This is the future of grocery stores, like it or not. Employees are expensive and make mistakes, whereas machines are cheap, don't take breaks, and work pretty reliably once you set them up correctly.
Even if a machine is terrible and useless, you can collect that useless information/data and use it as a data point for other machines that are perhaps not so terrible, any data point is useful afterall.
Machines are the future for that reason alone.
they seem (or pretend) in: costco, whole foods, trader joes
not so much in: walmart, target
And some are greeting me outside of the store. They have no obligation to do so.
If you want to pay for someone to be social with you why not do that separately to shopping? Seems funny to try to mix the two.
I enjoy seeing this group of young people given such a broad responsibility and I acknowledge them and their stellar job. And they acknowledge me.
But who am I, I just enjoy Old Europe.
Who do you optimize for? IMO, ideally not the company.
I don't know what your experience is, but I always find self-checkout massively more efficient for me and I'd always prefer it and would choose shops that offer it over those that don't.
I can just breeze through with my AirPods still in listening to my podcast, not having to wait for anyone else or have anyone else wait for me, not having to say anything, and just get on with the rest of my day and what I really want to spend my time doing.
It’s lower effort because talking is a bigger cognitive burden for me than scanning a few items. Over time with experience, you get as fast as an employee would be anyway.
I like human cashiers because they are faster than me+robot. So I tolerate the chitchat for their efficiency.
And I never really want to optimize for typing in codes for the price of lemons and whatnot.
The casual interactivity is what I would call the 'gravy' of society. They know I recognize/know them, and I know they recognize/know me.
I could never understood why should I, as a client, do the work that someone else can do for me (and more reliably, of course)? It's win-win, I'm not stressed at doing something wrong, I can do something else while my products are checked out and that person doing the product checkout also has a job.
But because it sounds tech-y and more automatic-y lots of tech-literate people fall for all of this, I don't see what's more automatic in me doing the same work that another person used to do.
But the point is we don't need the 'while my products are checked out' step. We could skip that. You save time, save more people handling what you're buying, save them having to staff a checkout and freeing them to do something else instead. That's the real win-win.
Yes, the'll be busy looking for other jobs.
The economy is developing in the wrong direction. We are not on track for happy automation.
Also, the stores that are most promising don't require checkout at all, so that's an entire category of human effort eliminated, for better or worse.
People who want the assistance of an employee can go that route, but I prefer the self-checkout process for the reduced waiting and self-service nature.
I don't think I've ever seen a discount for it?
The cost is included in the prices you pay for the products.
You're paying it whether you use it or not!
I would honestly be fine with making that permanent. It's so much easier to pick the things I want with fewer people between me and the shelves. All in all a much more efficient shopping experience.
At least at Safeway I can spot the kind of person who looks like they value their time and it'll usually go faster.
I'll literally never shop at Ross again because it takes forever to exit their damned queue.
The model works better at Trader Joe's in SF where it's mostly people who value their time. You can then be confident all the counters won't be used by slow people.
Is this really correct? Shouldn't one grand queue just decrease variance, not average?
Put another way: if the median is 1 minute, then half the time you'll wait less than 1 minute. The other half you might wait not just for 2 minutes, but significantly more. They won't "cancel out" to preserve the mean.
They'd really rather you not get in their way, anyway. It isn't awkward for them until you try to help. They enjoy the feeling of power/superiority they have over you. That's why they smile while you stand there naval gazing.
A checkout clerk just feels like a weird adjunct to the whole process. I walked to the store, pushed the cart around and grabbed all my items, yet somehow someone else has to do the quickest and easiest part for me?
However, considering that there are usually many more self-checkout terminals available with much less queue it means that the total time spent is less than on a service one. My local store, open until 23, usually closes down the self-checkout terminals the last hour since there are too few people to make it worthwhile and you rarely have a queue to the serviced station.
So I totally agree that the serf service checkout is slower for that actual station but considering that the store can cram in much more of those in the same space and they need much less personnel to manage it saves everyone time and money to use them, unless there is no queue to the serviced checkout (and personnel is manning it at the moment).
Typo or deliberate?
You then scan items as you pick them off the shelf - if you're really prepared you put the item directly into a bag you brought with you.
Payment is then a case of walking up to the till - human or machine - and scanning one final barcode. Your order is presented to you for a final review then you tap your card and leave.
