Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

theatlantic.com

31 pointssamizdis138 comments

Here in Switzerland I scan my loyalty card at the entrance, grab a handheld self-scanner, scan items as I put them in my cart, scan out at the self-checkout area, finalize and pay at a self-checkout till.

Very convenient. There are random checks by the staff, one out of 20 times maybe.

My local grocery store (Wegmans) tried something like that; a self-scan app on your cell phone, to check out you'd scan a QR on the self-checkout and it'd pass over all your items.

Theft (things like putting unscanned $200 beef tenderloin roasts unscanned at the bottom of a bag) was so bad they canceled it within months. I miss it, it was super convenient.

They're now trialing camera-based machine vision cart attachments that are slow and annoying.

Wegmans around here kept it around for 2 years.

But yes, I miss it too.

At ICA in Sweden they solved this by doing random checks of the cart at checkout to verify

Might work with clear bags, but otherwise you put it way at the bottom underneath a bunch of small items. No checker wants to make you dump out a shopping bag full of yogurts.

In Sweden when you get stopped for random checks they do indeed make you empty out everything in your bags and rescan everything to make sure it matches.

I’ll point out that typically in Sweden the carts are much smaller, the biggest ones you typically see at ICA and the like are pull behind rollers that are usually only about 25-40% of the size of a USA full size cart. So it’s not as big of an ask to empty them out as the massive trawlers provided in the USA.

My local ICA Maxi has three sizes of carts. The largest ones are basically the same size as the ones I've seen in the US. It differs greatly from store to store as well. The central down town ICA that doesn't have a parking lot only has the smallest carts. The massive ICA in the outskirts of town that can basically only be reached by car tends to have the big carts

US shopping carts vary widely. Costco's can fit a good 2 m^3 and 250 kg of products. The flat platform types can haul even more. These are in contrast to some pharmacy store carts are smaller than a hand basket.

I will say that Costco’s baskets are definitely an outlier. When I go to Walmart, Target, Kroger, Safeway/Albertsons/Wegmans flavor of the day, all of those baskets are the same size. The vast majority of people in the USA shop with the roughly same full size wheeled cart or the handbasket in my experience. Perhaps a few cubic decimeters of variation but not much. I haven’t been everywhere in the States, but I have been to all of the contiguous ones and aside from the Costco cart, which is in fact larger, I have not seen much size variation beyond that.

And the flat platform types, are you referencing the kind that are normally seen in Home Depot? The ones typically that go 6 inches from the floor and look like a pallet jack? With those again you can find them in Sam’s club and Costco but you won’t see them in a “typical” grocery setting

You'd cause an armed revolution here trying that, lol. People already get grumpy at Costco when they want to briefly see your receipt.

It's very rare that it happens though, maybe once or twice a year to me.

Having someone go through my bags looking for stolen merchandise once a year would be more than sufficient for me to take my business elsewhere.

To be clear, No one goes through your bags. you unpack your bags yourself onto normal checkout conveyor, as you would do if checking out normally. If you don't want to 'risk it' you can just go to the manned checkout to begin with.

I would never agree to that. They have no right to see my personal property.

Several Walmarts I’ve been in have asked to see my receipt, the answer is always the same: “No Thank You”, and if they persist I just ignore them.

I think you're conflating reusable bags containing unpurchased products with women's purses.

Filling your bags with stuff and barging out without paying has always been an option, even before self scanning. Advocating for it hardly gives you the moral high ground.

One interesting thing to point out here is that OP doesn't appear to be advocating stealing. They are simply implying there is no legal basis for them asking to see your receipt. They can of course ban you from the store but they aren't going to do that simply for not showing your receipt unless it's obvious that you are stealing multiple times.

This is actually different than how stores like Sam's Club or Costco work - these stores can force you to show the receipt because a condition of membership is that you must show the receipt. But in a store "generally accessible to the public" e.g. a non membership style store such as Sam's Club or Costco in the USA store employees cannot detain you or otherwise force you to show a receipt for something that you paid for - as grandparent says it's your property at that point.

I typically show the receipt at Walmart if its not going to be an inconvenience for me. But the other day I had bought a heavy car battery and a jump starter kit and my hands were full and I wasn't about to put all of that down to show off a receipt. So I politely declined and kept walking and that was it. It's kind of like cops and searching your vehicle - they can always ask and you can always decline. They have the technology to figure out if you're actually stealing or not, so if they know you are, and they know, then they'll simply just ban you from the store. If not, then they aren't going to arbitrarily ban you.

They are simply implying there is no legal basis for them asking to see your receipt.

But surely there is a legal basis to prevent you from leaving the store with groceries before you have paid for them. When you walk through the normal checkout and they ask you to put everything on the conveyor so that they can scan it, are you allowed to say "no thank you" and just walk out? If that is not OK, I fail to see the difference.

The key here is that OP has paid for their groceries. Once the transaction completes, the groceries are their property. OP has no obligation to prove to anyone that they own their own property after that (except in the case of Costco and Sam's club, which you of course don't have to prove either, but they will revoke your membership if you don't). In your scenario, you haven't paid for the groceries yet. So they are still the store's property. And they can of course take measures to protect their property while it's still in their possession.

