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Comment by pineaux | Hacker News Reader

I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living. To me as a 29 year old, this feels like the same "progress" as that of companies with a customer service without telephone number. If you have a real problem and you need a person on the other side, they don't provide it. It's just cheapskating.

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>I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living.

I'm not sure how you could call grocery stores as having "semi-monopoly positions" and being "extremely profitable", when they have razor thin profit margins.

I'm tired of hearing this "we have no margins". You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat. I can buy a car once every few years. I can rent or buy a house. I can't rent food. I have to buy. In most places it's going to be from one of the major grocery chains. They have economies of scale. They have a captive audience (or whatever it's called when people can't live without what you're selling).

They have no margins because they blow hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on these self-checkouts!

> You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat.

That's not what "monopoly" means. Whether you "have to eat" is irrelevant. Most states have monopolies on gambling, but even though nobody has to buy lottery tickets, it's still a monopoly.

> I can rent or buy a house.

But you still need to get shelter somehow, right? ;)

A few grocery chains in Tokyo have clerks that take items from your basket, scan them, place them neatly in a 2nd basket. On completion, they take 2nd basket and place it at one of two payment machines where you can pay with cash, card, or smartphone. Two payment machines are necessary to prevent congestion. If you have problems with payment they're quick to assist.

After payment, the customer takes the basket to a 3rd location to bag their groceries and leave. There are clerks available to assist.

It is amazingly fast, I had the misfortune of shopping at 6:00 pm. I looked at the lines and estimated twenty minute checkout, actually got finished in about five minutes. The basket size limits the amount of groceries which is a minus, but helps move around the store quickly vs a huge cart and checks out faster.

> It takes me way more time than a fast cashier.

Only if you don't count the time waiting in line before it's your turn. Consider this analogy: you have a single-threaded task that takes 30 seconds to complete on CPU X, which has 4 cores, or 1 minute to complete on CPU Y, which has 24 cores. If your task is the only one running, then CPU X will finish it faster, but if there are 20 other tasks that also need to run, then CPU Y will finish yours faster.

It’s funny because I am usually frustrated by how slowly many cashiers are at scanning the items and how bad many are at packing the grocery bag. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go to a cashier when I have a bunch of items, though. The worst is when people go through self checkout with a full cart and don’t have any idea how to do it making the rest of us wait.

If I have, say, 5 items or fewer I prefer the self checkout. There's usually no queue (as there are 8 or so machines) and scanning the items is only slightly less convenient than putting them on the belt at the human checkout anyway.

It's not hard to get fast at using self-scan, especially if you've worked retail. If many others can be efficient, perhaps consider whether you are part of why it's so slow?

Some of them are quite forgiving and let you go fast, others insist on you placing every item on the scale carefully and still freak out half the time. Depends on the quality of the area, perhaps.

Sure, I'm perfectly ready to admit I'm shit at it. I just don't want this to have to be something I good at.

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