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Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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