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The failure of self-checkout technology (bbc.com)
177 points by LaksiMati 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 605 comments



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.


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.


Do retailers really have insurance for loss and theft? I thought they'd just factor it into pricing.


I work for a retailer and we certainly do not use a third party insurer, and I don't see why any other consumer retailer selling inexpensive merchandise would use insurance. It is priced in.

In fact, we use RFID tracking to know when goods are stolen, not to save money, not to catch shoplifters, but to improve inventory management and ensure that we get a replacement item on the shelf to avoid losing sales.


Yeah, I figured as much. So the above commenter was just talking out of their ass.


Highly doubt it. You can't insure the inevitable.


Sure you can, it just costs more than taking the loss


There's the other kind of shrink at self-checkout where somebody weighs their produce bag of fair trade, heirloom organic apples; and "accidentally" keys them in as the cheap variety. This is pretty common.


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.


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.


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


Thanks for the tip—never tried it, but it sounds solid!


Why don't you just scan the alcohol last then?


Because you still need to wait for the attendant to come. But you have no chance of scanning other items in parallel. (Assuming you don't know if this store will block scanning)

It is always optimal to scan these first. You have two cases:

Blocking: scan 1 + wait for attendant + scan rest

Non-blocking: scan 1 + max(wait for attendant, scan rest)

However if you scan these items last the wait is always the same:

scan rest + scan 1 + wait for attendant

This is never shorter than either of the previous two. It is equivalent to the blocking case and almost always longer than the non-blocking case.


^ This post is just in case you forgot you were on hacker news.


I agree it's a beautifully crafted response, and have nothing to add, it's exactly what my point was.


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.


Oh my gosh, this is the bane of my shopping existence. Fred Meyer (Kroger) self scan registers are absolutely henpecking, pushy nannies. Did you put a bag on the scale? Did you put another bag on the scale? Please put your item in the bagging area. Please take all your purchased items. Over and over.


God forbid you have more than one bag, because that totally confuses the system.


Or that not all of your bags fit on the scale.


One workaround is to delay bagging (in your own bags) until after checkout, when you can just ignore its complaints. But the downside is having to awkwardly tetris your scanned items around the stupid plastic bag holders that take up half the bagging area...


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.


> 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.


That's what we have in Sweden. It is really nice, unless you get a check on leaving the store.


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.


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..


I think the light above you changes to blinking red, which they're expected to notice on their own but often don't.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


I use my US Passport for restricted-age item purchases (or ID at a bar), simply because it is not trackable and does not list my location/residence upon it.

Although I'm way beyond the point of caring about demographic profiling, I still don't want my home address to be available to everybody dealing with a simple purchase (although this perspective is probably greatly atypical on account of being a survivor of CSA).


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.


it's not "bitching and moaning" to be concerned about the over collection and exploitation of surveillance capitalism.


This is more a issue with the current legislation rather than a technical one.


But it was the store that decided to pretend I could self-checkout when I actually can't.


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.


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.


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...


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.


Weird, I've never seen a self checkout in the UK that doesn't provide the option to select no bag or key in 0 bags.


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.


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.


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).


I believe the difference is living in a high trust society.


Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.


> 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.


Turns out, like almost all things, homogeneity has positive aspects, too. Weirdly enough, this almost seems like forbidden knowledge depending on what political side you are on.

Also, as Denmark recently discovered, homogeneity is not simply dependent on a social safety net but exists within a symbiotic relationship with the latter.


Most ways, as the research of Robert Putnam has documented well.

https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/downside-diversity


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.


[flagged]


> You are the one who hurt your kids, and it’s on the rest of us now to stop you from also hurting society. Homogenous societies are a good thing and always have been.

Thank you for supporting my thesis that praise for "homogeneous" societies is nothing but a dog whistle for plain old racism. I hope my children won't have to suffer people like you IRL.

Edit: It is hilarious that people like you praise places like the country where I was born and the country where my wife was born, but when we marry and have mixed-race children then suddenly you label our family as a menace to society.


