I loathe the camera and the little screen that shows me standing at the self check out. It is degrading. Self check out needs to go away.
The article is describing a bad implementation that apparently uses some "AI" nonsense to insinuate that a customer (and probably most customers) is attempting to steal. It sounds even worse than the weight sensors that many earlier self-checkout have used, which, besides being error prone, made it impossible to put groceries into any kind of re-usable bag or backpack until after first finishing scanning and paying for everything while attempting to balance the entire load of groceries onto a tiny platform/scale like some reverse jenga tower game.
As stated, the quoted sentence above says nothing; it has no content because of the caveat. Let's simplify on the way to dragging reality back in:
"Self-checkout is fast, efficient, painless. and generally pleasant."
I have never ever seen an implementation that makes bulk goods checkout, as is required for say vegetables/fruits/grains etc., "fast, efficient, painless, and generally pleasant." How could it be? You have to look up each item on a stupid touch screen, weigh it, and bag it. Lots of potential for callous mistakes that are annoying as hell to fix, so I never fix them, and now I'm a criminal.
Ok, so now they're bagging up the bulk goods so they can barcode the batch, and... I get to buy 3lbs of zuccini, with a bad one visibly lurking in there, or nothing.
Awesome technology thanks bros.
It's pretty easy at Whole Foods. You hit a button for "produce", type "gr" and select "green pepper", confirm and you're done.
I've never had any trouble at all. I can't even imagine what exactly could go wrong?
I would expect that AI could help to identify what vegetable is being weighed, but it will probably never know whether or not that zucchini is "organic"/"bio".
As a fairly low tech (but maybe too costly) solution, I could imagine a system where the vegetables at the store live on a scale that spits out a bar code value based on the weight of what a customer removes, which the customer would then take to scan at checkout.
Of course that's one regional grocery chain, and typically a more "high end" one than Walmart. But that furthers the point, self checkout can be nice, it just depends on the implementation.
Stores are already full of cameras. Things like ATM's all have cameras filming your transaction too.
What's different about a self-checkout one?