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Comment by seangrant | Hacker News Reader

Seattle area here. All my life I remember waiting in lines 10-20 minutes if you go to a store on a busy day (fri/sat/sun). It's just simple math sometimes where there's so many people with $400+ carts trying to check out and cashiers can only scan so fast. Everyone with medium or small sized carts have to wait in this.

I've seen great strides in recent years to advance self checkout technology and its user flow. Walmart is my favorite example of this, my local one having almost half of the area devoted to self checkout. It seems to have been successful for them so far. I don't see anyone having a hard time operate them and perhaps more surprising, it's filled me with the idea that I can pop in and out of a big store on a busy day to just buy 1 item.

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> It's just simple math sometimes where there's so many people with $400+ carts trying to check out and cashiers can only scan so fast. Everyone with medium or small sized carts have to wait in this.

Why don't the customers scan the items themselves as they put them into their carts while at the shelves, rather than waiting until they get to the checkout? That's what we do where I live in the UK.

Stop n Shop in the NYC Tri-State area has this, but they are the only store that I've seen that does. I'd assume it has a technical barrier to implementation, and large-ish up front cost.

Some stores support this; most don’t.

In my experience, Walmart has the worst self checkout software however: poorly designed and laggy as heck. QFC/Safeway are much better, even Target (which is pretty bad itself) is better.

Wal-mart's big innovation in self-checkout that i'd love to see other stores adopt is the corral. Every other store seems to just let people line up in a free-for-all and the line gets long and starts to merge in with other lines and nobody's quite sure what they're lining up for. Then some narcissist thinks that despite the obvious crowd waiting to check out, they can start a "second line" that they'll be at the front of. And the stores see this crowd as a sales opportunity, so they randomly scatter product displays in the middle of where the line usually forms.

Wal-Mart has a nice cordoned-off maze to keep the line under control - a simple solution that works perfectly.

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