One of the biggest hurdles to getting a social safety net past public perception in the US is that people are easily swayed against it if they're told that people of other races will benefit from it. A certain portion of the population automatically sorts any public benefit into a weird racial zero-sum game, where any support given to <people of that race> is a dollar specifically taken away from <people of my race>.

It's a big part of why we've historically had such a hard time implementing any sort of reasonable social benefits, and why the much lauded Nordic countries started cutting down on theirs the second they got a significant (racially different) refugee population.


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...


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.


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.


> booking record high profits

According to the opening paragraph of that article that's doesn't seem to be the case. €80 million in profit (with €100 million theft) is not all that much.


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.


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?


Do I want to live in a society in which criminals suffer the consequences of their crime? Is this a serious question?


Whenever I see anyone use "homogeneous" in this context I always consider them a racist...

Meanwhile Netherlands elected an anti-immigration right-wing government in their last elections: https://time.com/6339173/dutch-election-results-geert-wilder...


23% did, just to be clear.


Being conservative on immigration (and in general) is not necessarily the product of racism.


Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.


It's not exactly Japan-level high trust, but it is compared to most other countries in the world.


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".


Sam's Club does this in the US and it is great.


This exists to some extent in the UK with the self scan widgets. Waitrose had it before self checkouts. It works really well.


That’s not the full story though because there are random spot checks and they’re very very annoying when they happen.


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


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!


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.


The scan as you go app is quite good until you get a rescan. The issue there is on the employees handsets. They never seem to be able to log in


Honestly why did you all have to Brexit. Would have loved to immigrate to the UK. Had to settle for NL.


Same in Switzerland. I got so annoyed the first time I used a self-checkout in Germany.


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.


> 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.


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.


That works until your store has migrated 99% to self checkout. (which my grocery store has many hours of the day)


The stations are just not designed for checking out a lot of non-barcoded/awkward etc. items.


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.


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


> 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!

this is insane to me and if a manager was involved they should be fired. I dont think its reasonable to review video of a customer without probable cause they were stealing. In this case, the machines are so buggy (as you illustrated with your case) that a machine complaining is NOT probable cause. How to alienate your customers 101...


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.


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.


I just pile my junk on the scale and bag it up after I'm done with the transaction.


This does mean you block the person behind you for much longer, but that's the store's problem not mine.


If it means there's never an "unexpected item in bagging area" it probably overall reduces time.


I do this too, but most stores have plastic bag holders on the scale that clutter things put and make it harder to stack items before bagging.


I imagine its regional, but where I'm at those are long gone. Now you gotta bring your own bags or pay for each of the ultra flimsy 'reusable' store brand bags.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


It can also help the customer - it stops you scanning twice (and paying twice) for a single item.


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"


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".


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.


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?


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.


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.


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?


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).


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".


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.


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.


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 :-)


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


Phone could be quite good I suppose since it's tied to the person's identity.


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


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.


> 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.


> 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?


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.


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.


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.


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/panosmourdoukoutas/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".)


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.


> 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.


> "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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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".


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.


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.


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.


Instead you stay in the queue for the self check-out, and have to wait minutes till the buyer in the front figures out how to scan their items.


I've never seen a queue for a check out where regular queue wasn't 3x as long. To a single till no less.


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.


> Is this Walmart being cheap

> $15/hr. is nothing now

I think you answered your own question. They are failing to hire cashiers because they aren't willing to pay enough. So yes, they are being cheap.

There is a huge potential market for cashiers. There is no shortage. There is only a shortage for the price that Walmart has decided is worth paying.


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.


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)


> 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.


> 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.


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.


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.


"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.


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...


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.


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.


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?


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.


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.


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.


HEB has those now. They also do a weight check but they just weigh your entire cart at the end.


I was at my local Vons the other day and had two identical boxes of rice at the self checkout. Scanned the one in my right hand and put the one in my left hand in the bagging area, then tried to scan the one in my right hand again (this was all to speed things up just slightly).

