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Comment by joesmo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Your experience has been very different than mine.

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".

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