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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

This is a fairly obscure supermarket chain and in no way indicative of a trend moving away from self checkouts in the UK. Self checkouts are as popular as ever and some are more crap than others. This is usually down to a benign reason like price lookup latency or barcode scanning accuracy. It could also be as pedestrian as Windows running out of memory and not being rebooted regularly. Yes, supermarket checkouts use Windows.

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Most of them use Linux (OpenSuse) simply due to the per seat costs of Windows.

I was working in a UK supermarket when we had self-service checkouts installed in 2005 or 2006. The NCR kiosks were running a version of Windows XP. The self-service UI was a facade where behind the scenes it was just running the traditional checkout program, which on cashier checkouts ran on Windows NT. I guess the self-service UI emulated a keyboard and translated the actions that way. At the time we definitely did have to reboot devices regularly.

We switched to the same POS system they used in Waitrose/Tesco's - it is Java based and ran on OpenSuse for clients and think Redhat on the servers due to IBM - being the I.T service provider.

Company is called Flooid/Vision Bean Store.

> in no way indicative of a trend moving away from self checkouts in the UK. Self checkouts are as popular as ever

Indeed. Aldi just recently rolled out self checkout for example

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