Receipt checking, by definition, always happens after the transaction has completed and the payer has taken possession of the groceries, hence the receipt. So receipt checking is always a practice to verify that your already lawfully purchased groceries match up with what you are removing from the store. This is a practice, while rooted in a perspective that benefits the store, that you have no obligation whatsoever to comply with.

The store, as mentioned above, has no obligation to let you back into the store (they can ban you), but they also have no right to detain you and force you to prove that you own your belongings as you are leaving either. And a store is not going to ban someone unless they are completely sure they have stolen something. So in practice there is really no issue with telling receipt checkers to pound sand for trying to verify my lawfully purchased groceries. I usually don't, because it feels standoffish for no reason sometimes, and you risk encountering someone that doesn't fully understand the law correctly. But if I have a good reason, as mentioned above, I will definitely tell them to pound sand.

I realize now rereading the thread how these two scenarios became conflated, because OP responded to the "before purchase" scenario that you provided with an "after purchase" scenario. So we are really talking about two different scenarios here.

> And a store is not going to ban someone unless they are completely sure they have stolen something.

That isn't true. Just being rude to staff can get you banned from many stores. If you don't like their policy of checking receipts, they can ban you, although they can't really enforce anything without a trespassing order, at best they can just refuse service.

Of course, but refusing when they ask you to show your receipt is what we are talking about here, not some arbitrary other thing that can get you banned from a store. There are all sorts of behaviors that can presumably get you banned from a store, as you pointed out in your example. If someone has ever been banned simply for politely refusing to show the receipt and nothing else I would like to see some evidence. I’ve never heard of it happening. But yeah it is of course theoretically possible, you could be banned by a place of business because they don’t like the way you have a spring in your step, provided that the underlying reason is not because you’re a member of a protected class. But no business is arbitrarily handing out bans for things like this because it’s bad for business.

Also AFAIK in the States it’s quite easy to get a “trespass order”. My understanding is that in most jurisdictions you simply tell the person they are in trespass and they are required to leave the premises or be subject to detention by authorities if they don’t. Now your typical employee may not be able to just hand that kind of order out due to some internal policy but in theory any agent of the business would be able to do it. There’s no real additional paperwork or legal process that needs to happen outside of a verbal exchange

> But surely there is a legal basis to prevent you from leaving the store with groceries before you have paid for them.

There isn't really. The store can call the police, and when they show up, they can stop you from leaving. But...ya, that doesn't work out very well.

I imagine in Europe you would just become a social pariah and might get a knock at your door by police (at least in Switzerland...), while in the states...they can't do much, there is no social pressure.

As a teenager/early 20's in the late 80's and early 90's I worked at a K-Mart style discount store. We employed up to four plainclothes "loss prevention" associates who absolutely could and did detain people for shoplifting. We even had a code for it: "Code 100!". Hear that on the loudspeaker and you know there's a shoplifter either on the run or nearly so, and if you're able to give pursuit or just look tough, get to the front NOW. I chased shoplifters twice. One was tackled by a bystander in the parking lot, and while the other got away, I gave the cop a description and they picked him up at the McDonalds down the street. Sensibilities/budgets may be different today, but back then it was a rush for a young guy.

I was also once in the position of acting as witness in the loss prevention office when one of my classmates was caught (no chase) stealing fishing gear. Awkward.

Someone would get shot if this became widespread in the us

In the US, workers wouldn't be able to actually do this because the US public is miserable.

There are lots of reasons why retail workers are not motivated to (and in many cases are specifically motivated against) policing people's shopping carts. But primarily:

1. If someone is willing to steal from a store, who knows what else they are willing to do? Retail workers do not make enough money to potentially put themselves in harm's way over a $200 beef tenderloin roast. 2. It's doubtful whether a retail worker even has the legal authority to physically detain a shopper. I surely wouldn't put up with it as a shopper, and would make a stink. And at that point you're back to #1: Will the next shopper you detain make a stink, or will they get violent? 3. For liability reasons, companies don't want their employees getting harmed, so most stores' guidance is to not interfere.

Things that work in a high trust society do not work in a medium or low trust one.

The US is rapidly backsliding from a high to low trust society so things like this are simply not possible in many areas. A few trials like this ran near me and shut down months later.

This...is a weird exaggeration. Walmart plus allows you to do just that. Sam's club, I do exactly the same. Scan it via my mobile app, show app QR to person at checkout, done.

The US isn't rapidly sliding anywhere.

it's not an exaggeration, there were also stores near where I live in <major city> that tried to do something similar with scanning apps and then abandoned it due to theft and added the standard self-checkout stations you see everywhere now.

I have seen video of black dude going to white neighborhood and geeking out that stuff if out in-front of petrol station unsupervised. He was scolding his community that it would be impossible in his hood.

America is in super state of being both, high and low trust.

And by judging the current world trends it will collapse to one state pretty soon - the dead cat scenario i am afraid.

