are on the receipt.
|
| People are saying the same can be done with an app, but I don't
| want to install another app.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Oh, and the person who checks receipts isn't just casually
| looking. The person checking receipts randomly scans a few
| items in your cart and then scans your receipt and the
| computer tells them if anything they scanned in your cart is
| not on the receipt, so it's a legit check, and it's fast. The
| whole thing takes about 15 seconds per cart, and if there is
| a big line they have the option of just letting people go
| without getting checked, so I've never had to wait.
| thinker5555 wrote:
| > It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout
| technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting,
| which don't even seem that effective at doing that.
|
| Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're
| on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self
| checkouts.
|
| For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery
| store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own
| bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can
| presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start
| scanning items and placing them inside.
|
| That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is
| that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the
| button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in
| the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in
| the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I
| need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and
| forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to
| watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging
| area for both bags 2 AND 3!
|
| I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm
| placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about
| every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags
| in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is
| filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being
| quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what,
| every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I
| have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep
| going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and
| bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10
| "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the
| bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button
| after the scan.
|
| While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL
| better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and
| sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat
| me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and
| inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah, as much as I like self-checkout it seems the bag logic
| is broken everywhere
|
| I just scan everything and bag the stuff after payment
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| I never use the "bag" function.
|
| When I've scanned the first item, I put it in the bag that's
| outside the scale and put the bag with the item on the scale.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Works for most light bags, many people use heavy reusable
| bags which can _sometimes_ throw off weight of _some_ items
| too much and it 's a lottery then. Similarly I don't use
| "add X items at once" because they don't multiply weight
| error by X so for many items it sometimes do not work.
| Arrath wrote:
| I just pile my junk on the scale and bag it up after I'm
| done with the transaction.
| Thlom wrote:
| The first self-checkouts in Norway around 10 years ago
| implemented this weight thing to prevent shoplifting, but
| they dropped it pretty quick. Now there's just random spot
| checks (which can be frustrating enough when it happens). I
| encountered the weight again last year when vacationing in
| Denmark. So frustrating.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I treat the self-checkout as if it has the "10 items or less"
| sign for an express checkout some supermarkets used to have.
| If I need multiple bags, it's probably not faster to use the
| self checkout.
| ghaff wrote:
| The stations are just not designed for checking out a lot
| of non-barcoded/awkward etc. items.
| Arrath wrote:
| My bane back when I was a cashier and to this day thanks
| to self checkouts: weird shaped items that, while having
| a barcode, mean they'll never ever scan correctly.
| Powerade bottles were the worst for this, with the label
| going over a bunch of ridges in the bottle which made the
| label undulate like } and it was hopeless to try to scan
| the damn thing.
| smileysteve wrote:
| That works until your store has migrated 99% to self
| checkout. (which my grocery store has many hours of the
| day)
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not a particular fan of self-checkout for more than a
| handful of non-restricted bar-coded items. But, subject to
| that caveat I find that self-checkouts in general are far
| less fussy than they used to be about using your own bag etc.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Unfortunately, my experience is different.
|
| I have given up on using my big Patagonia bag at lidl,
| because it never works. Last time it required the cashier
| to override the warnings once after each item was placed in
| the bag.
| mc32 wrote:
| Self-checkout relies on high trust. There are places where this
| works and shrinkage is manageable, but that seems to be higher
| income areas.
|
| So it works in Norway or Japan, but put this in Indonesia or
| Honduras or even in small city USA and it'll run into problems.
| It can work in areas of larger cities where most of the
| clientele are high income, but it's bound to fail in most other
| areas.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I disagree. The majority of the problems that I run into with
| self-checkout are related to not being able to buy items I
| picked up off the shelf like Mucinex or children's cough syrup
| or alcohol without getting an employee to check me out... at
| self checkout.
|
| What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is _required_
| --not by failure of the system but by rules--to come help me
| several times during the process?
|
| Edit: at least with alcohol I know it's coming. But it feels
| like every time I try to use self-checkout I'm foiled by
| surprise rules about particular items.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required
| --not by failure of the system but by rules--to come help me
| several times during the process?
|
| In my nearby Walmart they have a dozen or more self-checkout
| stations which only require a few staff in total. Most people
| don't need assistance.
| Izkata wrote:
| Yeah, mine has 1 person overlooking 8 self-checkouts, and
| most of the time they're standing there doing nothing. I've
| only needed help like 5 times in several years, when the
| scale messed up.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| My favorite is when the system says "help is on the way" and
| then very obviously does nothing whatsoever to notify the
| attendant. I have to catch their eye myself every single
| time.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This happened to me at the store last night! I tried to
| weigh something and the scale was mad so it locked up the
| whole process (dialog on the screen saying "Scale needs
| reset. Help is on the way!" and no ability to scan the rest
| of my stuff) then just sat there. I turned to the attendant
| and said "Oh it didn't even tell me you needed help"
|
| Like wtf. At the very least let me continue scanning the
| rest of my groceries so I can be done once this person
| helps me instead of still just 2 scans in..
