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Comment by drunner | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of buying beets at the grocery store that were $.99 "each", but were conveniently bundled in a group of 3.

I got home and was thinking "that was a lot of beets for $.99." but I still have no idea if I did the self checkout right or wrong when I entered "1" as the quantity.

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I think there may be a labelling law that covers that. I believe that they label on any package has to be an accurate reflection of the package's price. Things like meat that are prepackaged but sold by weight have to be individually labelled/priced on the shelf. Each jurisdiction will have its own rules but they all came from a time in the 1950s when evil supermarkets were attempting to hide higher prices on groceries knowing that few people would check their receipts against the shelf prices.

https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/04/28/US-Pr...

Arizona:

F. Except as otherwise provided in this chapter or by rules adopted pursuant to this chapter, any package kept for the purpose of sale or offered or exposed for sale shall bear on the outside of the package a definite, plain and conspicuous declaration of: 4. The price, except as provided in subsections K and L.

DC:

(6) DISPLAY AND ADVERTISING OF CONSUMER COMMODITY UNIT PRICES.--A seller shall conspicuously and clearly display the price per package or unit and the unit price in close proximity to the display of the commodity

My dad ate lots of guava fruit in his childhood in his native country. He buys a few whenever the local grocers have them in stock. About half the time, the cashier keys them in as limes (about 1/3rd the price) and he doesn't realize until he's home and reads the receipt.

I can't imagine confusing them with limes given their size. I had a guava tree for a while and it's ... hard to eat that much guava.

There are several varieties of guava. The really good ones are small and lime sized and the really bad ones are bigger and crap.

Really good ones have nice, soft red flesh and don’t have seeds that will break a tooth.

I was lucky enough to have some guavas around for a while but not very recently - if I’m remembering correctly I think the seed hardness is also largely a function of how ripe they are?

That's the trade off of self checkout scales that try to match what you're buying compared to those that don't seem to care at all. At some stores, it's overly sensitive, and you constantly need attention to get past the system thinking you're trying to steal, and even adding a paper bag is enough to cause problems. At other it doesn't seem like it cares at all, and two items can be on at the same time without it noticing. Maybe they track it all and just review cameras later?

Produce charged by the item is probably hard to account for, but three times the normal weight seems like something that might be safe to trigger on.

I really really hate the weighing self-checkout things that are so prevalent in the UK (and I guess US?). They require a special artform of weighing the things just right, putting it one by one in the right basket etc, which is slower than going through a normal check-out.

In contrast one of the bigger chains in The Netherlands has a self-checkout system where you get a small hand scanner to put in a holder on your cart, it doesn't make you weigh anything, just show it the barcode before dropping things in your cart (or easier: put your bag in the cart, put everything straight in the bag). At the exit, drop the scanner thing in a charger, hold your phone in front of the checkout screen, Apple pay, done, straight to the car with your stuff already in your bag.

Their UX guys understand how to optimize. The original version made you press a few buttons to select things like "card payment" (still takes only 30 seconds vs the Tesco several minutes of weighing things), a few years ago they made it default to card payment, so you don't have to press any buttons if you use Apple pay or similar.

I guess only Amazon has an even better thing with their "walk straight our" shop. But it has the same optimization idea: Make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy things.

Yeah, around here Target seems to be easiest. They don't care if you use the scale at all. You can just scan and put into a bag someone with you is holding, or whatever, it never needs to touch the scale. Each self-checkout does have a little security screen above it through that's about 4"x6" that shows you and says you're being recorded, so my guess is that it along with the fact most people are paying with credit makes purposeful fraud fairly low, or at least low enough to be worth while.

FYI in the UK Waitrose mostly don’t use the scale to verify what you’re putting in.

It’s one one the reasons I shop there - quicker to scan, out directly in a bag, and pay.

I was buying stuff at Home Depot today and you could just scan the stuff directly in your cart without putting it on the scales.

I had a similar experience. I had to ask the self-checkout store clerk whether each banana was $0.25 or if it was all the bananas. They told me it was $0.25 per banana.

Oh, wow.

I’ve remarked to my wife how if I ever go crazy, can’t hold down a job, and live in the streets that I would sustain myself with bananas because you can buy a whole bundle of them for pennies.

Woops…

If their labeling is confusing or misleading, that's their fault.

Yup!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28038481

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