Arriving at the till and paying instantly means my entire queuing experience is over within 5-10 seconds
(Unless you get subjected to an infrequent random poll of your items but these are worth the occasional hassle)
Hopefully you get something similar implemented!
Also, scales to price veggies and fruits are at checkouts in the states. If they had them in the veggie area, like in much of Europe, things might be really different.
The USA, this is always done at checkout. If it was a law making that happen, it would have to be at the state level.
The way it works is that you scan the bar codes with the Walmart app on your smartphone as you add items to your shopping cart. The scan function is very fast. If you are adding more than one of an item, you can either scan them separately or scan once and then set the quantity.
To checkout, you just go to an open self-checkout station, hit the "check out" button in the app, scan the QR code that is on the home screen of the terminal, tell it how many bags you are using (default is zero), hit "pay", and about two seconds later a confirmation appears in the app, and you can leave.
The confirmation can be shown to the person at the exit to show that you have paid, although usually they don't ask.
If you are buying anything sold be weight, it tells you when you add it to your cart that you'll have to weigh it at checkout. At checkout, it prompts you to put each such item on the scale, weighs it, and adds it in.
It is literally 10-15 seconds from the time I enter the self-checkout area to the time I'm pushing my cart toward the exit. (I don't bag in-store. I have my reusable bags and some boxes in my car trunk, and do my bagging and/or boxing at my car).
This has been great for pandemic shopping. It is fairly easy to avoid spending more than a few passing seconds around any given other shopper while going around gathering items, but when scanning and bagging a full cart of groceries at self-checkout, you might be around the same other shoppers for several minutes, some within 2 meters.
It was already the present in most of Sweden before this too. Almost every store has automated checkout im addition to manual checkout.
on edit: evidently people would like their supermarket checkout experience to be as pleasing as the typical online shopping experience, thus a quick downvote.
There are queues online too. They are just at the delivery side, not at the checkout side.
On delivery its not really a queue as I dont have to spend my time doing it.
Here we have to suffer through websites like this:
https://www.rohlik.cz/c300102000-ovoce-a-zelenina
where you open a category, then you see a whole screen useless stock image for a category, then you scroll down through a bloated list of subcategories, then there's half a screen of recipes, and then quarter screen of filters, and then finally you get to a algorithmically selected grouped product lists.
And you have to scroll through this every time you change a category, which is also a hassle, because of all the huge multi-column popups and annoying category images everywhere and the constant scrolling you have to do to get to the subcategories from the product list.
Other websites are not that great either, due to this being the first mover in our market. So they copycat it: https://www.kosik.cz/maso-drubez-a-ryby
It takes more time to select all I want online, with this interface, than a bus trip to a shop and back + typical 15 minutes in the shop for a moderate grocery shopping session.
Most stores I visited don't even have scales and just trust you to put in the correct items. Especially the ones where you get a handheld device to scan while you walk trough the store. I would guess that fraud levels are much lower here so the stores don't need to do that.
the automated føtex near my house has this, or also put your item in the bag, you need to put an item in the bag etc. crash because you didn't put item in bag fast enough, or you took bag off scale to put new one on.
>the UX failures are not universal.
yes, because they do not have a universal interface which a human checker provides. By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff - to having as many ux as there are companies implementing automatic checkout machines and however many versions of their workflow are in distribution.
The UX failures for a self-service checkout are unique and unfamiliar to the user, just like the ux failures of a new checkout flow on an online retailer.
And I only regularly go to two different supermarkets, so once I know their flow, there's nothing new to it. In contrast, humans seem to like to change their interface quite regularly, even between customers...
On the other hand I think I may be abnormally sensitive to badly worked out human machine interactions since working out these kinds of interactions is part of my job as a programmer. So when something is poorly thought out I think that I feel it stronger than most people do.
Even this is not universal. In Sweden the checkouts have that divider so the checkout clerk can start scanning the next customer's products while you're packing.
In the UK, you can't move on until the other person has bagged and removed which you're expected to do before paying, which makes self-checkout considerably faster because you're already bagged.
I'm not sure if about 5% of our weekly supermarket spend would be negligible enough for you, but it's been worth it for us. One big factor for us is that we don't own a car, so we'd be (and previously were) hauling all that stuff by hand.
My understanding is that the chain is running the delivery service at a loss, though they probably make it up by people buying more at a time. It remains to be seen if they raise prices for the delivery when the pandemic passes.