The screen threw up a message asking me to check on what I had put in the bagging area. Below it was a video of me shot from the ceiling, with bounding boxes drawn around the two boxes of right (basically identifying that the thing I had scanned was not what I had put in the bagging area).

I was actually pretty impressed... at my work we do some computer vision work, and we're dealing with fairly high-resolution, static images. This managed to draw perfect bounding boxes on a video, and the whole thing processed in less than a couple of seconds.

Seems like if you can do that, there ought to be other ways you can speed things up. Currently for produce with no bar code, I have to type in the name of the produce and then weigh it. They ought to be able to identify it as a zucchini via computer vision and skip the first step, at least.


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.


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.


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!


> 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.

Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.

I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.


Many self checkout systems check for the weight of scanned items, so if you scan an item you have to put it down (“please place item in the bagging area”) in order to continue.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


> 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.

A lot of them literally do work this way and just accept the risk of shrink,.


Some places turn these things off. At target I never got "unexpected item in bagging area" or those weight check problems.


This has been my experience. Rossmann does not do weight checks and using theirs is a breeze.


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!


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


RFID tags are already used for inventory management for some items/retailers. A system like this can just piggyback on the existing tags.


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.


I’ve seen it at stores where each item is relatively more expensive (e.g. a Uniqlo).


We nowadays have disposable smart labels with integrated screens.

Look up ynvisible


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.


This. We need many fewer disposable things in this world, not more.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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?


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.


The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of tonnes of produce to rot.

Check out getfairaboutfarming.com


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.


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.


How much to swim in the banana pit?


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).


> 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.


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”.


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?


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


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?


We kind of already do that, just with plastic, adhesive, and ink.


My bananas don't have plastics, adhesive or ink and regardless, adding another chip to them won't make it any better.


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.


I was thinking more along the lines of produce stickers.


I've seen it, just rarely.


Yes, that should be reduced, not added to.


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.


I am not suggesting it. It was widely presented as inevitable once the costs dropped enough. Retail inventory management and checkout is expensive.


Apologies for the strawman then. I just hope humanity can pass on that one, for once.


Absolutely worth it


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).


Metrc charged $0.40 for single use RFID for cannabis plants starting in 2014.


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.


Not seen it on groceries, but I know Uniqlo use this same method and it's fantastic.


Want to buy this vegetable? Now try to find it among these 300 icons of vegetables! Enjoy!


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


The tiny stickers on all the veggies at my grocery store all scan just fine.


There are no stickers here. Just the peel. But It doesn't scan so well.


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.


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?


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.


it's 4021 apple, because it has a sticker. So you try to scan tiny barcode (if one is present, you can see it on bananas) but if it's missing or dirty, you enter 4-digit PLU by hand. It's very simple and fast:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-...

but yeah, if your store has no number stickers and multiple types of apples I can imagine self-checkout being a major pain. (I can think of a few ways to make this easier -- like provide a roll of stickers next to each variety so customer can attach them to the bag themselves -- but I've never seen this implemented)


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?


At least over here, differing varieties of the same fruit often cost the same, probably precisely to avoid this problem.


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.


> ”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.


It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.


The items are also all high enough margin to cover the extra tag cost. Isn’t going to work for supermarkets.


It's not just for payment though, it also helps for theft, and I suppose inventory management is improved on many aspects as well.


Yup, tagging and all the related costs are only reasonable for high-margin/relative high value products, not food


> I love self-checkout, honestly.

Not me. I really loathe it a lot, unless I'm buying just a single item and I'm in a hurry.

Increasingly, the self-checkout lines tend to be the really long ones anyway, so using them isn't even any faster. Just more work.


Uniqlo's system was discussed here in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111


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.


I think that's a Germany problem rather than a self-checkout problem.


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.


To be fair, there's a massive difference between the machines I've seen at least in Switzerland and the ones in the UK/US. In the latter, they seem far more anti-shoplifting focused, forcing you to place each item and wait for some delay before you can scan the next item, loudly announcing every step of the process, etc.