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| Definitely a yes-and scenario here. I was a cashier, I'm good
| at finding and scanning bar codes and PLU lookups. I was a
| damn fast cashier. That's impossible in a self checkout. And
| then you get carded for a can of spray paint, and the one
| attendant for 8 machines has three people with blinking
| lights. On top of that, most of these self-checkouts are not
| designed to handle a full cart of groceries, but also why do
| I want to do the work of ringing up and bagging a full cart
| of groceries by myself?
|
| For the most part, in practice there's little or no advantage
| for me, the consumer with a cart full of groceries.
|
| One exception was 2003-era Martins in Virginia - Walk in,
| grab a cart that had bags attached to the front, grab a
| portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and bag as
| you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register, show the
| attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done. No unloading
| and reloading the cart, no fiddling with plu lookups,
| fumbling with bags, etc. It was actually glorious, but relies
| on trusting your customers. Corporate stores seem to trust me
| even less than I trust them.
|
| I'm somewhat ok with these things as a secondary 10-items-or-
| less option. But for the love of god staff enough cashiers to
| handle the grocery-shopping-Sunday crowds.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > Walk in, grab a cart that had bags attached to the front,
| grab a portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and
| bag as you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register,
| show the attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done.
|
| They were doing this in a few Michigan Krogers within the
| last few years. I think they ended the program though.
| toyg wrote:
| This seems easily fixed: just ask the consumer to show a
| driver license or other accepted ID, with some software
| validating whether it is legit. It will still be slower than
| a regular cashier judging your full beard and receding
| earline, but it would remove most human oversight.
|
| Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to
| minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too.
| Already, in my local UK supermarket there are cameras on each
| checkout station, which I guess go to some bored reviewer; so
| you could just alert the guy "hey, customer X gave us a valid
| license" and assume that he'll react if he can't see a
| realistic amount of wrinkles.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Because people will then bitch and moan about how they're
| being recorded and their PI is being captured. The former
| is likely already happening, but people would still
| complain since it would be apparent. Both issues would be
| ephemeral if it's a human checking it.
| toyg wrote:
| As I mentioned, we're already being recorded, so that's
| not much of an objection.
|
| On PI, I agree that there is a qualitative difference
| between a cashier and a machine if you assume, as most
| people do, that the cashier will not remember private
| details. This can be fixed with industry-wide agreements
| to not store such data, in the same way as merchants
| don't store your full credit card details. You could even
| allow people to bypass the check if a valid identity is
| registered against their store-issued fidelity card.
|
| Honestly, the only hard problem is localization. At the
| moment you can sell more or less the same automated till
| to UK supermarkets, US supermarkets, or EU supermarkets;
| but document-checking code will have to be heavily
| localized. Still, EU driving licenses are already similar
| on the entire continent, and that's quite a critical mass
| one could hit. I would be surprised if manufacturers
| weren't already developing this feature.
| mjbeswick wrote:
| This is more a issue with the current legislation rather
| than a technical one.
| jtbayly wrote:
| But it was the store that decided to pretend I could
| self-checkout when I actually can't.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I always gamble and scan any alcohol or age restricted items
| first. About half of the time, it throws an alert and flashes
| but lets me continue scanning, it just won't let me complete
| and pay until someone has come over and approved.
|
| For some reason though, some idiot designer who never
| actually thought about how these would be used in reality,
| decided to make it so that the other half of the time it
| immediately stops all scanning until someone comes to fix it.
|
| In the first case, basically I waste no time. In the second,
| I lose however long it takes for the cashier to come.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| If you scan the alcohol first, you can then move over to
| another checkout and proceed with the rest of your items if
| you need to wait for assistance for the alcohol
| bluescrn wrote:
| The first hurdle with some self checkouts is before you even
| scan an item: Bags!
