Shoplifting and frustrated customers plague self-checkout | Hacker News Reader

Shoplifting and frustrated customers plague self-checkout

fastcompany.com

22 pointsedward70 comments

The problem, as always, is corporate squeezing every last penny. At my local regular grocery, the machines are set to "complain about a fly-landing on it" sensitivity and regularly berate me for not scanning everything even though I do. They also do not read barcodes well, taking several attempts. And on top of that, they are slow enough that they are often still processing the previous item when I'm ready to scan the next.

On the other hand, the local asian grocery has installed self-checkout machines that actually work. They scan well, do not complain about phantom items, and there were 2 employees ready to help if necessary (it wasn't).

Just actually invest enough to make stuff work! It's not a hard concept.

The scales at every grocery store in my city were disabled a few years back and never went back on. It’s such a nicer experience.

If shoplifting is a problem they should employ people to scan groceries.

The local grocery store is set to “Fort Knox” levels of annoying. I never use self checkout unless it’s one item and no cashier is available.

The local Walmart is set to somewhere around “maybe your bag weighs like an elephant” and it works quite well.

I thought scales were phased out everywhere years ago, I use self-checkouts a lot and I can’t remember the last time I had to deal with that.

Home Depot, believe it or not, has an actually pleasant self checkout experience. No scale whatsoever, access to a handheld barcode scanner, a fast enough machine that you're not sitting there waiting for it all the time, and no robot voice telling you what every item costs with no option to mute

I agree with you, although their decision to not support NFC payment methods is an odd one, IMO. Everything else about their checkout system I like, for the reasons you stated.

And partial credit to Costco for, despite having a scale based system, being lax enough that you can leave the heavier stuff in your cart, or move things on the scale without it bugging out.

I think HD not supporting NFC comes down to a timing thing: they were one of the first to adopt EMV payments in the US after their big hack in 2014, and they did it in a hurry: https://ir.homedepot.com/news-releases/2014/09-18-2014-01451....

I wouldn't be surprised if the HW in use just doesn't have a reader due to that, and they'll start supporting it in the next upgrade (speculation: maybe next year? It'd be 10 years).

I hadn't realized that was the impetus; what you said makes sense, thanks for making me aware of it.

No, they just don't want to pay the Apple tax.

So they refuse to support tap-to-pay cards, or anything else with NFC.

The hardware they had years and years ago already supported Apple Pay and NFC, because they were using the same hardware as all the other stores that had already adopted Apple Pay and NFC.

The hardware they have today also supports it, at least at other stores.

We have the same problem here in Texas with the store named H-E-B, after the founder Howard Edward Butt.

Merchants don't pay those fees, the banks do.

Sounds accurate.

https://thekrazycouponlady.com/tips/store-hacks/does-home-de...

> According to Home Depot, the reason they don’t accept any tap-to-pay options is that their registers aren’t equipped for contactless payments.

> When I spoke with a Home Depot customer service representative in February 2023, they told me that they hoped to add tap-to-pay as an option in the near future. How soon “near” happens, we’re not sure.

Home Depot is great, until something goes wrong. You can't fix it, you have to wait for someone to come by and fix it. Scan the wrong barcode (on a box with 10 different barcodes) you can't simply delete it and try again. Scan to many items, same problem. I think it is better than my local grocer, but I wish I didn't have to get help so often... Or I would rather just have a cashier rather than me work for free

The self-checkouts at ALDI in the UK are very efficient. This is partly due to the barcodes, which occupy about a third of the packaging. Additionally, rather than requiring a staff member to scan their ID barcode for assistance, a simple metallic tag is used. This tag speeds up the process, especially for approving alcohol purchases or correcting weights.

The Tesco self-scan system is also cool. I can easily scan items and place them directly into my bags, bypassing the need for a trolley or basket. Although I'm occasionally checked to make sure I'm not shop lifting, which can be inconvenient during larger shopping trips, it happens infrequently enough not to be bothersome.

I always opt for self-checkout or self-shopping. While it may save costs for the retailers, it also saves me time.

I love the self-checkouts some grocery stores in the Netherlands have.

When you arrive you can either grab a hand scanner or open the app. Scan items as you put it in the cart, get to the self checkout and either scan the QR code on your phone or place the hand scanner in the socket, pay and you’re done.

