Hacker News Reader

Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

Fruit & veggies are a disaster unless you like shrinkwrapped everything or you know all the codes.

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.

View on HN

Most of the fruit and vegetables I get at the store these days have tiny barcodes on them that make the self-checkout easy. And the occasional need for intervention from the one staff person handling 4-6 self checkouts is almost always far less than the time I would have spent waiting in line for someone who's still paying for groceries with a personal check in 2018. I almost always prefer a self-checkout.

Depends how much I'm buying. If it will fit in one or two bags, self checkout is often faster. If I'm buying a cart load, the speed of the experienced cashier and separate person bagging in parallel is almost always faster.

That's true; for big shopping trips self-checkout is non-ideal. It helps that the cashiers don't have to wait for the items to be weighed in the bagging area. I think a CV implementation will eventually replace the weighing setup and speed things up since RFID tags for individual items never caught on due to cost.

This is also one of the reasons I prefer Kroger whenever I go shopping. Most Krogers in my area don't have conveyor belts, and instead the cashier personally takes all the items from the cart directly to the scanner. At Tom Thumb, Albertsons, and Walmart, there's a conveyor belt and I'm expected to unload my whole cart onto the belt before the cashier touches anything.

> there's a conveyor belt and I'm expected to unload my whole cart onto the belt before the cashier touches anything

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.

Shopping for me involves so much loading and unloading that I'm happy to cut out one of the steps.

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.

Sounds like a case of different strokes for different folks. I live within walking distance of my store, so I take more frequent trips with fewer groceries. I rarely buy more than can fit in a hand-basket.

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.

Unnecessary movements. If you put rollers in the cart itself, docking the cart at the POST and spinning a torque rod with a tri-lobed docking coupler--like on those old Capsela toys--could move everything on the cart within reach of the cashier.

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.

Wait...you have someplace that actually uses the conveyor belt? Pet peeve of mine is that most cashiers just turn it off even when there is a gap between them and the goods. (Poor design of many stop mechanisms exists, but doesn't excuse this case)

This is an aside, but I've never understood why people paying by check can't prefill everything but the dollar amount during the checkout process. It seems like people paying by check don't even take out their checkbooks and hunt for a pen until the total comes up.

Certain stores have a printer at the register that puts the store name, date, and dollar amount all on your check so you just have to sign.

You hit the nail on the head. Self checkouts are terrible because they treat every customer as a potential thief.

Self-checkout likely introduces greater opportunity for shoplifting. And the grocery unions like the UFCW have no reason to like self-checkout.

Self-checkout is a perfect example of compromise - not what the workers want, not what the business wants, and not the shoppers want.

> Fruit & veggies are a disaster unless you like shrinkwrapped everything or you know all the codes.

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.

Most stores I've been to in the past 10-15 years you can print out a scannable label/barcode for the produce right in the produce section. I didn't know this was uncommon.

I have never once seen that. Are you in the US?

Yes, I am.

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.

Yes this is how they do it in France. It's self-service but monitored by an employee... learned the hard way the first time I showed up to the register and they gave me stinkeye because I didn't measure/label my produce.

Have yet to see that in the US... instead we have shrinkwrapped everything (and barcoded stickers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com