The unpopular rise of self-checkouts
bbc.com
bbc.com
Swiss self checkout machines are small, silent except for beeps, and fast: https://subito.migros.ch/dam/jcr:afca29de-d490-4621-8844-868...
The latest option is that you can grab a scanner before shopping, scan items as you place them in your cart, and just walk up to a station to pay.
The result is a worse society, because in the US, stores have to take measures to not be ripped off. Those measures get in everyone's way, including the people who would not steal from the store.
Personally, I love self checkout in switzerland. 20 checkout stations vs. 5 is faster, tell me what you want.
You flatter us, but I'm not convinced the Swiss are particularly honest. And I'm not convinced that anything the US register does is particularly helpful to catch cheating.
Walk into an Apple Store in Berkeley and you can self check out expensive items using only your iPhone.
The generalization you are trying to make doesn't work.
In the UK, self-checkouts in Tesco and Sainsbury's (where the poor do their shopping) will have this up to 11, whereas Waitrose (for affluent people) turn it off. So you can steal as much as you want, too, since there's only 1 person looking after 6 machines (when there's anyone at all).
Only time I've been happy to pay the premium to shop there.
I alluded to this in my other comment in this thread. Switzerland is 'the better part of town' in its entirety. Europeans only hear about the lowest common denominator in the US. I'm not saying it's not a tragedy, but I didn't create this system and I don't know how to fix it.
I understand the purpose of the weight check; it's to make sure that an item is in the bagging area iff it has been scanned. I don't get why it needs to be run after each item and can't be run just once -- after all items have been scanned and the payment process begins.
Oh yes, of course. It's certainly not just about the cost of an employee at a cash register, which is why retailers give you a little discount when you self-checkout. They do, right?
Sincerely: Does anyone believe there is any reason at all for pushing these other than squeezing labor cost, to the retailer's exclusive benefit?
I avoid the self checkouts as much as possible because they're annoying and because I figure I might need a job as a checkout clerk sometime after I retire. It's self-interest, which is also a feature of capitalism.
Plus - it always feels better to do things with one's own hands. Since the rise of the self-checkout, going to a grocery store that only has human checkout clerks is starting to feel as uncomfortable as driving to a gas station in New Jersey and being forced to rely on a human attendant.
It feels sorta weird going thru a regular checkout now and just standing there not doing anything the whole time. It's boring.
First, allowing grocery stores to operate with smaller staffs means we get more grocery stores. The small, cramped grocery store that recently opened within walking distance of my apartment probably wouldn't be able to operate if it had to provide not just pay, but parking and work space for another dozen full-time employees. That's a food desert in a dense urban core that doesn't exist anymore and a smaller, but still substantial, group of available jobs that otherwise wouldn't be there.
Second, if I were to approach you and tell you I had two plans for a machine. Both are about evenly efficient, but one requires two people to stand at the machine doing boring, repetitive, mindless drudge work for hours on end. I, for one, definitely prefer the one that doesn't require human suffering to operate. Automated checkouts eliminate jobs, but specifically they eliminate shitty jobs that we should probably feel bad about asking anyone to do in the first place.
People vary.
I would guess nowhere near enough to support the notion that this cost reduction leads to new stores, or that new stores would appear in food deserts.
I don't want self-checkouts to disappear. I just don't want to be lied to about their purpose, and in particular they ought to make it worth my while to use them by offering at least some tiny discount. The fact that they don't tells us all we need to know.
Probably almost none of it, at least not directly.
> How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer?
Probably a lot of them.
Places where it's profitable to run a grocery store already have grocery stores. Food deserts exist in the first place because they're not profitable places to put grocery services for one reason or another. Lowering the fixed cost of running a grocery store means that some places that previously could only support N grocers can now support N+1, so that's where the opportunity is. This is no less true when N=0.
Otherwise if you mean that all of a retailer's stores should have self-checkout in equal measure, then we're back to square one: The same places are as less profitable as the more profitable ones. Why impose this deeply unwanted downgrade on your already profitable stores?
I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. I'm just saying that it's dishonest for a retailer to claim self-checkout is about anything other than the obvious.
If providing groceries to food deserts were really a motive for these cost savings, there is one thing they could do to promote self-checkout that would absolutely work where all of those other efforts in the article don't: Offer the tiniest token discount for doing it yourself.
But they don't, and there's the answer.
No, but I am :-D.
Pretty obviously the motive for these cost savings is _cost savings_. But that extra profit has to go somewhere.
Sometimes it'll go into lining the pockets of whoever owns the store, which kinda sucks. Go advocate for higher capital gains taxes. I'll be happy to help. Past a certain point, though, stores that just pocket the extra profit won't be around for long. Someone who's willing to make less money as a grocer will come along and start a cheaper store across the street.