Check is done by having a little gate that opens by scanning your receipt, with an employee on the other side that randomly checks your receipt against what you have in your cart.

No scale BS, no “place the item in the bagging area” nagging, no lockup for the most mundane reasons, just smooth sailing.

Yup, this is the way. Coop in Switzerland has had it since 2010.

I nearly always prefer self checkout, but let's get real, the problem is not "corporate squeezing every last penny". As the article points out, it's extremely difficult to make up the personnel savings due to shoplifting losses. For example, at grocery store, my guess is that stores take tons of losses from people swiping organic foods as conventional. And given how brazen shoplifting has gotten in tons of places over the past 3 years even when there are clerks around, it makes it really hard for the math for self-checkout to work.

Self-checkouts are a godsend to shoplifters. If a company is installing self checkout counters, I don't think I’d believe their complaints about shrink.

I’ve probably mis-categorized produce when using self-checkout. Often I can’t remember what type of thing I picked up. And I’m terrible at spelling, so I often have trouble looking up vegetables using the “search by name” feature. This UX problem could be solved if they just put RFID tags in all produce so you got 100% scans, like at the Uniqlo self checkouts.

Most produce in big name stores has a four digit PLU code that can be entered rather than guessing the name.

> given how brazen shoplifting has gotten in tons of places over the past 3 years

Most recent view is that the claims of brazen shoplifting were not fundamentally true.

"The US shoplifting scourge is a lot of hype with little evidence" - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/07/business/shoplifting-surg... ("There are pockets are of real increases in certain cities, but the national trend is pretty flat") HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38578764

"Is Shoplifting Really Surging?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data... ("The various sources of crime data — from government agencies and private groups — tell a consistent story. Retail theft has not spiked nationwide in the past several years. If anything, it appears less common in most of the country than it was before the pandemic.") HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38535662

"How the retail lobby sold a $45-billion whopper about organized shoplifting" https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-ret... -- HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695985 .

The National Retail Federation, which was pushing this panic, has had to withdraw its claim.

How do you swipe organize as conventional? Are you staying the barcode from conventional food? Or did it let you select. My grocer has everything barcoded. There are a few items I have to tell it what it is, but it is very rare. Of course this would all be preventable if you hired a cashier instead of forcing your customers to work for free

Most produce in the US is not already packaged. It is weighed at checkout where you enter the type of produce, or enter a 4 or 5 digit code to identify the type of produce.

To be fair, sometimes simply some of us live in low-trust areas and/or micro-cultures and the machines have to be set to correspondingly annoying compensatory configurations. While I suspect Japan doesn’t have widespread scan-as-you-shop or Amazon Go/Fresh for cultural acceptance reasons, I’ve noticed the areas I’ve seen these in my travels have generally been what I would characterize as high trust. High agency, high trust cultures are quite a breath of fresh air to immerse oneself within, though I’m curious to see the flip side of that “grass is greener” sentiment.

> the machines are set to "complain about a fly-landing on it" sensitivity and regularly berate me for not scanning everything even though I do

This is partially because they've implemented that flow in the worst way possible. Do not stop me from scanning every time the weights don't match; let me keep scanning, and pop up a "weights didn't match at some point" error right before payment.

Now they only need to check, at most, once per customer. It's nice for customers, but pivotally for the stores, it's nice for the employees.

Where I am, those errors pop so often that the employee's job is basically just hitting OK on all those false positivies. They don't check anything in my bags, and I frankly doubt they have the time to do so. Scanning 10 items usually results in at least 2 weight mismatch errors. With something like 8 self-checkout kiosks, there is a large and constant flow of false positives on weight mismatches.

Just pop it up at the end, and I would bet that they'd save enough time to have cashiers actually checking what people scanned instead of being a human bug-fix for corporate's stupid policies.

Target has the best self checkouts I've ever used. 95% of the time I have no issues at all. Occasionally I might have to use the hand scanner on something if the barcode is faded, very rarely I might have to type in a code manually.

When talking about shoplifting, I think it's worth noting that property crime rates in the US are noticeably lower than they were in even the 2000s, even accounting for an uptick during the pandemic. If there's any real (rather than corporate-PR-manufactured) uptick in shoplifting specifically, I would personally assume it's got more to do with the "remove every possible person from the floor so one person at a time is responsible for an entire store" business strategy than anything else.

