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Comment by vsskanth | Hacker News Reader

In terms of cost-convenience trade-off, can someone tell me how is this better for a store when compared to self-checkout counters or scan-as-you-go apps (as suggested below) ?

I use these frequently at Walmart and Sams without any problems. Rarely have to deal with an actual checkout person unless I have to get a gift card.

IMO you can get very far simply addressing annoying latency and UX issues with self checkout counters.

Edit: There is also the advantage of seeing what you're exactly being billed for

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I love self-checkout and use it when available and reasonable. However, I have seen lines. It feels the same as ATMs for me. Occasionally I am waiting behind someone who just takes forever. I always wonder what they are doing, how it can take what feels like 10 minutes to do what I attempt to get done in 1 minute.

Self-checkout is a bottleneck since there are a limited number of available machines. I can see efficiency gains by removing that bottleneck.

I'm surprised many people here mention lines at the self-checkout. I shop in a fairly busy Walmart and I never had to stand in line, even on Saturdays and Sundays. They have like 15 of those counters on each side.

It is literally a supply and demand thing. You happen to have experienced high-supply/low-demand. Why are you surprised people mention low-supply/high-demand scenarios?

In fact, just follow the logic down that road. Consider highly-volatile demand purchase scenarios. A company might over-spend on self-checkout stations to cover high-demand scenarios that go unused on more typical days. A more efficient approach is to avoid requiring additional stations to cover changes in demand. Just create a single system (walk out purchasing) that handles all scenarios and be done with it.

I guess I'm just wondering if there's data on how often you these self-checkout bottlenecks. The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often. Hence the surprise.

Although I agree just-walk-out scales well with demand.

> The way other commenters describe it makes it seem like it's fairly often.

There's almost always a line at them when I walk by in the stores in my area. Usually, the line there is about as long as the lines at the manned checkouts.

Just curious, where do you live? I stand in line for self check out very frequently in SF/Oakland/Palo Alto.

In shops I frequent, there is usually a single line for all 3-8 self-checkout machines, but separate lines for each individual cashier.

I've noticed that the line for self-checkout is usually roughly the same length as the lines for individual cash registers, regardless of how many machines there are.

I'm not sure if people just don't like self-checkout or if they have failed to notice that the "go to the shortest line" heuristic doesn't work anymore when one of the lines moves much faster than the others.

I've had too many issues with self scan, I absolutely avoid them, and if a company eliminates all their non-self checkout, I'll go elsewhere. If I literally have 5 or so items, I'll use self checkout, anything more, nope.

The first time I brought a full cart through self checkout, that's when I understood road rage, so to speak. I was never so annoyed and angry and wanted to just walk out and leave it behind so much. "Please place item in the bag... please remove item from the bag... please place..." It may well be better, or getting better, but I'm out of the experiment.

-- edit:

Since then, there have been two times, I did walk out and leave my cart behind... one of those times about half a dozen others did the same. It was a Walmart, and the Friday before a holiday (Christmas was Sunday that year iirc). It was 6pm, and they had literally closed half their registers with an average of 11 carts in each line left. I had a full cart including a lot of refrigerated and frozen items. The other time was similar but less extreme at another store (not walmart).

In the end, some of us will pay a little more for actual people doing actual customer service and interaction. I tried the scan and go a couple times, and frankly it wasn't really any better. It seems that Millenials and Z are so averse to interaction, I just don't get it.

It's way nicer than self-checkout in my opinion. A big one is there's never any line -- you just get your stuff and walk-out. Here in SF, lots of store frequently have long lines.

I can't wait until full supermarkets have this.

Self checkout works ok until:

1. A customer born before 1968 or so shows up

2. The scale's state machine gets corrupted ("UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA")

Both of which end up needing more retail labor than a traditional checkout line.

How would this person in case 1 feel about not knowing what they're being billed for when they walk out ?

I think just having an employee explaining "just leave, we'll send you a bill" would be pretty fast, and wouldn't hold up the queue for people who know what's going on.

We went in on Black Friday because we needed normal groceries. There was a 10+ minute wait to check out, even at the self-checkouts. This would mitigate that by allowing some customers to check themselves out.

And then with scan-as-you-shop (some shops even have apps, I know Asda does) latency is reduced further, it's only the time to transfer you're already scanned basket and to pay

yeah exactly. I guess I don't understand the marginal improvement in adding so many cameras and advanced processing, all so that you can "just walk out", with the possibility of having to deal with billing related customer service issues.

I wonder if it would be possible to integrate payment into the mobile apps they've already got in place, thereby meaning that the only time you'd need to go to the checkout at all would be if you were buying restricted goods (e.g. age limited, or items with security tags) - the risks would seem then to be tracking whether someone had paid. Maybe have a QR code shown on screen which security staff can scan if they're suspicious, giving a list of what items were purchased?

I see a version of the QR code check already in Sams Club. A person at the exit scans your bill and it tells them what to check for. Otherwise they will randomly scan an item and it will cross-check with the bill.

As a student I frequently will end up putting items in my backpack. It is way more convinient to just stuff stuff into my backpack than it is to get a cart and go through the grueling check out line that takes forever because someone has to scan every item, and a lot of people still don't use contactless payment. I hate this process so much now that I only get my groceries delivered now, but if there were a local convinience store with this technology then I would totally go there.

Wouldn't it be easier to just walk out vs deal with the self checkout? Also, there might be benefits to the store in reducing shoplifting.

It helps make the effort to buy a product much lower, therefore increases sales.

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