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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

How would a grocery store look that's designed around that? Sell only essential goods where you can control the supply chain, and sell it only in big portions so that the cost of the RFID tag doesn't matter.

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Shops like Aldi are good place to look. They still use barcodes, but they’ve got their manufacturers to print the barcodes multiple times on packaging, and print them huge[1]. This is done to speed up scanning at their checkouts, so cashiers don’t need to look for the barcode, they just grab the item in any orientation and yank it across the scanner. That in turn means they get higher throughput per cashier, which means fewer cashiers and tills.

[1] https://i1.wp.com/www.savingthecrumbs.com/wp-content/uploads...

They also tell the cashiers that their family will be killed if they don't process each item at at least Mach 1. (Or that's what it feels like at the checkout anyway...)

Cashiers are measured on their scan speed, and get bonus based on performance. So yeah, they’re highly incentivised to scan as fast as they physically can.

It goes too far though. They're throttled by how fast the customer can bag things, so going way faster and overloading the packing area is counterproductive. (+ the experience makes me that much less likely to choose that shop again in the future)

Aldi is German, and “grocery packing” is the unsung national sport, everybody is at it, all the time.

You have not know humiliation if you have not experienced a line of slightly elderly shoppers mildly frowning and tutting as you hurl your items into a bag, whilst the cashier looks at you with overt disapproval. The only accepted bagging speed is “Superhuman” and the best day of my life was when the cashier at my regular Edeka nodded approvingly at the fact that I was practically ripping the groceries out of their hand as soon as the cash register beeped.

Supermarket staff here in Italy, where I now reside, think I am insane, and I work hard to contain my impatience with those lesser-trained people in front of me at the cash register.

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