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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

It's been a while now since I used a self-checkout, but my general philosophy is "Sorry, $Employer pays me to fight with buggy, UI-from-hell computers at $Job. If you want me to fight with your self-checkout system, my rate is \$$Lots/hour".

(Admittedly, there are quite a few stores where PoSh*t PoS systems, poor training, and poor staffing team up to make live-human checkout just as bad.)

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I have preferred self-checkouts for over a decade, and I usually avoid grocery stores without them. The user experience is simply superior to traditional checkouts. I can proceed at my own pace, and there is no forced interaction with a random person.

The UIs are also superior to the vast majority of web/mobile software I use, because they rarely change. After a year or two, you just get used to them. And when you visit a foreign country, you often find that they use the same software there as well.

How much UX superiority is due to the shorter lines? I definitely prefer self-checkout at Walmart, but if their cashiers were as efficient as e.g. ALDI it wouldn't be as valuable

ALDI gets me through the checkout faster than I could do it myself at the other large grocery chains, primarily because they have put in place efficiencies throughout the whole supply chain. Eg the Barcode is as long as the side of the box it's on for most items, and the PoS machine is simple with highly optimised lookups so you can scan a hell of a lot of product quickly. My local self serves need time to think between my lazy scanning, and then time to think about every other step along the way. I'm almost convinced a study or three have suggested that the slower the software the more chance I'll purchase the chocolate next to the machine.

Barcode scanning is not the bottleneck. The slowest part is packing the bags. Aldi get speed by asking you to pack bags after paying.

Hence why I said everything in the chain. I gave a singular example of and optimisation.

ALDI and Trader Joe's* have both moved into my area in the past decade or two. Neither has self-checkout. Only ALDI has the big barcodes.

What I notice is that both seem to have "customer checkout MUST be fast" as a C-suite priority. Vs. big American stores love their "something went wrong again, so now we all stand and wait while the cashier and manager try to figure this out" delays. Or have several idle employees hanging around while one hard-working cashier has a dozen+ customers waiting in line. Or have "Special Offers" which require the cashier to stop and handle paperwork for several minutes. Or...

*ALDI and Trader Joe's have closely related, German management & ownership:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Albrecht

https://www.aldireviewer.com/aldi-and-trader-joes-are-they-t...

Most stores around here have self-checkouts that are actually pleasant to use. No scale, no bullshit, it's very rare for an employee to be required and in those cases, one is usually available. That only works because people are generally honest, wages are high and crime is low, and might change as people get more pressed for money.

One store/chain had a user-hostile system (nasty self checkout software, had to wait for an employee to unlock something, then an exit gate check with barcode scanning, then an employee doing a random sample check to make sure I didn't scan a cheaper product instead) and to "encourage" people to use it they reduced actual checkouts so there were massive queues. I don't know if they improved it because I haven't been back in years now.

I used the US style checkouts (in and outside of the US) a few times and holy hell how are people putting up with it.

Meanwhile, airline self-check-ins are horrible because they know you don't have any other option at that point and will put up with both the line and the horrendous system, and probably won't think about it the next time you buy a ticket (and even if you do, it'll be from the same airport and most airlines will be using the same horrible system).

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