There's still some variance in the latter countries between supermarket chains as some are noticeably faster or require fewer taps than others, but the general experience in most every chain is far less pleasant than in every major supermarket brand in Switzerland.


Thats more of a thieve problem facing the consequnces of their actions.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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)

Every once in a while I'm reminded to be grateful I live in North America.


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.


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.


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.


Assuming there is usefull job to get instead.

I bet many would rather do a useless job than staying at home getting Hartz IV.


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.


It's a loss of even more human interaction. And there are a lot more useless office jobs.


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).


Yeah like gettting unemployment support money.


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!


That’s the problem with the money incentive most stores have here - what I mentioned in the original post, that the security personnel receives 50 - 100 euros per “thief” caught


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.


And because I personally have never seen the problem, it couldn’t possibly exist!


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.


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.


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.


3. The people who say they have a problem actually had a problem, but they a minority and got unlucky, and then extrapolated their experience to everyone else

The article actually ends with "shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time." - and that is clearly false for me and everyone I know. "rarely" or "occassionaly"? maybe. But not "most of the time".


> but they a minority and got unlucky, and then extrapolated their experience to everyone else

Bold of you to assume you're not the minority.


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!


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.


Why do you like it better than having a cashier ring you up?

Me: I don't have to scan, check I've scanned everything, enter the number of bags, put groceries in those bags. Instead I put my stuff on the belt, I pay and walk out w the groceries--and the cashier is a pro at scanning and bagging, whereas I am not.

Plus, it's not like these stores are going to pass along the labor savings to us. They'll just pocket the difference.


... after waiting in line for 20+ minutes

I remember the time before self-scan machines, and the lines were not shorter. Even "10 items or less" registers had huge lines.


Fair point--maybe the throughput is higher for self checkout. I still like not having to do the work myself tho.


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.


That weighing thing doesn't exist on good self-checkouts.


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.


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.


> 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)


same


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.


In Germany there are a few Lidl's with self checkout now. But haven't seen an Aldi doing it.


All Lidls in Poland already have self checkout, and it's one of the best implementations I've seen, as expected from Lidl.


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.


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.


There are Aldis in Germany with self checkout.


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.


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.


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.


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!)


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.


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).


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.


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.


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"


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”.


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).


> () (())

Totally off-topic, but I challenge you to try writing without using any parentheses. They generally don't contribute positively toward either the legibility or impact of your prose.


> 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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


Every machine I've seen can be built and configured to accept cash, but they're always "broken down" and "can't accept cash"


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.


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.


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.


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.


> Somehow, the self checkouts in Switzerland are mostly free of both problems.

You're experiencing the difference between high- and low-trust societies.


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.


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.


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 ;)


-- : it doesn’t actually save any labour, just now the customer does the scanning instead of an employee. Labor - yes, but a customer still need to be present all the time while cashier does the work. So self-checkout allows only 1 person to "waste" time


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.


Why would stores invest so much into the self checkout tech if it does not save labor/cost?


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.


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.


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.


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


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)


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.


Every Costco I’ve been to has actual cashiers. The self checkout is there if you really want to use it but I never do.

Costco is also technically a private membership club, not a store. That’s why they can check your receipt.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


Right, they'd have to add more clerks to compensate. I prefer self checkout, but their implementation is horrible.


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.


agreed. i've found CVS self-checkout to be the best of all retail stores i go to


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


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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


>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.


> 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.


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 :)


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.


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.


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)


I don't really remember any more, but he re-scanned everything, said I made a mistake, and gave me a new (lower) bill. Maybe it was something out of the ordinary?

I was mildly frustrated because it was the second time in as many days that they checked me.


Never seen that in Poland and I use self checkout all the time.


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.


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.


> 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.


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?


> 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.


>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


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.


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.


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.


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?)


Can't believe I had to scroll this much to find someone mentioning how good this is in Switzerland (where the implementations trust the customer) vs other countries (where you have to weight everything).

I scan everything beforehand with their device, then head to the self-checkout with a shopping cart full of items (already put into bags), I scan the QR code there and I pay. Done.