You cannot trust those numbers very much beyond murder, grand theft auto and other scenarios where a disinterested third party is involved.

My experience is that self-checkout works extremely well until it... Doesn't. And then you need a human anyway. The "doesn't" only happens to me rarely.

But when something goes wrong it becomes immediately clear that---whether at a grocery store, convenience store, or anywhere else---almost no business deploying self-checkout has a real plan for handling the edge and corner cases where it fails, freezes up, or spits out an error.

Most stores that want self checkout to replace five to ten employees with just one to supervise but do not then make sure that the one employee can actually handle the self-checkout's failures and errors.

I had a relative who had a summer job at Ikea monitoring self-checkout:

1) the system and software were unfriendly to both users and staff, especially in error states, as you suggest 2) many people needed rudimentary help 3) no time to look for theft due to 1) and 2) 4) surprising number of couples arguing with each other

Everyone quoted in this article is roughly 60 years old - would have loved to know if other generations are similarly split about this experience.

That said, as a former cashier who mostly uses self-checkout in her 30s: babysitting self-checkout sounds way less fun than chatting with strangers while I checked them out was.

The best part of self checkout is the 0% chance of getting behind someone who is writing a check, using multiple gift cards or counting out all the pennies.

I dunno why some grocery stores don’t do this but most in my city have a single line that feeds all the checkouts.

I remember Frys Electronics (RIP) used to do that.

Kohl’s, Barnes & Noble, Ross have single queues

Fry’s knew that single queue multiple server had lower waiting time variance before everybody else in retail did. No surprise that John Fry funded the American Institute of Mathematics!

Microcenter still does.

We had that at one store and then they got rid of it. I think the long looking queue put people off but it moved so quickly. Was much more efficient.

The worst part is that everyone is infuriatingly slow at self-checkout.

No slower than standard checkout. Most often, self-checkout is much faster.

True story: I once shoplifted a gallon of milk from Lidl.

1. I missed it in the cart bottom at the checkout.

2. Put my shopping in the car.

3. Returned the cart.

4. Started to drive off, and someone else helpfully said: "You forgot your milk", and I took it.

5. Halfway home, I realized my mistake.

6. Next time there, I picked up the same product and scanned it twice to make good the boo-boo.

7. This post has given me a chance for public confession, and I am grateful.

I'm curious why conveyor belt type systems (like the ones at airports) with vision based checkout aren't a thing. Multiple camera angles could prevent customers from trying to sneak stuff through. For additional security some sort of turnstile could be added to prevent the customer from access the groceries until payment has been verified.

Computer Vision Approach to Cashierless Checkouts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWFmKI5RYY

Twinflow Live in Store https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3eBbZ_Zt1c

The floor area would be larger than a self checkout station but the throughput would likely be much higher and be a better customer experience. Self checkout stations seem much more amendable to casual shoplifting since its hard to see what the customer is doing.

I like the revised self service we have at some Super Markets in Australis where you have more space to load and unload and they don't use the annoying scales to weight everything that goes into the bags!

Having plenty of self service checkouts means I neve rhave to queue!

Also very modern is the way Uniqlo do it!

They have what I'm guessing are NFC readers in these large white tubs that you put your items into at the checkout.

Works well and is very efficient.

> Also very modern is the way Uniqlo do it!

Uniqlo’s implementation is really neat until you try to buy a shirt that’s missing a tag in a pile of other shirts and it’s an annoying process to get it all resolved.

I bet!

I have only shopped there once! :-)

I never use self checkout if I can avoid it, the experience is always terrible. Instead I wait and just catch up on a couple pages of my book on my phone. Waiting in line is fine when you have something to do.

Self checkout could be great, but corporations and excel sheets micro optimisation ruin everything.

I use grocery store apps where I can scan the items with my phone as I put them in my bag. Checkout is then only swipe to pay. There are occasional random inspections, otherwise I completely skip the checkout lines.

The supermarket mugshot I find most objectionable. I have no issue with general security cameras in store, but when placed 40cm from my face in the checkout screen, it's creepy.

