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Comment by isthatafact | Hacker News Reader

Self-checkout, when implemented in a sensible way, is fast, efficient, painless. and generally pleasant.

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.

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"Self-checkout, when implemented in a sensible way, is fast, efficient, painless. and generally pleasant."

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.

At Wegmans you weigh the produce & print the labels in the produce department, before you ever get to the checkouts. At checkout you scan the barcode that got printed. Fast, efficient, and painless.

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.

> You have to look up each item on a stupid touch screen, weigh it, and bag it.

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?

Maybe I do not buy enough different vegetables in a single trip to feel at all inconvenienced by the weighing vegetable problem. I also understand that some people will always prefer employee/human checkout for various reasons.

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.

At least in California and Europe, most self checkouts I have seen either have a button to note that you've put your own bag on the scale, or just ignore weight put on the scale before you start scanning. Are there self checkouts that don't do this?

My experience of those buttons (Sainsburys in the UK) is that they fail at lesat 50% of the time and require someone to come over to verify the bag before you can continue scanning.

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