What is the issue with self-checkout, I found it is actually faster.
Any peculiarities on how you handle the goods - e.g. repositioning something that fell over in the "checkout area"- results in an escalation.
The implementations out there are untrusting and non-optimized and take significantly longer than a real clerk.
I've used a lot of these and it's always the same.
I don't understand why this is a negative? I guess I usually optimize my shopping trips for getting out the door faster. Different people enjoy different things I guess.
First, as you're shopping, you load everything into the cart. Then, you get to the cash register, and at most supermarkets you have to take everything out of the cart so the cashier can scan it (if you're at a Kroger, you can skip this step). After the cashier is done, you may or may not have to put the bags back in the cart yourself depending on whether or not there's a dedicated bagger. Then, you take your cart to the car and you load up the car. Now, the next step will probably be different if you own your own car; I don't, so I either go to the supermarket with someone I know or take Lyft. In either case, I take everything out of the trunk and put them in front of my front door. After everything's done and the driver has driven away, I unlock and open the door and take all the bags into my house. Then I sort through my bags and begin putting all the individual groceries wherever they're supposed to go.
It's exhausting. If I can cut out even one of those steps, I'm happy. At Kroger, I'll just wheel my cart over to the cashier's station, swipe my Kroger Plus card, stick my credit card in the chip reader, and play with my phone until the machine starts beeping at me to take the card out.
Also, I grew up with the expectation of emptying your cart onto a conveyor belt, so it's probably socially programmed into me that it's expected.
Ideally, the only movements the customer would make would be to place items into their cart, and move their entire order, already packaged for transport, into their vehicle at once. Unloading from the vehicle and moving to a pantry or refrigerated storage should also be easy and free of unnecessary movements.
My solution would be to make the carts a platform of elevated rollers, carrying several reusable bins, owned by the customer, and manufactured to an open standard. While shopping, the rollers are locked, and the bins are secured in place. The customer can choose to organize foods in bins according to their individual needs. Put all the dairy in one bin, and meats in another. Put canned and boxed goods in one, refrigerated and frozen into another (insulated, perhaps).
At the checkout, the platform docks. The cashier scans from the nearest bin into a sorting area, and a second employee, the customer, or the cashier can re-pack the bin in a sensible way, rather than according to the disorganized arrangement determined by the layout of aisles in the store. The packed-for-transport bin moves onto a second docked platform. The docking station spins its torque rod to move all the rollers, and the remaining bins move closer to the cashier. Process repeats until all bins are scanned and packed.
Customer pays, and rolls cart to their vehicle. They put the lids back on the bins (which are now stackable closed containers) and stow them. The roller platforms stay in the parking lot. When the next customer arrives, they load one up with empty, lidless bins, and enter the store, ready to shop. New bins sold inside the store, likely at a wafer-thin markup.
At home, the customer might have their own handtruck to move bins from vehicle to food storage. Maybe their pantry has roller shelves, and a special drill bit so a handheld drill can spin them. Or maybe they just have regular shelves, and stick PTFE pads onto the bottoms of their bins for easy sliding. Perhaps they unload the bins and stack the empties for the next shopping trip. Maybe they can plug some hoses from a cooling unit into an insulated bin to turn it into a miniature refrigerator. As long as the bin conforms to the external dimensions and weight standards, it can have any number of additional features included. Pelican, Coleman, Igloo, Yeti, Rubbermaid, etc. could compete on those special features, or on materials.
Self-checkout is a perfect example of compromise - not what the workers want, not what the business wants, and not the shoppers want.
It looks like this: http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5560d80cecad048a6f5...
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-woman-weighing-pineapple-o...
http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/1/17470/32_2008/mettl...
The one in my local grocery store is the best because its main screen is big buttons of the most common produce plus a "lookup" option. 90%+ of the time I only have to put my produce on the scale and hit one giant button.
Have yet to see that in the US... instead we have shrinkwrapped everything (and barcoded stickers)
Not in my experience. The codes are all right there (on a sticker on the fruit or vegetables) or easily looked up by name/picture.
Unexplained item in bagging area.
I have had so many issues with the self-checkout's sensor not working properly. If it's not telling me there's something in the bagging area that's not supposed to be there, it's telling me that it can't detect the item I just put in the bag. It's especially common if the item is lightweight. Usually the sensor fails to pick up the item I just put in the bag and won't let me scan anything else unless I either do or press "I don't want to bag this item". And then I scan the next item and then it finally picks it up and whines about an unexplained item in the bagging area.
Whenever I use the self-checkout, I usually end up having to call over the attendant multiple times to deal with these problems. And the attendant is busy with half a dozen other people, so the self-checkout ends up being slower than the regular one.
So the usage pattern goes: scan, bag, scan, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, enter code, weigh, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, process payment, move all bags, leave. You can't scan the bread and eggs and the watermelon and leave the fragile crushable items on the belt until the heavy items are already in the bag. Everything must be moved immediately to the bagging area, human! So if you don't plan your scanning, you end up moving some things twice. Weight discrepancy noted. Return items to the bagging area and wait for the store employee to verify that you aren't cheating!
For the regular checkouts, the usage pattern is often customer moves entire order to first conveyor belt, employee 1 scans all items and passes them onto the second conveyor belt. At this point, there may be an employee 2 that bags the scanned items and places the bags back into the empty cart as employee 1 processes payment, then both bag until the order is processed. That works fine. Not great, but it works well enough.
At some stores, the bagger employee has been deprecated. The cashier bags items into a bag carousel. At some stores, the conveyors are not used. Cashier scans items directly from the cart. The most efficient stores, such as Aldi (Aldi Sud, in US), scan directly from one cart into another, and don't even bother with bags. The customer can keep Tyvek bags in their vehicle, and bag directly from the cart to their trunk, if they even care about bags at all. (Maybe they keep specialized containers for specific sizes of cans, instead?)
Self-checkout doesn't work like that. It's almost designed to be annoying and frustrating. It could be so much better if they only designed the experience from the ground up instead of trying to make a drop-in replacement for the employee checkout lanes, which were designed for different criteria decades ago.