|
| If you've brought your own bag and it weighs more than the
| mass of a few protons, the system assumes you're trying to
| steal something, and a human has to intervene before you can
| even get started.
|
| And then they have to come back almost immediately to deal
| with age-restricted items or other glitches.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I have used multiple self-checkout stations in the United
| States that weigh items. If you add two cans instead of one
| into your bag, the computer terminal will inquire about it.
|
| And security: You only need a single person standing there to
| scary away 95% of shoplifters.
|
| I watched a YouTube video from the channel "Not Just Bikes"
| about grocery shopping in Amsterdam, Netherlands showed a
| supermarket where you carry the "pricing gun/lazer" with you
| and "beep" each item as it enters your basket. I have no idea
| how they reduce shoplifting. Can anyone comment?
| nopurpose wrote:
| Scan as you shop minimises shoplifting by requiring random
| spot checks. When you about to checkout, person comes and re-
| scans few items in your bags, if all were scanned you are
| good to go.
| Goz3rr wrote:
| You can get randomly selected upon checkout where they will
| sample a few items from your bag, and if it finds a
| discrepancy they will rescan every item you have.
|
| These hand held scanners have been a thing for over 10 years,
| way before the current iteration of self checkout stations.
| They continue to exist side by side with self checkout
| stations at supermarkets mainly.
|
| It also should be noted that I have not seen a single self
| checkout station in the Netherlands that puts restrictions on
| how you scan your items. It doesn't care about weight and in
| what order you scan and put items into your bag or if you
| just keep holding the items, and I never have any issues with
| this system breaking or complaining about anything.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We have that in some places in the US as well. Stop and Shop
| has little mobile scanners or apparently you can use an App
| instead. They say they might randomly check your bags when
| you leave, but it only happened to me once.
| afavour wrote:
| IMO it's exactly this. Back when I was a teenager I worked at a
| supermarket and was able to scan a basket of shopping
| incredibly quickly. But the self checkout machines have so many
| pauses and errors that it's impossible to do anything at speed.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| At Walmart, where I often shop, they have an overhead camera
| watching to make sure every item gets beeped. Sometimes I get
| stopped for that. Maybe that system is the bottleneck to
| faster scanning, or maybe they want to try to avoid double-
| beeping items and pissing off their customers so they set up
| a debounce. It would be great if stores were more open about
| their implementation.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The small Target downtown in the college town I live by, has
| _only self-checkout_. No human beings at all.
|
| Further, my contact in the Target data center says the scales
| are disable (too many problems) and the camera showing you on
| the little screen over the kiosk, doesn't go anywhere but that
| screen.
|
| So it's working for them, so far. You'd expect maybe more
| shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under
| strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
| tristor wrote:
| > You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots
| of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is
| thriving.
|
| Most data on the issue of shoplifting in the industry show
| that the people who shoplift are not ones doing it out of
| necessity (e.g. they're poor and can't afford those items),
| most shoplifting is done out of intention and not necessity.
| This includes categories like underaged people stealing items
| that are age-restricted, or people stealing items that cause
| shame to purchase (like condoms, pregnancy tests, et al), as
| well as the now commonplace problem of shoplifting gangs in
| the US who steal en masse to list items via Amazon
| Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online
| markets. People who are productive adults in society very
| very rarely shoplift, and in the cases that they do it
| because of mental issues, like kleptomania.
| Kuraj wrote:
| This has been my experience. Rossmann does not do weight checks
| and using theirs is a breeze.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Companies want insurance to pay for their losses, and it turns
| out the only thing the videos find on self-checkout stands is
| that customers are frustrated that the machine is calling them
| a thief, when the shoplifters, big surprise, don't stand around
| in line for 15 minutes to walk out the door without paying.
|
| The loss prevention person at the door is more likely to find
| items you left behind than to stop a shoplifter, but insurance
| demands it.
|
| And the false positives on those little loss control tags is so
| high that most of the time workers aren't even going to look
| your direction if something sets it off. Once again, this is
| all crap required by insurance.
|
| Shoplifters don't care about any of this. They just grab what
| they want and leave.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I live the self-checkout at my local Ralph's (USA). They have
| their system dialed in and it always just works.
| odiroot wrote:
| A failure? I see many more people using the machines than the
| manned registers.
|
| Waitrose, M&S and Sainsbury's seems to be going nearly all in on
| the machines in my town.
| thedougd wrote:
| I remember in the 2000s Walmart was pushing all their suppliers
| to adopt RFID. It was expensive and never happened.