I had a version of this myself, moving out of a poor area into a nice one. When we were doing a tour, we saw children's bikes just left laying down by the street everywhere. It was shocking, as a child I couldn't even store my bike in our shed out back.

I think it really depends on the region where you live. The US is a very large and diverse place.

You just named subscription services which by definition “weed out” the people the parent comment was referring to.

I'm in the US, and my local Stop & Shop location does this; however, they also have a robot loaded with cameras and sensors that patrols the store "checking for spills" (and can theoretically also monitor for theft, and was also rolled out amidst a strike). It's also somewhat unsettling, despite the googly eyes (it always makes my kid upset).

https://thecounter.org/supermarket-robot-automation-ai-organ...

Or not. From the article:

> Not that there is a lot of data to suggest that this oft-discussed recent spike in retail crime is even real. In an earnings call earlier this year, for example, the CFO of Walgreens admitted that his company had perhaps “cried too much” about theft, and that its product losses had actually declined in the previous quarter.

It's important to note that these aren't isolated anonymous systems. They know who you are when you pick up the scanner and can assess choose to deny service based on how much they trust you. Fail a couple of random searches and you lose service.

It's still financially viable to assume a little extra theft risk here because you take a tenth of the time at checkout and use less than half the person time as regular self checkouts (which use a tenth of the time a manned checkout does). They massively increase throughout in large, busy stores.

Where? There has been self-checkout all over America for 15+ years. I don't see anywhere removing it.

The recent problems have been:

District Attorneys deciding property crime is selectively enforceable for social justice engineering, and a knock-on effect of the police not bothering to do their job while having the gall to collect a paycheck they didn't earn.

Political divisions where a growing demographic of self-destructives wish to throw a Molotov cocktail into functional civilization. This explains why COTUS can't elect a Speaker of the House.

Maybe it's not "social justice engineering" so much as liability avoidance.

We've seen plenty of issues with police that wildly escalate a situation, in ways that result in things like "burn-half-the-city-down riots".

In that atmosphere, it might be an intentional goal to minimize the number of "low value" police encounters. Stopping a shoplifter might recover $100 of merchandise, but you have to get it right an awful lot of times to recover for every time a trigger-happy cop loses his cool and the city has to pay a seven-figure settlement.

> issues with police that wildly escalate a situation, in ways that result in things like "burn-half-the-city-down riots".

That is one way of putting it. Another and in my opinion more correct way is to conclude that some groups of people are looking for reasons to burn half the city down and find it in "police brutality" or "racism". When the police is just as brutal towards different groups of people the cities do not burn down.

You can have a look at the areas which gave heed to the calls to "defund the police" to find out whether that has led to a decrease or increase of crime. If the police were the cause of these problems you'd expect fewer problems when there are fewer police encounters. In actuality the result is the opposite and what most people who do not hold with the narrative expected: less police leads to more crimes committed.

No, reducing police presence in these dystopian areas is not the solution. A better trained police force with better tactics might be. Giuliani managed to turn New York around so it can be done if there is the will and the opportunity to act upon that will.

Giving up and giving in will lead to streets empty of stores instead of streets with empty stores which will promptly be followed by claims of "discrimination" and "structural racism" because there are no shops in those areas without a single person asking why those shops left. Giving up and giving in is not an option.

> District Attorneys deciding property crime is selectively enforceable for social justice engineering, and a knock-on effect of the police not bothering to do their job while having the gall to collect a paycheck they didn't earn.

Many police departments in big cities are severely understaffed. Seattle is at 60% where it needs to be, and has the lowest number of officers since 1992 (while population is much larger than then).

Couple that with just being a bad job: you get blamed for not doing enough, doing too much, and...really, there are just way better jobs out there these days that offer as much money for a lot less stress.

That's how I do it here in the US. But without the spot checks. Definitely handy.

10 years or so of self check he in US Midwest, and I’ve never even seen someone being checked on.

Same here in Estonia. Virtually all chains support one of two solutions. First one is scanning items at the checkout area - this does not have any random checks by staff. The second one is with the handheld scanner, where you might get occasional checks when trying to pay, but these checks happen rarely if you pass several checks without any issues.

Best thing since sliced bread IMHO, very quick and easy. Most stores have reduced cashier stands from eg. 10 to ~2.

There is also a 3rd option: using your own phone as scanner.

In Partner Card [1] stores such as Viru Keskus supermarket (Kaubamaja Toidumaailm), one can download Partnerkaart app [2] to use their phones to scan for products.

I personally am a big fan of this one, since for some reason my phone's barcode scanner is greatly faster and more accurate than the market's own scanners.

[1]: https://www.partnerkaart.ee/et/ [2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/partnerkaart/id1615988287

Why bother with that when AI/ML/CV can track what comes off and on the shelves? Amazon Go

In the US I’ve usually seen grocery stores have a self checkout where there are a bunch of self checkout machines and 1 staff member at that area to hand out bags, probably make sure you actually pay and don’t walk straight through the self check out, and fix things when people need to return items, the machine breaks, etc.

I'd prefer scanning-while-shopping, otherwise I have to remember to leave things barcode up and have enough room, especially for bug box stores.