The whole operation is like 20 seconds max, and it's how it should be.

Using self checkout in the UK, US or in Italy is a nightmare. First of all, they don't trust you by default so you have to weight everything (this operation takes on average 10s per item). Half of the time the systems are broken (in terms of UX) and you need to do things in a specific order (e.g: you can't scan a rewards card with the other items - you have to do it BEFORE even starting to scan the products).


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.


> 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.


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...


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.


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...


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


This. I know the people at my local grocery store and always chat with them.


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.


> 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...


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.


>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


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".


> 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.


There are some with good and very reliable scales and some where they never work, though


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.


For many others instead it's convenient, so I hope they will keep being one of the possibilities


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.


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.


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.


> 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)


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.


> 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.

"maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on" was meant to indicate a benefit to society, not the individual. I.e., society demands that they move on, for better or worse. I don't think anyone's pretending that they're doing the individual a favour, in the short run at least.


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


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.


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.


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?


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.


> 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.


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.


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?


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.


> 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.


It'll be marginal at some point, like people riding horses to work.


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.


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.


What about when the internet goes down for several weeks or months...?


This is not a thing that happens in the US, except in disaster-recovery scenarios.


There is a regular war going on in the country neighboring my one, a thing that was hard to think of several years ago. We had a pandemic and lockdowns destabilizing lives of millions of people and thousands of businesses.

What makes you think the US are immune to disasters resulting in having no internet for weeks or longer?


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.


For UKer, is it just me or is the M&S self-checkout system by far the worst one ?


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.


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.


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.


I find ASDA's to be the worst. Visibly very old computers, lagging and failing to react to touches.


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.


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?


> Yet that's largely been cured. The vending industry has matured and such problems are reported to be largely extinct.

I beg to differ! Just last year, I was at the platform for Gleis 11 at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof trying to buy a drink at the vending machine. After waiting in vain for the VISA transaction to go through, I cut my losses and caught my train with only a few seconds to spare. I never did get my bottle of Fanta, and it's still on my to-do list to find out if the amount was actually charged or not.

In those brief moments between observing that the machine wasn't working and running for the train, I surmised that the vending machine's payment terminal was running some version of Android, probably 4.4 or 5.0 judging by the GUI, and had lost its Wi-Fi connection. That's rather sloppy UX in my opinion, and I've made a point of using the (somewhat) more reliable cash vending machines instead (human-staffed counters are even better!)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


I too, for a related but slightly different reason. Human interactions at work, even within the limited social confines of the relationship between a service professional and a customer, is really important to society. Even if new technology creates an equal number of jobs in the Amazon 'Mechanical Turk' style as the traditional roles lost, it's not healthy for anyone to repeatedly do the same task alone at a desk for 40 hours a week. I suppose you could some up my belief as: +1 to secretaries, -1 to typing pools.

There's a huge wealth of folk songs from around the world that were sung at work, serving both to coordinate the workers' movements and to strengthen the social bonds among them. See for instance the Scottish 'waulking song'. Singing/whistling at work is pretty rare now anyway, but the complete lack of any constructive social interaction in some recently-invented jobs is a new low.


I prefer to talk to a real human.

1. Human is nicer than cold robot 2. Liability to scan items is the stores responsibility


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.


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.


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...


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.


You get to load your bags appropriately instead of putting eggs on the bottom.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


How would you identify a shoplifter at M&S based on their socioeconomic dress code?



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.


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.


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.


The US not only has SWIFT, the US government basically controls it; they’re the ones who cut off Russia. In my experience the US was probably slightly ahead of the UK in terms of cards being accepted everywhere rather than needing cash. All of my utility bills have been on electronic autopay for years along with all of my other bills and I write a paper check probably less than once a year.

I don’t know what a “physical email” is. I occasionally receive bills in the postal mail (mixed in with all the spam our postal service likes to deliver every day as some sort of sick and twisted jobs program) but they usually have a QR code I can scan to pay them online.