|
| The dream was that we could just take a cart full of items
| through a gateway and all the items would be instantly tallied
| and ready to take home. I could actually see this happening, but
| perhaps at Costco instead. Costco doesn't weigh or bag items.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Decathlon and Uniqlo are two retailers that do use this tech
| today. However, they also have the huge advantage of retailing
| only their own-brand products, so they have full control of the
| supply chain.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| The article is way out of sync with my experience - I've seen no
| reduction in the number of self-checkouts compared to the number
| of traditional checkouts.
|
| Sure, self-checkout is annoying. Mostly because of measures to
| combat thievery, which I notice have got more hair-trigger
| recently. The level of anti-theft paranoia that's dialed-in
| varies depending on the supermarket - the more downmarket the
| place, the more the self-checkout is calibrated to not trust you.
|
| I'd be really surprised if they end up being phased out.
| selimnairb wrote:
| If a cashier makes a mistake, I always correct it when I catch it
| because I know it can count against them. When a self-checkout
| machine makes the occasional mistake (namely, charging too little
| for an item) I never correct it because it's all on the store and
| who am I to correct them.
| oytis wrote:
| I find self-checkout pretty pleasant to use if implemented
| correctly. A positive experience was an Ikea store where you just
| scan everything and walk out with occasional checks by a security
| guard. Or even better at Decathlon where you don't even need to
| scan things - you put it in a special box, and the machine
| recognises them itself. On the opposite side of the spectrum
| there are machines at supermarkets that try to be smart in a
| wrong way - complaining about what bags you are using, where you
| put them etc. About third of the times I decide to use those I
| end up having to call a human worker.
| neilalexander wrote:
| The IKEA implementation is very close to ideal. An actual
| handheld barcode scanner attached to a long cable that you can
| move around as needed. Virtually no delay when scanning things.
| No need to place items on a scale. No need to pick each item up
| to pass it over an awkward fixed scanning surface. No problem
| if you want to use your own bags. No problem if you run out of
| space and need to move items back to the trolley. It's like
| they actually thought about the user.
| jen20 wrote:
| Agreed it's very good compared to the incredibly poor systems
| in most places, but suffers from the same attention problem
| as other systems - prompts in the middle of the scanning
| phase (usually the "I promise I'll attach this to a wall)
| that should be treasured up for the end of the process.
|
| Of course the scanner doesn't know this so will happily beep
| each time as you scan 10 more things that don't get
| registered because someone didn't learn why modals are a bad
| idea.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Yeah the Decathlon ones really bamboozled me.
|
| Does anyone know how are those achieved (from a technical
| standpoint)?
| block_dagger wrote:
| I shop at Sprouts and they don't require weight checks. You can
| scan same item twice (rarely causing mistakes). The item lookup
| is easy and effective. Whole thing works great, I use it all the
| time.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Failure?
|
| They work very fine, just not replace as many workers as expected
| chasd00 wrote:
| I've see this story floating around and it certainly doesn't
| apply to my area. The self checkout at my local grocery store is
| very popular. When you've done it once or twice and get the hang
| of it it's easy to go fast even with items like fruits/vegetables
| where you have to enter a code and weigh for the price. When I'm
| buying alcohol that requires age verification I make eye contact
| with the cashier covering the self checkout stations when I walk
| up, they are already on their way over when I scan. It takes the
| smallest amount of effort to learn and then it's fine, I love
| self checkout.
| thesaintlives wrote:
| Previously an employee scanned and took my payment. Now that
| 'employee' is me. What is my upside? Generally I try not to work
| for free whilst making other people richer...
| whycome wrote:
| Well if the other employees screw up they get a warning and
| maybe some direction. If you screw up at your job you'll get
| accused of shoplifting and maybe get the cops called.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| You get to load your bags appropriately instead of putting eggs
| on the bottom.
| hasbot wrote:
| Heh, I always put eggs on the bottom of my bag. Those cartons
| provide a nice base and are designed to hold a lot of weight.
| But, I agree, I prefer self-checkout because I can organize
| the bags as I want them.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I would not call self-checkout a failure. Yes things like weight
| checks are annoying but what self checkouts are great at doing is
| increasing throughput through a store checkout. Often times I can
| be standing in line to a self checkout with 10-15 people in front
| of me and only wait 2-3 minutes because there are 6 self-checkout
| registers, meanwhile the folks waiting at traditional checkout
| are still waiting as I'm already walking out.