Apart from produce, I'd prefer home delivery that eliminates the scanning and transportation effort entirely.

I suspect a better approach than gig economy grocery delivery would be dedicated refrigerated vans and trucks with drivers who work directly for the seller. Gig economy drivers don't keep things at a proper temperature and can't seem to deliver consistently.

In general, where I am in the US, gig economy workers are rude, short tempered, don't read direction notes, and sloppy.

We do the same in Italy in lots of supermarkets.

I never understood the appeal of having to do that "work" and still pay the same price. To me it feels like going to a restaurant where you have to be the waiter yourself. Is that really that convenient?

Yes it's pretty convenient, no need to take items out onto the checkout counter just to put them back into my shopping cart.

The Sam's Club version, scanning barcodes while putting things into your cart, means you get to skip the checkout line completely. That's an easy 10+ minutes saved if the store is busy.

It's faster.

From Switzerland too. In France and Ireland I also saw these self-checkouts. In Ireland I even could use one, and to my surprise it worked out fine.

its weird, here in Australia we have self checkout at the two major supermarkets.

I find them mostly convenient. the only times I've every had a staff come over is when I've done the wrong thing and the machine needed staff assistance to progress or when the machine did the wrong thing and I needed the staff to progress.

It amuses me to read (and I see it a lot) people outraged that staff may come over and check what they're doing and not cheating the system somehow, outraged at the lack of trust being perceived.

Do they not remember the old checkout system was a complete lack of trust scenario. Every single item you want to buy was checked by staff.

The self checkout is a HUGE level of trust being given to the customer.

I see a lot of comments that disagree with the article. Where I live in the US, the only grocery store near me has four self-checkout machines and only one other cashier on duty. This results in lines through the entire length of the store at all hours. People with $200 worth of groceries are checking themselves out and taking at least 20 minutes to complete the process. The people who have 12 items or less have to wait for a long time to leave the store.

I’m all for self-checkout if it is limited to 12 items or less because it is significantly slower to scan and bag groceries yourself than to have two people who are trained at this.

The process is so slow that we drive an additional 15 minutes away just to avoid that grocery store.

Sounds like the issue in your area is lack of competition. I live near a lot of grocery stores (coincidentally can walk to two of them in under five minutes and I don’t live in a walkable city) and it would be hard for me to give that up.

I also live near a lot of grocery stores, all different chains, and what the OP describes is the reality at all of them. I always choose a human cashier when available because it's almost always faster.

Honestly, I think the issue may be more due to labor shortage than penny-pinching.

Isn't labor shortage a factor of penny-pinching? I'm pretty confident that if said cashiers were being offered double the rate that they are currently being offered that there would be no labor shortage problem.

A variant of the self-checkout is what's called self-scanning in Switzerland. Instead of checking out you scan the stuff you want to buy with a scanner you can pick up at the entry. The checkout is just paying.

It's so easy to just have 20 self checkout lanes and then this problem doesn't happen. Why is walmart the only one doing it?

I think it's worth noting that Walmart's self-checkout is incredibly more robust than many competitors. What I've seen of Safeway, each item has like a 5% chance of needing an employee to clear an error state, which usually means a two minute wait per error.

The Lidl near me in London has a similar issue. There are 14 self-checkout stations, but they're mostly broken all the time (and the store is only about two years old, it's not like they're ancient technology). The most I've ever seen functional at once is 9. One day it was down to only 5 working at all and those were having some issue with NFC payments (if you had an actual card, it was fine, but everyone wants to use Apple pay on their phone now) and they only had one cashier working.

The other anti-pattern is multiple lines to human cashiers. A single line is faster and fairer. What slows it down is assholes on their phones not being ready when they are next.

> Where I live in the US, the only grocery store near me has four self-checkout machines and only one other cashier on duty.

I'm not sure why that is, but it isn't the fault of the self-checkout machines. They are smaller than normal checkouts, and they could have 20 of them and still need only one cashier on duty.

Where I live, when they replace normal checkouts with their conveyor belts, lolly stands and backing areas, they typically get 2 self service ones per normal one replaced.

There's a noticeable difference between self-checkout stations, for example:

The stations at my local Harris teeter are unable to handle the user quickly scanning+placing products in the bagging area. I imagine this has to do with how the software translates changes in the bagging-area weight to a count of items. When this happens you have to wait around for the system to decide you aren't, in-fact, stealing.

These same stations also prevent further item scanning once an age restricted item (e.g. alcohol) is scanned, forcing you the wait around for the attendant before you can continue with your items.

Contrasted to the self-checkout stations at my local food-lion, which have none of these issues, the lack of UX is frustrating.

To top off with some non-content: You'd really think more people would have learned how to reliably scan barcodes after observing others do it hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

Self-checkout literally always works for me. Items that require an ID, requires an associate to confirm, but they're always there to help me. The worst thing about self check out is when there's not enough machines!

I disagree. I have had almost no issues with self-checkout, and I use it every week when buying lots of groceries. I think I only had an issue once or twice when the item I was trying to buy wasn't in the system.