No indication of who is watching, recording status or face-scanning. In Australia it's common for no traditional checkouts to be available, meaning self-checkout is the only option and buying groceries requires submitting to the supermarket mugshot.

My local Home Depot has 3 humans overseeing 6 self-checkout kiosks… I’m guessing they’re there to protect against shoplifting (which certainly leads to accusations of profiling) and assist when the machine inevitable fails at something.

Seems logical, especially for a hardware store that sells so many parts requiring product# lookups, to just have those attendants be cashiers.

I feel like this was true 10 years ago, but not now. But maybe it's just that Walmart has figured it out since I've been primarily buying groceries from Walmart for the past 10 years. It's so good that I actively avoid aisles with an employee. I rarely ever have a problem.

I hate these Luddite hit job articles on new technology.

We've had self-checkouts for over a decade in Europe, stop complaining it's tedious.

Let's do away with self-checkout and standard checkout. The model Amazon promotes with full delivery is where we ought to go as it'll save so much land and space in the long-term.

In the near-term, the model adopted by Walmart, Target, and the many grocery stores with order pick-up makes a lot of sense. I rarely step into a store these days. Often I hear skepticism regarding quality of produce, but this is drastically overblown in my experience.

This would eliminate a number of problems.

The most expensive and lowest quality producing way. If you can make it to the store spending a few minutes visually comparing products can really inform decisions.

What comparison can one realistically do in a grocery store between most products?

The packaging disguises a lot of characteristics of the products being sold unless you're strictly looking at produce or raw meats.

If the stores you're buying from have most of their produce in packaging then you're buying at best average quality produce in the first place.

Reread my comment as this was already addressed.

I explicitly stated products other than produce and meats are in the category of foods that typically are difficult to gauge quality of.

To specifically list out the products I'm talking about, consider: milk, oatmeal, flour, snack foods, ice cream, beverages, cheese, broth/stock, prepared soups, condiments such as ketchup, cooking oils, packages of tea bags, breads, jams, and so forth.

Vegetables and meats are only slightly easier to gauge quality of because they are typically not packaged, however, anyone who cooks at home regularly can tell you that you still run the risk of getting bad produce/meats even with a close-up visual inspection.

Hardly. People think they can spot quality and that's why American tomatoes are now giant solid flavourless lumps, meat and fish are full of dyes, ...

I have plenty of time to compare products while I sit at home on my phone idly building up carts. Contrast that with standing in a busy aisle as others maneuver around me.

If I want to look up more information on an item, I can do so at my leisure on my own WiFi network.

Rather than creating a list that I need to then bring to the store, I can idly add items over multiple days.

I can price match my items against multiple stores, moving the items to which ever store has the best deal.

Then I just checkout and pick it up or select a one hour window for delivery.

No more impulse buys. No issues searching the store because they moved things around for the third time in the year.

I rarely shop in store anymore and I don't miss it at all.

The online options are incredible convenient and I'm perplex that more people on a tech forum don't do the same.

No problems would be eliminated. Ditch Amazon whenever possible to reduce problems.

Local, independent stores that are physically visited are the better option.

Our local Rite Aid (struggling with bankruptcy) has almost completely removed clerks. I was making an FSA card + personal card purchase (so a complex 2 step transaction) on their self-help kiosk and the credit card reader hung. I was lucky to catch the person who was as stumped as I was to what to do. After several minutes she was able to flip the machine into "employee" mode which unfroze the screen and allowed me to proceed. I was very vocal in my appreciation to her, they really don't get great pay to deal with this kind of nonsense.

Yet in Asia self checkouts work well and rarely ever need intervention.

if you're multitasking a podcast or something, being able to do self checkout without taking off your headphones is worth a lot

I mean, I use self-checkout and generally like it because the queue moves much faster, but "worth a lot" is too much IMO. At regular checkout, I'll pause my podcast and pull out one of both earphones when the person in front of me is paying, and then I plop it back in once I'm done. That's like, what? 60 or 90 seconds or so. Not a huge deal honestly.

The UK has used self checkouts for 15 years or so now. They work fine, are quick and I’ve never seen an “obscure error message”. You need to wait for an attendant if you’re buying alcohol, but otherwise it’s seamless.

Sounds like crap software and a customer base not used to things the first world take for granted rather than an issue with the idea itself.

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