| jwmoz wrote:
| This is a nonsense post. There are plenty of shops running well
| without issues. The city m&s we go to is full of customers in and
| out at lunch times.
| hasbot wrote:
| Aldi recently switched to self-checkout which is a _huge_
| improvement. Aldi had always skimped on cashiers so there was
| always a line. Now that I 'm scanning products myself I see that
| Aldi products have two large UPC on each box which is why Aldi
| cashiers are so fast. All product manufacturers should do the
| same.
| teddyh wrote:
| When stores near me started to have self-checkouts, I started to
| use them immediately, and I always preferred them. In the
| beginning, they had the annoying weight check for every item, but
| it was mostly fine, and employee interventions were rarely
| needed, and I don't recall ever having an employee going through
| every item; it occasionally happened that one came over, gave my
| bag a quick glance (not even touching it), and scanned a code on
| the machine to unlock it and let me go. Also, quite soon, all the
| stores removed the weight check entirely, and you could just scan
| all your items and put them in the bag, pay and go. (Just
| remember to not put away your reciept until after you've used it
| to go through the exit.) It was _fine_.
|
| Then, all the stores removed the possibility of using cash in the
| self-checkout, so I stopped using them. I haven't used them
| since.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| After having seen several massive discussions on this topic on HN
| and other places, I'm coming to the opinion that "is self
| checkout a good thing?" is "vi or emacs?" but for the general
| population not just techies.
|
| People get their backs up _hard_ on this topic!
| dre85 wrote:
| I always use self-checkout and prefer it. Recently though it's
| gotten really annoying in the Walmart near my house in that there
| are like 30 checkouts out of which only 4 are working and there's
| again a line up. Probably again some stupid shoplifting
| prevention strategy, but it's highly nonsensical.
|
| On a similar note, I'm blown away by the checkout system in
| Decathlon stores. You literally just throw the item into a
| checkout bin and it somehow detects what the item is (maybe NFC
| tags?) And just adds the price on the screen. No weighing or
| scanning barcodes. Really futuristic!
| andenacitelli wrote:
| Uniqlo has a similar system for some stores where you just
| throw the items in and it automatically senses them. It's
| probably more feasible for them because they do much more of
| the supply chain for their products and basically have an item
| all the way from manufacture to retail sale, so they probably
| cut a lot of the middlemen costs.
| paulorlando wrote:
| A related read on this focused on self-checkout's impact on
| shoplifting. "Do the unintended consequences of job automation
| include creating shoplifters? People build products and companies
| to automate tasks, especially costly, dangerous, and monotonous
| tasks. For many of the tasks already automated, the effect is
| already invisible, the history forgotten, unstudied, and unknown.
| People find it surprising to learn that anyone used to do these
| specific tasks manually." https://unintendedconsequenc.es/do-we-
| create-shoplifters/
| gspencley wrote:
| I hate waiting in lines almost more than any other "chore" in
| life. I'd honestly rather file a tax return. I find that in my
| city self-checkouts tend to move much faster. There is often a
| machine available already, so no wait at all, and if not the
| waits are much shorter. So for this reason, self-checkouts have
| been a wild success for me.
|
| What bothers me about a lot of self-checkout machines are the
| annoying attempts to "up-sell" me on stuff; in quotes because
| these hoops that you need to jump through before paying are not
| always trying to literally sell you something. No, I don't want
| to scan a loyalty points card. No, I don't want to donate to your
| charity. No, I don't want an email receipt just print it please.
| And I don't care about whatever announcement you want to shove in
| my face before I can pay. Just let me pay and be on my way
| already FFS.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Not to trot out the ol' meme: "Just as AI/ML", but why don't they
| add a camera that can guess what is your fruit/veg, or at least
| suggest 2-3 items that look close? That would solve a lot.
|
| In Hongkong, most major supermarkets have self-checkout sections
| now. Usually, there is a single person standing by to fix any
| issues. I am sure the labour cost for checkout is much lower in
| those areas.
|
| In Tokyo, Japan, most convenience stores have at least one self-
| checkout register. (Can anyone comment about combini other
| regions of the country? And, Aeon: Do they have self-checkout
| yet?) The interface in each chain takes some getting used to (so
| many steps!), but then you get the hang of it. Unsurprisingly,
| many natives continue to queue for service, even if it takes
| longer than self-checkout.
|
| Can anyone comment on the situation in Singapore, another highly
| developed, but very low crime location?
| Palomides wrote:
| >why don't they add a camera that can guess what is your
| fruit/veg, or at least suggest 2-3 items that look close?
