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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

It seems like I'm the only person in this thread who's had pretty much nothing but good experiences with self checkout machines. And this is despite the fact that I usually do grocery trips with at least 15-20 items. I don't have a problem with human contact with a cashier, I just prefer self checkout because it pretty much never has lines. I've also not experienced the horribly buggy machines that everyone else here seems to be exposed to.

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To me it's a lot like pumping your own gas. It's weird when I go back to NJ and have to sit in the car and wait for the one dude working on 6 pumps.

But if you talk to people from NJ who have never been outside of NJ it would seem obvious that someone else does it. All of the comments in this thread against self service are the exact arguments NJ people have against pumping your own gas.

I've never had a pump in NJ or elsewhere not work. Self-checkout machines on the other hand, don't work often. That's the difference.

I don't know what you're basing that on, I live in Australia and I've never had a self checkout machine not work. They are consistently good and I use them all the time.

Your experience has been very different than mine.

Note that the machines have many tolerances that can be set to trade-off theft vs. annoyance of the customer. (E.g. the product weight when placed in the bagging area.) The machines can we way less annoying when they are set to be more trusting.

I also generally found them to work better in Australia than in the US, though the technology seems to be the same. I guess it's because of these tolerances being set differently, but that's just speculation.

You could be correct, just recently the Australian supermarkets announced a crackdown on self-checkout theft (mentioned in the podcast) which would seem unlikely if tolerances weren't currently lenient. In the last week the Coles supermarket I went to had rolled out entirely new software / UI on the machines, and for the first time in ages there were long self checkout queues and people seemed to be taking longer.

I've never come across a self-checkout machine that doesn't work, but that's just anecdotal. It seems silly to base one's general opinion on the concept of self-checkout machines on how broken the ones you've experienced are. When I was traveling, I spent time in countries where toilets would back up more often than not, and that didn't make me think "Toilets are ridiculous,why do they exist".

You're not the only one, I love using them and I do use them all the time. If I'm doing about half a trolley or less of groceries I will use them. Never had experience with lots of broken self-checkout systems or extensive manual intervention. The only thing I wish you could do is delete items you've scanned twice by accident.

I also don't understand how they are "slow" compared to going through the checkout with a cashier.

Likewise here. I've basically memorized self checkout flows as a physical pattern and can quickly scan / scale and go without much issue. Usually prefer them over human cashiers.

Me too... though it's very hard to find supermarkets nearby with one these days.

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