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Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

I use self checkouts regularly in both the US and Switzerland. The contrast in UI design is staggering. The US self checkout machines (e.g. at Safeway) are enormous, employ voices constantly hectoring me about bags, items placed in the wrong location etc, and do everything to disrupt my rhythm: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8382/8539442967_7917df5cde_b.j...

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.

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The vast majority of the problems with self-checkout machines are caused by the item weight check. Try shopping in the better part of town.

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.

>Try shopping in the better part of town.

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.

> The vast majority of the problems with self-checkout machines are caused by the item weight check.

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.

I imagine there's considerable variance in the weight of products, such that any attempted calculation of the final weight of a long list would be unacceptably vague. Also, if there's a single item whose weight is out of tolerance, it needs to be clear which one so that the issue can be resolved.

Your comment is spot on about the tech (won't comment on the social points). The weight check is broken. If you have to pay for bags, you want to use the least bags possible. This is incompatible with the operation of all the check out machines I've seen. Get rid of the weight check OR allow all you can use bags for free.

Systems like that exist in the US. For example Stop and Shop has the exact same system you describe.

That implies a level of honesty and trust that doesn't exist in the US. In Switzerland, a store can trust customers to scan everything they place in their carts. In the US, they can't.

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.

> In Switzerland, a store can trust customers to scan everything they place in their carts.

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.

I can take you to stores where the self-checkout is as good or better in the US as you describe. How many different corporate entities and how many different communities did you visit in the US?

I am by no means trying to claim to have a comprehensive perspective on the stores on both countries, but the two machines I describe were both located in middle class grocery stores (Migros and Safeway, respectively) located in prosperous areas of the respective countries.

There is usually one to two persons supervising a row of self checkout machines and they claim to randomly sample people, though I've never seen them doing that. Though I think these two things act as a deterent to stealing.

Personally, I love self checkout in switzerland. 20 checkout stations vs. 5 is faster, tell me what you want.

The US is a massive administrative area with some cities the size of Switzerland and very different demographics and qualities of life in different regions.

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.

I'm guessing stores realize theft and even unintentional mis scanning due to 'amateurs', will happen, and have decided that the cost savings of using self scanning is still worth it.

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