|
| this is exactly what you'll see rolled out over the next few
| years, all of the equipment vendors have been showing
| prototypes of it
| atvcatole wrote:
| > why don't they add a camera that can guess what is your
| fruit/veg, or at least suggest 2-3 items that look close?
|
| They had one of those in a larger supermarket I visited last
| summer. (EDIT: In Norway) They also had those mobile bar code
| scanners you bring with you and dock in your trolley, and app
| payment (including receipt storage), so the entire process was
| pretty smooth.
|
| I live in a city so I don't use those large supermarkets, so I
| don't know if this is something new or not.
| gosub100 wrote:
| The biggest design flaw I've noticed has no technology
| whatsoever: the shelf where you set the basket isn't long enough
| to accommodate the whole basket! So you can set the basket down,
| and if you take away a heavy item on the "load bearing" side,
| your basket will fall down! I can't..even..comprehend how stupid
| this design is.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| You'd think the article was written by a rep from the cashiers
| union.
|
| I have no bad experiences with self-checkout. None.
|
| Going to a staffed-only checkout feels like going back 20 years
| in time. They take up more space, they can move slower, suddenly
| customers will kill the speed because they need to look for their
| coupons, pay with change, or whatever.
| elitan wrote:
| same
| compiler-guy wrote:
| And because I personally have never seen the problem, it
| couldn't possibly exist!
| regular_trash wrote:
| If the problem is pervasive as made out to be, it stands to
| reason that a person would have at least one anecdotal
| experience in favor of the claim.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Which is more likely?
|
| 1. The people who say they have had a problem actually have
| had a problem, and some other people have gotten lucky.
|
| 2. The people who say they have had a problem are lying, or
| deceived.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Given the massive variation in self checkouts, it's also
| possible you just live in a region which is on the High
| Quality end of the bell curve.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Don't forget that "cashiers" aren't a real job anyway, and
| with self checkout technology it allows someone who was a
| checker to be inspired to be a software engineer.
|
| All they need to do is drop everything to learn one of the
| most competitive and hardest cross-disciplinary skills and
| jump into a shrinking market!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Not saying that they don't exist, but my experience has been
| nothing but positive. It must be 8-9 years since we got one
| locally, and it's been smooth sailing for me.
|
| You scan the products. Confirm that you've scanned
| everything. Want a shopping bag, yes/no? Pay.
|
| That's it. The scanners work. Payment work. Getting a receipt
| works.
|
| Maybe I've just been lucky, who knows.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Opinions on self checkouts are age tests. The older you are the
| more likely you are to hate it. You can basically peg someone
| to 45/50 or older if they complain. I say this and I'm near
| that age range. On Facebook: I bagged my own groceries! Is
| someone going to pay me?!?? And yeahz you're 52? Yup, over and
| over.
| xphos wrote:
| I disagree being a young 26 year old, I have had dozens of
| issues with self checkout getting stuck for 5+ minutes at a
| time over things that don't have bar codes and require hand
| typing. Or Heaven forbid you don't put the item precisely on
| the scale bench and it flags you as being 0.1 oz off your
| checkout basket.
|
| They are not hard to clear issues and I could do them myself
| but only the cashier has the ability to clear those errors
| and sometimes there is that one customer that is taking the 1
| cashier for 8 stalls for like 5 minutes complaining about a
| coupon.
|
| I think dismissing the issues is sure fire way for more
| issues to come up.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > You can basically peg someone to 45/50 or older if they
| complain.
|
| Not me (aged 60, happy with using self-checkouts in general,
| resigned to the occasional glitches)
| Libcat99 wrote:
| I use the self check out unless my order is huge and I need
| more space to pack it. The scan->wait->scan drives me nuts
| though.
| tehbeard wrote:
| Ah, this is a US focused study? Strange for it to be on the BBC.
|
| Personally, as a customer (UK), it's been pretty damn good.
| Especially scan as you shop.
|
| They're not perfect, everyone's experienced "unexpected item in
| the bagging area", or had a quick trip halted by having to wave
| down a staff member for a full cart scan.
|
| Part of the problem mentioned at the top of the article is the
| store's cut too many staff from checkout; having only one on hand
| to manage the "fleet" of 12-20 tills does not work well. You need
| 3-4, so you've got some leeway if a few customers need a
| verification (full scan, or restricted goods) or a till needs
| some troubleshooting at the same time.
