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Comment by BayAreaEscapee | Hacker News Reader

I have some sympathy for the stores: they've obviously put in a lot of these features to keep people from scamming the self-checkout system.

But I also share the author's frustrations. I've had a number of times where it decides the weight of something is wrong or for some other reason stops functioning until a store employee intervenes. But sometimes there is no store employee there at all, and I'm standing there at the self-checkout with no way to resolve the situation.

In some of those cases, I've just left my groceries there at the machine and walked out the store. I tell myself "That'll show 'em, they'll have to put all that stuff back on the shelf!" But it obviously doesn't show them anything: they never fix the broken parts of the self-checkout and I end up having to return to that supermarket (or another) for the reason that brought me into the store in the first place.

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>In some of those cases, I've just left my groceries there at the machine and walked out the store. I tell myself "That'll show 'em, they'll have to put all that stuff back on the shelf!" But it obviously doesn't show them anything: they never fix the broken parts of the self-checkout and I end up having to return to that supermarket (or another) for the reason that brought me into the store in the first place.

This seems... like a pretty lame take.

I bet in most cases the employees will never know why someone just left their stuff there. Some of it could be perishable so it'll need to be tossed rather than re-stocked onto the shelves.

And not only that, I doubt the people responsible for those machines at whatever corporate level are really checking metrics on why someone starts a checkout and then randomly stops. That's just too many steps removed.

However, there should definitely be a better way. I just don't think this is it.

> they've obviously put in a lot of these features to keep people from scamming the self-checkout system.

And these features, while understandable, make me despise using the self-checkout. I've always mused that we should have a TSA PreCheck for grocery store checkout. Do a background check on me, I promise I'm not going to steal your shit, now let me just check out without all the checks that constantly break and slow me down. But then I get annoyed at my own solution because of privacy concerns. And so I always just end up leaving the store in a bad mood.

This would be considered discriminatory and not allowed.

Then why is TSA pre-check allowed?

In Seattle, the City Council has decided that the purpose of stores is to provide free stuff to shoplifters.

> In some of those cases, I've just left my groceries there at the machine and walked out the store. I tell myself "That'll show 'em, they'll have to put all that stuff back on the shelf!" But it obviously doesn't show them anything: they never fix the broken parts of the self-checkout and I end up having to return to that supermarket (or another) for the reason that brought me into the store in the first place.

That's because corporate headquarters doesn't track how often stuff gets left where it doesn't belong, and the individuals employees have no way to make feature requests or report bugs that aren't severe. (I can report that the system chokes if a guest tries to pay with card, but I can't report that I have to kill the app every so often because it won't let me backstock(there's like 5 different ways it breaks backstocking))

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