Self-checkout is mostly fine for a few barcoded items that don't require age approval (like alcohol). Even awkwardly shaped items at places like Home Depot work pretty well these days given hand scanners. But having half a cartload of groceries including a bunch of produce? I'd much rather have a cashier. Aside from the slow process of looking things up, self-checkout areas just aren't setup for checking out and bagging a big pile of goods.

Grocery needs a little more tech to be perfectly convenient. Best I've seen are handheld scanners with electronic scales in the produce area to let you get barcodes for all your produce. The handheld scanner to let you scan and pack away from the checkout area. When you get to the checkout area, you generate a barcode that loads all the items into the self-checkout and pay.

Sounds like more work than I want to do to buy produce. And there's still the problem that self-checkout at grocery stores is really optimized around the person scanning half a dozen items.

Agreed. In fact, the complaints the article starts off with seem to screem "I'm an idiot that can't follow simple directions".

All the self checkout systems I've used are near identical. You move unscanned items past a scanner and onto a scale in the bagging area. Nothing confusing about that

Self check outs in high cost of living areas vs. low cost of living areas are different.

Low cost of living areas you have many more reliability issues, I suspect because of high use and poor maintenance.

Examples of poor reliability I’ve experienced are:

- Scale not working for produce, requiring the attendant to re-tare it

- Machine stuttering when scanning, resulting in not scanning, then double scanning an item

- Machine refusing to scan after a small number of items. Staff response to that was “try not to use the small machines, they have issues”

You also have some vicious anti-patterns that when combined with suspicious staff support make the checkout experience

- At Kroger, similar items share the same picture. I was once scrutinized by a staff member who reached into my bag to see the item I had just place in there when scanning celery because celery sticks and celery bundles share the same picture in the checkout screen.

- Kroger also issued coupons by mail to compensate for raising prices. When scanning coupons, you need to have staff support to take the coupons, which prevents completing checkout before their intervention.

You combine that with the fact that many people in low cost of living areas also have health issues, which degrade their ability to follow instructions and respond to complex stimuli, you have a situation where self checkout lines backup, people get over charged, and it’s for the benefit of the company and not their customers.

I can't speak for everywhere, of course, but I live in a fairly low-cost-of-living area (rural upstate NY), and the self-checkouts in the grocery stores I frequent are largely well-maintained, reliable, and easy to use, with the exception of one store where they're configured to be just a little too finicky about warning you to "place the item in the bag". (I say "configured" because the sensitivity level has changed several times since their introduction a few years ago, so there must be some level of configurability to it.)

Personally, I love self-checkout, and would be happy to use it every time, even at the place where it's a bit oversensitive. (Just have to remember to place the item in the bag, wait a second, then move the full bag back to the cart...) I think the notion that it's a "failed experiment" relies on a number of assumptions that the author's experiences are universal. It needs more fine-tuning in places, and possibly some more regulation to ensure that it's not being used in predatory ways (either toward the customers, or in terms of cutting down on employees and forcing everyone to use the self-checkout).

Are the machines used in the US in some way different/worse than the ones used in Europe? Most of my local supermarkets are basically all self-checkout these days (generally smallish urban supermarkets with a bank of 5-10 self-checkouts plus some closed human-operated one); there's usually someone there to fix problems and authorise alcohol, and usually _one_ open human operated checkout.

And it's generally _fine_. I remember a lot of problems when they started showing up 20 years ago, but it's distant-memory stuff at this point. Bigger supermarkets also tend to have self-scan things that you bring around the aisles with you for big shops.

(One fun exception: a few years back all the grapefruits on offer were unusually small, I think due to adverse weather conditions in Spain. If you tried to buy grapefruits, the machine would become concerned that the grapefruits you'd put in your bag weren't as heavy as it expected, and required an employee to reassure it. There are presumably acceptable weight ranges for fruit, and the problem grapefruits just fell outside it...)

My experience with self-checkout machines in the US does not resemble the description given in the article in any way. I've never gotten an "unexpected item in bagging area" error, rarely have issues scanning items, and need help from an employee once every few months. I've never had a line for them longer than 2-3 people.

My beef with self-checkout tills is that I don't use carrier bags, preferring to put my goods in my backpack. The self-checkout tills won't accept a backpack in the packing area; too heavy, I suppose.

Yeah, I have the same problem, I usually just end up putting everything into my backpack after I've paid. Slows things down.

That sounds like a crummy design. At my usual store, the packing area is just a big flat scale and you can put everything on it without bagging if you want. Then throw it back in the cart if you want, or a backpack, whatever, after you pay.

Backpacks work fine at self-checkouts at Target-CVS here, and all human checkers at Trader Joe's (Aldi Nord).

Joining in the mix here. I literally take such great pains to avoid having to use anything OTHER than self-checkout. They are a god-send to mankind.

It's a great replacement for the "15 items or less" aisle, more than that and I'll find a line with a human cashier. There's one store that doesn't use humans in the evening, they've lost my business for large purchases.

It depends. Self checkout works wonderfully on stores like Walmart and Target. 0 issues.