|
| But when it works; the queue moves quicker, stuff isn't being
| thrown along the till haphazardly.
| keiferski wrote:
| Meanwhile here in Central / Eastern Europe, self checkouts
| continue to be adopted and work just fine. They're especially
| great for convenience stores where you can grab a quick snack,
| pay, and be out in a minute.
|
| The difference may be that there is zero expectation of theft
| here, with shoplifting also being punished as the crime it is.
| MarketingJason wrote:
| The weight check slows the whole process down and I find I have
| to make sure I grab items with the cart-side hand or the system
| thinks I am trying to drop the item in the bag without scanning.
|
| Worst of all is the receipt check after the process - looking at
| you Costco. It feels like checking pockets in a diamond mine. If
| I am going to be doing all the work to save the store money they
| should loose the right to check it.
|
| Regarding that last point, has anyone tried brushing past them or
| refusing? I doubt they can detain or stop you without evidence. I
| guess the worst case is they could ban you or cancel a
| membership.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The act of checking is like a deterence, likely they found it
| lowered shoplifting by x %. If anyone works in that area, they
| probably was instructed to look like they check, and just dash
| it
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Yeah the weight check slows everything down enough that my
| girlfriend and I opt for the grocery store that doesn't do that
| over the one that does. It's obnoxious the way it works the way
| I can't just grab a bag without being yelled at or the way it
| gets mad if one of us leans on it etc.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I mean... Differences in location. I'm in Norway.
|
| Most places have turned off the weight balance on the two
| sides, so it is no longer an issue.
|
| I don't have a receipt check, but I do remember walmart did
| that before I moved ~10 years ago - those Walmarts didn't have
| self-checkouts, so it definitely isn't because of those. Stores
| thought this was good before self-checkouts were everywhere.
|
| My mother once refused. They harassed her, and she ended up
| yelling. I cannot recall where this was, however, since there
| were not a Costco in the area.
|
| I _do_ - at some stores - get a random check, where they check
| a few items to make sure they were scanned. And then most of
| the time, I scan my receipt to get out of the check out area.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| They don't do weight checks in the Netherlands. The process is
| super efficient. They have certain reasons to have a human
| check out your load before accepting payment (weight might be a
| part of it? But probably not). You must scan your receipt to
| leave. So far as I understand, I think it works really well
| here. They probably catch enough serial shoplifters to make it
| work.
|
| My guess is that the "featurism" of the weight check was
| promoted so much that they feel weird _just_ relying on the
| tendency of people to be honest. But people do tend to be
| honest (especially when there is a small chance of being
| caught)
| Zandikar wrote:
| They'll complain/look bewildered but little will come of it
| (probably) if you just do it once and weren't rude. However
| they can (not necessarily will, but can) revoke your membership
| for it, which you'll discover when you try to use the card at
| checkout or online. YMMV of course, but then checking the
| receipt is something you agreed to when signing on as a member.
| It really probably depends on how much of a scene it makes and
| if that stores stop loss dept takes note, which is likely tied
| to the value/fullness of the stuff in your cart.
|
| I've done it before when busy, the line was long and I just
| needed tp (I was fortunate Costco was essentially my closest
| grocery store at the time). The girl doing receipt check looked
| non plussed and "Sir'd" me, I just smiled held up the receipt,
| told her have a nice day and kept going. No issue. Full cart
| might actually get a response though.
| n3dm wrote:
| I have. This was before I realized it was in their cardmember
| agreement. The woman grabbed my cart and held onto it,
| preventing me from leaving with my belongings until I conjured
| a receipt.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Lots of anecdotes, which is a sign everybody is having problems.
|
| Or is it? Talk about vending machines with a person of sufficient
| age, they'll tell you stories about getting cheated, not getting
| it to take their money, taking their last dollar and not giving
| any product.
|
| Yet that's largely been cured. The vending industry has matured
| and such problems are reported to be largely extinct.
|
| I wonder when the self-checkout woes of the first years will give
| way to flawless self-checkout, but _with people still
| complaining_ because of something that happened years ago?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I've used self checkout at a variety of stores since they very
| first turned up almost a decade ago. I always used them over a
| human since day one.
|
| I don't know if people are just really dumb or I'm really
| lucky, but I very rarely have issues with self checkout.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| as a side note, the biggest time sink when shopping is trying to
| open those bags you try to put vegetables in. Who solves this
| problem will get more customers. So far i've never seen a good
| solution, and is baffling
| anon115 wrote:
| just put food inside vending machine freezers whalah self check
| out baby
| i8comments wrote:
| I think it works great, though.
