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Comment by aardshark | Hacker News Reader

Self checkouts like the author mentioned, which have the "unexpected item in bagging area" component, are awful. Plus the machines are usually laggy.

When the machines are responsive and there's no irritating behaviours of the machine, then they're just fine, or even better than a cashier.

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I've never understood that check. Anyone attempting to steal something just wouldn't put an item they didn't scan in the bagging area. It's almost certainly always a false-positive, which is confirmed by most store employees just clearing the error without checking.

And then there's the other check that if you do scan something, it needs to go in the bagging area. So if I go into a store and grab a single item, and just scan it and hold it, the machine will freak out that I didn't put it in the bagging area. If I don't put it there quick enough it'll lock up and need an employee to intervene. Ugh.

In my experience, Target is the only store that has consistently implemented a good self-checkout experience.

Home Depot is the only store that has a great self-checkout experience. They give you fast responsive terminals with wireless barcode scanners, just like the employees have. You can line up your goods in your cart and then checkout faster than with an employee helping.

IKEA's is good too, for the same reasons.

Afaicr, HD began modernizing their self-checkout terminals ~4 years ago? I remember because it was rolling out and then pandemic happened.

People also underappreciate the internal effort (and cost) required to ship new terminals in a national chain and the drag of running a heterogeneous operation during the transition period.

It feels like 90% of UX issues could be solved with shipping over-engineered (from performance and robustness perspectives) hardware, at additional cost. Which seems like what HD did with the latest terminals.

It is probably quite common for people to put items in the bag after failing to scan them by mistake. But I guess an "a new item check" which is not very weight sensitive would be enough to counter that.

Self-checkout works best in Home Depot type of places in my experience. There are just so many items to keep track of in grocery stores.

Combine the low frequency with which that must happen and the money they save by replacing a worker, and you'd think they could just write that off.

They probably are writing it off anyway. I've never had an employee actually check -- they always just scan their barcode and clear the error.

The worst ones make it really difficult to use your own bag — no option to tell it, complains when you put your bag in the bagging area, etc. This is one of the main reasons I still go to the checkouts with human operators.

It's not even just the "unexpected item in bagging area" factor, it's that there's often way to little staff around so you spend >5 minutes waiting on any issue, sometimes more than once ("unexpected item" and then later alcohol/age check). They have exactly the same machines in Ireland and New Zealand (just with a different colour scheme, depending on the store) and while they're still crap, they're significantly less frustrating to use than Tesco or Asda in the UK because there's usually enough staff. That's been my experience with it anyway.

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