Most of that savings has to go to somewhere. Either there's more checkout lines or a better selection or cheaper goods across the board or whatever. Sometimes a store will be profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. At this point, the savings are mostly priced in. We are already benefiting massively from this automation.
Everyone hates these automated checkout terminals, but I doubt many people really want to have their neighborhood grocery store close and all the rest in their town get more expensive.
What's the projected lifetime?
I'm also sure we're going to have even faster RFID readers within a decade at the outside, so I'm wondering what the savings will be over that period.
I suspect speed and throughput is at least as much of a motivation as expense.
In the US, grocery worker jobs are some of the only blue-collar jobs left that still provide a middle-class income with benefits. There are lots of people for whom getting one of these jobs is something to aspire towards, not some terrible fate to dread.
This has a lot to do with the fact that grocery workers are better unionized that most -- 19% of workers in the retail grocery industry are union members, compared to less than 7% in the private sector overall (source: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/P...). Which is one of the reasons for the push towards self-checkout; it pushes those numbers down, which reduces the bargaining power the union can wield on behalf of those workers who the machines don't replace.
As a society, we spent the last few centuries having the problem of providing a comfortable standard of living to ourselves and our peers and the problem of getting shitty drudgework done be two problems that largely solved each other. We are well on our way to actually solving the shitty drudgework problem. That means we badly need to find a new solution to the comfortable standard of living problem, but deciding not to fix the other, fixable problem doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy.
They recently added a way for people to just use an app to scan barcodes while shopping and then just scan your phone at the self checkout but I haven't tried it.
Self checkout would be an awesome boon.
I think another way to save costs (if that is what the stores are after) is to make the cashiers they do employ more efficient. For instance, while living in Melbourne, Australia, I sometimes went to a local Aldi store and the cashiers there weren't exactly slow, but not the fastest either. In comparison, while living in Germany, if you go to a Aldi there, they check your items out faster than you can chuck them into your cart! (Yeah, that's right, they don't pack stuff up in bags for you over there.)
It's really amazing how fast they can be... and they have to because it's sometimes unbelievable how much stuff people in front of me can fit into a single cart. Because of that, however, you still get waiting lines -- it's the sheer mass of items people put on the conveyer belt. But the speed at which Aldi cashiers operate could certainly be a lesson to other stores as well if they want to maximize throughput per cashier.
This meant they could go really fast.
A lot, if not all, of the problems are self-inflicted poor design choices!
There is NO REASON TO CARE ABOUT BAGGING; I’m sure this is some ill-conceived notion of anti-theft or whatever but when you aggravate 200 paying customers for every banana theft that you prevented, you’ve still lost. A human cashier can scan dozens of items and toss them aside in seconds!! You cannot come even close to that rate of speed when Every Single Item has to be scanned (and often re-scanned), then moved all the way over somewhere else (and then removed and added again before the computer is happy). And if you have the audacity to buy a vegetable, whose codes cashiers mostly know by heart, you will again be much slower yourself. Not to mention that the entire idea of bagging breaks down with the recent craze to bring your own bags or simply choose not to use a bag, because the computer freaks the hell out when you just want to scan your two items and pay and get out without leaving the required sacrifices on the Altar of the Bagging Lord.
And there’s always at least one employee doing almost nothing except resetting computers. You know what that person could do? Accept cards in advance to start running them through the system while you’re screwing with your groceries, then press a button so that when you’re ready to pay you basically just have to tap a button and sign. Yet of course they don’t do that, they’d rather create the slowest and most unhelpful self-payment system in history, while people are waiting, which of course you can’t even reach until you satisfy the Bagging Lord in the previous step.
I find it a pretty frictionless experience most of the time.
It's usually quicker than using a cashier, and if I'm getting my goods cheaper through reduced payroll costs, who am I to complain?
The good ones are relatively friction free. Although my ideal would still be to avoid the checkout altogether and have some kind of smart-scan zero friction pay-as-you-leave system that only required a thumbprint or some other simple auth on exit.
It would make more sense if everything had an RFID and you could just load your shopping cart and the checkout would scan everything at once without having to put things on a scanner. This would be really useful. You could put your items straight into a shopping bag while shopping.
This is HN, what do you think the answer to that is?
That said, I hate self-checkout machines. Usually there's someone in line ahead of you with a 'problem' of some sort, and that's even assuming the machine itself is functioning properly. Our local supermarket actually removed theirs because they sucked so bad.
Once you're done scanning, you place the scanner back into its holder, choose your payment option, and make your payment. The only other thing you need to do is have someone check your receipt before you exit the store.
It would be nice if those types of machines were in more stores as opposed to the ones that require you to take items out of the cart and either scan or weigh/enter code and then bag them.