| tristor wrote:
| Most of my issues with self-checkout are with the anti-theft
| measures. What is especially galling is that I live in a state
| that charges for bags to encourage you to bring your own bags, so
| of course I bring my own bags. If you use your own bags, a /very/
| common thing, it throws off the weight sensors and requires
| someone to clear every 3-5 items, and lags between every scan.
| When I was much younger I worked briefly as a check clerk at a
| grocery store, my typical shopping I could scan and finish in 1-2
| minutes on a register lane, but because of the stupidity of self-
| checkout it takes me 10-15 minutes.
|
| I get that "this is why we can't have nice things", that people
| will take a sticker off a can of beans and put it on a PS5 or
| other shenanigans to try to steal/shoplift/cheat. I'm not doing
| that, and it makes it a massively worse experience. The worst
| thing of all is companies have huge self-checkout areas and then
| don't open any registers (or maybe 1 to sell tobacco products).
| Which means I have no choice. I actually prefer delivery, because
| it's a flat $5 fee and I don't have to mess with any of this
| anti-consumer bullshit, but it also reduces profitability for me
| as a customer because I don't make incidental purchases by not
| being in the store at all.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| It can still work; just needs a better implementation.
| misja111 wrote:
| I love the self-checkouts, I have been using them since 5 years
| now and only very rarely do I still checkout out at the cashier.
| Here in Switzerland I also don't seen any sign of supermarkets
| backing out of it, quite the contrary.
|
| I guess the article is specific for the US or the UK. I don't
| think the technology is a failure at all, the problem seems more
| specific to the culture.
| l3x4ur1n wrote:
| Same in Slovakia. I love self-checkouts, been using them
| preferably. Paired with scanning items to the store app as I
| pick them from aisle and then just scanning self-checkout QR
| code so all the items neatly import to checkout register and I
| just pay for it and go (Kaufland, Tesco). It's been really good
| experience.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Eventually these stores will fix the user experience issues (and
| I don't just mean the interface), and it will be much better. I
| tried a newer self-checkout kiosk at a store recently, and it was
| an improvement over the old system, but there were still a number
| of very obvious usability issues, unclear aspects, and annoyances
| that should have been fixed before the release. I expect they are
| planning to correct them in a software update.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I personally refuse to use them on principle. I've worked those
| kinds of jobs, and I know that for some people it's either a
| starting point or a lifeline that keeps food on the table.
|
| I do not want to encourage stores to remove such jobs for an
| automated solution.
| EvkoGS wrote:
| I don't see any issue with it in Russia. Almost all local stores
| (only the top 10 major companies though) now have self-checkout
| with a digital receipt. Since last year, I can self-checkout in a
| 24/7 store in a village of 10000 people at the sea. It's pretty
| wild, even though cashier's salaries are like $6000/year, they
| should've been saving a lot of money with these machines.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The obviously haven't been to the Netherlands or Japan
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| I'm sure it's just a coincidence these problems with automation
| are being discovered now that the Biden admin has decided we have
| a "tight labor pool." I'm sure it has nothing to do with
| Keynesian theory being popular among the extremely wealthy.
| temporallobe wrote:
| I understand that Sams Club isn't your typical grocery store
| model, but its Scan-and-Go app is absolutely the most impressive
| "self checkout" system I have ever used, and I think other stores
| could, in selective markets, start adopting similar systems.
| Imagine being able to walk into a store, scan the items on your
| phone, pay in the app with a connected credit card, and walk out.
| I think one of the keys to the success of Sams Club's system is
| that an associate must scan a QR code generated by the app, and
| then scans a few random items in your cart before letting you
| leave. It seems like this discourages shoplifting because every
| shopper is a known entity (by virtue of the app). It's not a
| perfect system of course, for many reasons (you can't use cash or
| be anonymous, for example), but it sure beats the hell out of any
| of the clunky and buggy self checkout systems I've ever attempted
| to use.
| bitwize wrote:
| Let's see... do I want to have my stuff scanned by an attendant
| who's lightning fast with the scanner? Or do I want to do it
| myself, slowly, while GLaDOS critiques my technique and seems to
| look for excuses to make me do it over for her own perverse
| amusement?
|
| I mean, for me it's not a hard decision.
|
| Self-checkout is enshittification. It diminishes the shopping
| experience so the company can save a few bucks by not employing
| cashiers.
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