Social security numbers are de facto national identification numbers. The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself. But you can use a passport or even get a passport card instead if you really want to.

“E-government” is a broad subject. In some use cases (internet voting) I don’t trust it one bit. In other use cases (filing and paying taxes or instant background checks), we have it covered. And in yet other use cases (buying health insurance), it was actually easier to do online before the government took it over, at least in my experience. My previous state set up an online system to file for unemployment during COVID but then lost millions of taxpayer dollars to overseas scammers who would steal the identities of residents at random and file for unemployment in their names; a better system probably could have been implemented if it wasn’t done at the last minute and with zero verification.


> I don’t know what a “physical email” is

Sorry, it's embarrassingly my bad. I meant physical mail/postal mail/snail mail.

> The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself

I would argue against this. The EU is a continental union[1] and not the same as the US [2]. All european countries are fully soverign states (unlike US states) and most of them are unitary. A few of the EU/European states are federal states/governments, like the US. So I think it'd be more correct to compare the US with Germany, Switzerland or Spain. EU would be something more similar to African Union. And there's also an upcoming EU-ID project [3].

About the US "E-government" (and I'm don't even compare it to systems like Estonia's, but) the problems you described sounds like bad system design and lack of identification.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_union [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#Contemporary [3]: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...


The EU is rapidly moving in a federalizing direction (one of the reasons the UK left, which will probably accelerate that movement). The phrase "United States of Europe" is part of the vision behind the creation and evolution of the EU in the first place. By adapting a common currency and the Schengen area the EU members have already given up significant parts of their sovereignty. It's not as federalized as the United States is now, but it's certainly an oversimplification to claim that EU members are "fully sovereign states".

Furthermore, EU member states are, in terms of population, much closer to individual US states in size than any of them are to the US as a whole. My state has three times the population of Switzerland.


> 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..)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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!


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.


> Obviously this sounds like such a US problem. Self checkout in the UK and Europe (Estonia and Barcelona) IME works perfectly: > - No thefts

Source?

"Shop thefts have more than doubled in the past three years, and the boss of M&S says the reduction of service plays a crucial part"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/21/middle-class...


You may be right about the UK, but most of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Nordics are better than the US (or the UK) to my perception and these sources I could quickly find:

- https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/11/shoplifters-of-the... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38129353 - https://www.numbeo.com/crime/


> 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.


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.


Japan, India, China has a big population and yet better on this.


China is also way ahead of the US in all the same stuff


You're generalizing a bit too much saying "Europe"


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.


UK is part of Europe.


A bunch of banks closing uk-nationals-with -eu-residencies accounts? Oh, and passport control? Remember Brexit?


EU is not Europe. Europe is a continent and passport control and brexit have nothing to do with geography.


Big user experience gap between self checkout in The Netherlands, Albert Hein, vs Walmart/King Soopers etc.


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.


> 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.


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!


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.


Probably not! I naively assumed the cashier is paying more attention during checkout.


> 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.


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.


> 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.


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.


Have you tried eating it before getting to the check out?


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.


>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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


if you accidentally scan something twice, frequently the machine requires an employee to delete the entry for you.


I've actually never seen one where you can delete stuff yourself


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.


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?


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)


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.


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


Many of them have some confusing states, you've probably just not run into them


> >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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Before Target moved to ten items only for self checkout I used to take my cart full of every imaginable aisle from the store and check out. However I would constantly see people not ringing up higher priced items at self checkout or just push their cart through when it’s busy and make it look like they paid.

Talking to one of the store staff they said they were losing too much at self checkout. They dropped it to ten items and forced eleven plus items to the registers. Hire a few older people at minimum wage to slowly scan your items and get you on your way. That initial month they went to ten items was around the holidays and all the new register people were sooooooo slow. It was painful. They just didn’t know what they were doing. Seemed like they were thrown to the registers to make it work.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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/


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.).


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.


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.


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.


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.


> prompts in the middle of the scanning phase (usually the “I promise I’ll attach this to a wall)

Never seen that. Is it an American thing? Or maybe I just didn't by things that have to be attached to a wall.