However in stores like Fry's/Kroger/Albertsons, it effectively treats me like a thief.

My Walmart even let's you void some items yourself, as well as not caring at all about the scale.

I'd consider it a plus honestly at this point, self checkout has no line, and short of a cart full of groceries, it's likely faster.

I'm pretty sure the various managers can play with that experience. I've had Walmart self-checkout complain if I moved too quickly or removed items from the scale after scanning them. They've also complained when I had a second person handing me items from the cart or if I was moving too quickly.

There seems to be some variance in systems. I //really// don't like the ones at my local WM. It disables the scanner until the bagging scale stabalizes, and you can't enter quantities. It basically speed-limits you to about 1 item every 2 seconds.

The ones at the Target, don't lock out the scanner unless you scan something that is marked as having a security tag, and the degausser hasn't fired.

Our local CVS has some, and they're fine, but anyone that can't use them (low vision, paying with cash (sometimess), or buying things that require ID) have to chase down the one or two roving employees in the store, which would be super annoying if you had to do it often.

Personally, I tend to use SC when I have <5 items. Even on the "nice" systems, there's no way I can outpace someone who does this all day, has helpful tech (conveyor belts, a bagger (even if it's me), ability to enter quantity, can enter PLUs, doesn't have to deal with the system locking out the scanner whenever it feels like it).

Every time I do self checkout at Krogers and it asks me if I put down a bag, selecting "yes" always triggers an employee verification (as does selecting "no"). I don't get the point in prompting the user if no matter what the user selects it always triggers an employee verification.

Another annoyance is you have to remember to scan your alcohol last or else it will block the checkout until your ID has been checked, Walmart has figured this out and only checks your ID when you hit "checkout".

That's interesting. On the occasion that I've shopped at Walmart, it hasn't been very smooth. And there's always a line. But our local Kroger-owned store (Fred Meyer) has lots of self-checkout kiosks that are all manned with a 1:6 ratio, and they're pretty seamless. They used to be a bit trigger happy with touchy scales, but Kroger seems to have eased up on that. Heck, they just added hand-scanners so you can just leave everything in the cart as you scan. Or just grab a scanner as you go in the store and do it that way.

> However in stores like Fry's [...]

You're a little out of date.

Target is also slowly circling the drain and will be death spiraling into worse service + experience.

>You're a little out of date.

I shop at both regularly. How am I 'out of date' by sharing my experiences (of last week, literally) of my local stores lol?

Oh apparently you live in Arizona?

Thought you were talking about Fry's electronics, I've never heard of Fry's Food and Drug before I just looked it up.

Ah, no. Their grocery stores are surprisingly dope (outside of the checkout area lol).

The test to me is M&S on Waterloo Station. At 6pm it seems the world is in this slightly claustrophobic but big enough supermarket. There is one queue (as there should be) and it is a steady walk. At the end are a big array of self service tills, always several to spare, and several staff guiding people. Something that feels like it should be a nightmare is actually a good experience.

I was standing at a Home Depot self-checkout, looking all over for an employee to help me with an item, finding nobody. The guy next to me was waiting too and I asked him "does anyone work here any more?"

He said "I guess we do."

I wonder how they're going to get me to stock shelves and clean the restroom.

And then there is my local home depot which seems to have a 1:1 ratio of employees to shoppers much of the time. And they're all so chipper and helpful. Almost too much so.

I just don't like ringing up and bagging my own groceries. I'll pay extra for someone else to do it just please stop making me use the self check out.

I never have a problem with self checkout here in the UK, mainly using Tesco for grocery shopping. It just works, and I appreciate the convenience.

I've recently started using their service where you scan items with a portable scanner as you go around the shop, and bag them immediately. Checkout is even quicker because everything is already in my bags, and I can see a running total of how much I'm spending. Again, it just works.

What doesn't work is product location discovery. I get that they want me to wander around looking for the coffee or whatever that theyve relocated yet again, because they think I'll make more impulse purchases, but it still frustrates me.

Scanning as you shop in Tesco is great.

> I get that they want me to wander around looking for the coffee or whatever that theyve relocated yet again, because they think I'll make more impulse purchases

Or out of general low-level supermarket-chain evil. My local Tesco (a small urban one) recently rearranged everything, and put the flour next to the gluten-free products. The only way I can explain this is that this is a sort of Tesco Value Squid Game; in the office upstairs evil billionaires watch coeliacs running the Gauntlet of Gluten.

If you like how it's done at Tesco, you will love how it's done in most of mainland Europe. Imagine Tesco, except the scale that weighs how much you've scanned.

Tesco Fresh & Easy enters the chat with:

- Small format

- Small quantities & worse value

- Limited selection

- Giant self-checkout conveyor belt confusing shoppers

Seems to have been US-only. Having briefly read-up on it, it sounds pretty bad.

I'm going to disagree and say that self-checkout has been good, and I only see the systems improving at stores I frequent and more stores are adding it every day. I'd call that a success.

> You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that.

Sounds like most of those issues are self-inflicted by cheaping out on all the hardware. Reliable scales, scanners, etc. aren't hard to figure out, if you bother paying enough for it.

In the half-decade or we've had self-checkouts in Austria, they've been mostly reliable – I've only ever had real trouble in the first six months of their deployment (teething issues), and in the first half of 2023, when producers were shrinkflating their packagings so often that the inventory databases couldn't keep up and scales were regularly expecting the wrong values. That seems to have quieted down again too, thankfully.

Here in Denmark, I use the “Scan & Go” feature whenever available. I use my own bag, scan items using my phone before dropping them into the bag, and use Apple Pay to finalise the whole transaction. A QR code is displayed on my phone allowing me to open the gate at the self-checkout line.

I can be in and out of the shop within a minute or 2-3, never needing to talk to a human.

The only disadvantage is that I can’t get my bottle deposits paid out using the app; I have to go to the till for that.

Yeah I love the scan & go method. But... a gate? Do they block you from leaving self-checkout until you scan a code? That's fascinating. Have never seen that in the US, at least not in my region.

Depends on the shop. At Rema 1000 (Norwegian brand), there’s no gate, you just a number on your phone that you might have to show to a clerk if they ask. You exit by walking past people being checked out by a cashier.

At Netto and Føtex (Danish brands), they have traditional self-checkout with a machine where you scan your items yourself. You get a printed receipt/code that opens the gate.

Scan & Go uses the same exit as the self-checkout, so they give you a code on your phone to open the gate.

Here’s a very short video from Netto: https://youtu.be/5zVATAnUNyg

Here’s another video from Coop, skip the first 1m20s: https://youtu.be/V69FQH47-sE

That's interesting, thanks for the video links!

I would say my worst experience with self checkout was at ikea. During a busy time of year, we visited ikea and picked up about $1000 worth of stuff. As you know, $1000 can net you a lot at ikea - so we probably had at least 50-60 items.

We would have been happy to wait in line for a traditional cashier but there were only self checkout lanes. And long lines for those too! We finally get to the front of the line, dutifully scan each item. Of course it’s impossible to track what’s scanned already since the area to place items is no larger than the one at the supermarket. Fat chance putting a shelf on that tiny area.

Anyway, the system decides that due to our purchase volume, we were selected for a “random rescan”. So we wait for someone to come over and it picks three items for the person to scan. Of course they screw it up, and the system now declares the entire order needs to be started from scratch.

How exactly did anyone save time or effort in this case? What a nightmare.

Seems true in America. I rarely choose self checkout, for the reasons listed.

However I spent 3 years in London and self checkout dominates. The Sainsburys by my house had ~40 self checkout kiosks and only about 6 regular checkout lanes. I only used the checkout lane one time in multiple years (same at Waitrose and Tesco).

There are a few things that made it better:

1) Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code. Much easier to scan. And generally the tech seems to just work, it rarely complained that I had missed an item when I hadn’t.

2) Fewer item purchase restrictions. Even alcohol was allowed at self checkout but you did have to flag someone down for that.

3) People do smaller shopping trips. Each person at an urban market in London is likely buying a basket of goods, not a whole cart. That makes the entire process much more streamlined and space efficient.

> Seems true in America

Not in my experience. I love self-checkout.

> Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code

Same with my local store in the US. Still a few things sold by weight, but the majority of stuff is barcoded. Even produce.

> Even alcohol was allowed at self checkout

Is that not true pretty much everywhere in the US as well? They have to check ID, yes, but that's a legal thing.

> Produce in these stores is rarely sold by weight. It’s more common to get produce in packaged quantities with a bar code. Much easier to scan

Even where a lot of stuff is sold by weight, you can just have self-service scales that print a barcode around the shop; this seems to work fairly well (unless they're out of order; then it's a whole thing and you can only use the self-checkouts that have built in scales, grumble mutter).

I’ve found it depends on the store and what you’re trying to do. Larger higher traffic grocery stores have their weight sensors calibrated much more finely. At kroger for example i’m always frustrated i forget to register my bag and need to empty it and start again. At sprouts things mostly “just work”, I rarely have issues.

Another annoyance: after moving to California i’m fairly frustrated by the “No Alcohol in Self Checkout” rule. Buying a sandwich and a single bottle of wine? Good luck standing in line behind someone with a cart full of produce! Don’t really see what this law does except cause frustration. In states where it’s allowed you need an attendant to verify ID anyway, same as a regular line. Another stupid CA rule.

Most of the issues stems from corporations trying to save a buck. If you want to see how it should work go to a Market Basket. When you pull into the parking lot, the first thing you will notice is the place is packed. Then you think, wow the lines are going to be long and you notice people's carts are packed full. Now that your cart is full its your time for the check out line. In two minutes your in the parking going wow that was fast. Most Market Baskets have 18 cash registers each one is open with a bagger and two managers standing watching and waiting for any issues. Then your thinking there are at least 38 people at the registers

Here in the Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, headquarters must love it. In Groningen I sometimes see 8 students checking out at the same time while the store would only have place for 3 to 4 regular check outs. It seems to me like much higher parallelization.