Could well be - any dresser certainly pops this up in the US - seemingly related to the campaign at [1] which came about after children were killed by tipping furniture. There's an equivalent campaign in the UK [2], but I haven't bought any furniture from IKEA in the UK for over a decade, which predates it.

[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/secure-it-creati...

[2]: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/campaigns/secure-it-pub10077d91


Yeah the Decathlon ones really bamboozled me.

Does anyone know how are those achieved (from a technical standpoint)?


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.


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!


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.


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.


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)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


Are self checkouts really 'failing' in other parts of the world? All the major supermarkets near me have self checkouts and almost everyone uses them. Unless you have a huge trolley full of shopping it's quicker and easier just to scan a few items, wave your card at it and you're done. I'm sure they get a bit of shrinkage but by and large everyone seems to do the right thing.

Now if only they'd remove that obnoxious "WOULD ya LIKE to PRINT a RECEIPT?" at the end... :P


I think this becomes clearer when you think about e.g. Walmart as something like an invasive species. When you take into account that they very often take far more than they give to a local environment, it's really hard to have any sympathy when they lose revenue through shoplifting, or whatever, by ALSO not employing and/or having a decent relationship with the people who live there.

If you minimize your screwing up their environment, they'll return the favor.


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


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.


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


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.


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.)


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?


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.


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...


There is self checkout in some lidl uk stores.


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 :)


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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


And Amazon delivered and actually made it happen but still too early


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.


> 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 £100k. 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


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.


Seems to be working perfectly fine in my local Lidl. The ones in Stokrotka are much less reliable but also work ok most of the time.

Yes you need 1 person to solve issues people have (which are mostly mistakes they make) but that 1 person is amortized over all the self-checkouts so it's still worth it.


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.


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 .


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.


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.


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.


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.


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 £0.27 can of baked beans?


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.


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?


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.


Norway has much less crime!


And why is that?


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!


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.


> 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?


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.


I’ve actually had very few issues with Target’s systems where I live. They seem to be fool proof, and I’m a pretty big fool so that’s saying something. I still prefer cashiers when I can, because I’m trying to support human jobs out here.


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.


So, when do I get the percentage for self checking out? After all, here I am doing the work of a employee for ten minutes, getting harassed, so at least I want my minimalwagesworth for that?


I had a 'magic' experience at Uniqlo, walked up to self check out with my single item and it was already detected without any intervention. Just paid and left. No barcodes.


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.


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.


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.


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...


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.


>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?


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 :)


Maybe a door that will not open.

Although it sounds a bit too much for a store, technically it could be done.


- Open the pod bay door, HAL.

- Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.


Probably it'll scan your card upon entry.


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.


> 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.


my problems with self checkout, mostly i get by without issue but 2 things: 1 occasionally i accidentally scan an item twice, but removing an item takes admin privileges so a simple scannihg mistake requires calling for help, it shouldnt. 2. the payment option in canadian stores prompts you to pay then prompts for points card, donations, receipt/email, then how many bags you need and the reprompts you for pay. its like 5 extra clicks/screens that are useless to me


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.


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.


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.


More accurately: the failure of the managerial class.


Failure?

They work very fine, just not replace as many workers as expected


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.


I live the self-checkout at my local Ralph's (USA). They have their system dialed in and it always just works.


I think they work quite well on average. Very efficient space and time-wise in densely populated cities like London.


> “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).


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.


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.


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


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.


Translation: It costs more than minimum wage employees to operate.


The obviously haven’t been to the Netherlands or Japan


It can still work; just needs a better implementation.


I make it a point to never use it.


nightmare for who? go stand in line with everybody else if self-checkout bothers you so much.


> 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.


I think it works great, though.


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.


just put food inside vending machine freezers whalah self check out baby


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.


meanwhile, it is basically everywhere in moscow


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.


bill burr has a funny bit on this.


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.


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.


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.


Based on the recent Twitter post, let’s just cut out the human controlled robot and have the human do it.




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