At least in Finland, self-checkout works pretty well. Stores of all sizes basically have them, at least in Helsinki. If there's over four machines, there's almost always a person standing by just to help the customers with any issues. In the larger stores, I've often seen two people dedicated to that. If there's just two machines, it's always right next to a traditional checkout with a cashier.

Cashiers have never been the ones tasked with bagging our groceries over here, so I guess it's not that big of a step to just scan and throw it in the bag after that.

It works wonderfully at my US suburb. Have in mind that my county has a culture of law and order with a fully funded police force and educated population.

I cannot stand Walmart asking me if I want a printed receipt and an email receipt or just a printed receipt, as if only-digital isn’t a reasonable possibility, and that unlike other retailers (Home Depot comes to mind), they don’t link your email to your card, so if you click for email, you have to type it in every single time. Whoever managed this didn’t think it through.

> Much of the blame for that can be placed on the systems themselves. During the years I spent processing purchases at big-box and chain retailers in the 2000s, every point-of-sale system I used felt more intuitive and less error-prone than the ones I’m now regularly tasked with navigating as a paying member of the public.

Modern UX for the win!

The amount of touchpoints in the grocery supply chain is staggering: manufacturer -> distributor -> grocery store -> shelves -> cart -> checkout -> bags -> vehicle -> home -> pantry. Online shopping should remove ~4 of those steps, but the shopping experience is still too poor.

It's still shocking to me that people - alive and well today! - used to have:

* full service gas stations

* live in maids

* a mailman, milkman, iceman, and paperboy they knew the names (and birthdays!) of

Call it false nostalgia or what you will, but we lost the plot somehow on paying for dignity-as-a-service.

Sincerely, the "everything-is-worse" department

"Loyalty Card" is a euphemism for a self-imposed privacy violation device. They are ubiquitous for the same reason as Self-Checkout. People are eagerly willing to surrender there privacy in order to save a few cents or gain convenience. ..

This seems crazy to me. I have one of these issues maybe once every 50 times I use a self checkout. And I think could tolerate much more of that before I consider a cashier interaction a better experience.

Funny, I use whenever possible this "failed experiment" and it works fine for me

Don't blame other for machines that suck and/or your inability to follow instructions I guess

If the machines suck, there definitely are "others" who should be blamed for that - both those who created the machines, and those who decided to install them.

True, absolutely

It's not just throwing machines out there without proper UX studies and adapted to each case

The worst offenders in that regard are probably public transit ticketing machines. In addition to every system being different, in some locations, you now have lines of possibly jet-lagged tourists who may not be native speakers of the default language fumbling with machines and nbot quite sure what to do with whatever pieces of paper the machine spits out.

There are definitely machines that suck and treat any little sensitivity as a potential theft. Blame goes to the machine makers and the decisions makers of the store. Generally self checkout definitely has its 'lane' with the 'less then 10' items shopping trip.

Article is behind a paywall, so apologies for commenting on the title alone.

Even if self-checkout as it is implemented today doesn't work [1], that's not a reason to declare it a failed experiment. It's a reason to improve the technology. The only thing stopping us from having universal self-checkout is lack of quality in the hardware and software.

There is a separate conversation about what impact self-checkout has on jobs and food prices. It's an empirical question what the ratio of automated to human checkout should be in order to maximize throughput. Maximizing throughput means lower food prices for everyone. However, if it happens that maximizing throughput means letting go of tens of thousands of human workers, then that also has an impact on the economy. This is why we should have a robust social safety net in wealthy societies.

[1] I don't actually think this is the case. I use self-checkout multiple times per week at the grocery store, and I almost never have an issue. Maybe 1 in 10 visits I'll need assistance from staff, which takes less than a minute.

> This is why we should have a robust social safety net in wealthy societies.

People frequently say that, but how does that serve the interests of capitalism? If a safety net is too robust, they'll have to pay to support unproductive non-workers indefinitely. Seems like it would make a lot more sense (and be the moral thing to do w.r.t. objective, capitalist morality) to make the safety net inadequate and hard to access, to eventually cull the unproductive people that turn out to be useless and cannot find other work.

Capitalism isn't a moral agent with interests. It's an activity that humans participate in. Humans and non-human animals are what we should really care about. Capitalism produces benefits for everybody, and it also produces harmful side-effects and unintended consequences. Our moral obligation as a society is to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.

If cutting all social safety nets really maximizes overall well-being, then that's what we should do. But I don't think anyone seriously believes that. I think those who advocate for cutting off all aid to people with bad luck simply don't care about their suffering.

Self-Checkouts have been here in the UK for years and work pretty well now.

What an idiot. I love self-checkout.

By principle I tend to avoid them, as they are yet another reason to hire less people.

Only for the boomers who still struggle with touchscreens and digital instructions and want a poor person doing the checkout for them. I have literally never seen someone younger than 50 have an issue with self checkout.

At least about the ones I have seen in Germany - the devices are super slow. You need to tap 2-3 times. It's not nice to use.

What a tasteless comment. Just because someone works at a grocery store does not mean they’re a “poor person”.

Different machines have wildly different quality and ease of use. Some stores I never have a problem, while at other stores they almost never work right.

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