The failure of self-checkout technology
bbc.com
bbc.com
The problem is that companies don't want that, because they're worried they'd get robbed blind if they did. In a sense it reminds me of the problems with our travel systems; if there were no gates, no security checks, etc, then they'd probably be a joy to use. But people suck so they're not.
1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-stij...
"In order to make more money we made customers self-report their purchases during a cost-of-living crisis while we were booking record high profits and now these customers are _under reporting_ their purchases, how dare they!!"
They should've seen this coming from miles away.
I'd say stealing is always a net negative effect for the whole.
But if you're saying that the entire context explains a lot of the behaviour, and could possibly be predicted, then yes I agree.
According to the opening paragraph of that article that's doesn't seem to be the case. €80 million in profit (with €100 million theft) is not all that much.
"Homogeneous" in what way?
Because in my experience the sort of "homogeneity" that leads to high trust is that of wealth/income, and it requires a generous social net.
And to be completely transparent about where I'm coming from: I'm the father of two mixed-race children and all this talk of "homogeneous societies" reeks to me of plain old racism that will hurt my kids. And I grew up in one of those European "homogeneous" countries that right-leaning racists love to talk about, too.
Also, as Denmark recently discovered, homogeneity is not simply dependent on a social safety net but exists within a symbiotic relationship with the latter.
It's a big part of why we've historically had such a hard time implementing any sort of reasonable social benefits, and why the much lauded Nordic countries started cutting down on theirs the second they got a significant (racially different) refugee population.
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933489
I used to live in Indonesia and things are much more "high trust" in many aspects. On the other hand Indonesia also has a lot of problems with corruption and that sort of thing. "High trust/low trust" is too simplistic.
I don't have 200 other countries to compare it to, but by and large, Western countries are much less high-trust in many areas than people assume. This often becomes painfully obvious once you stray outside of the "standard happy path".
Meanwhile Netherlands elected an anti-immigration right-wing government in their last elections: https://time.com/6339173/dutch-election-results-geert-wilder...
That said I barely use them mostly due to ideological reasons. I don't like to live in a society that completely does away with human contact and until society is really built around a UBI, I think cutting away unskilled jobs is not necessarily positive for society.
Another related problem is that you physically can't leave the store unless you buy something and get a receipt to scan. You have to tailgate someone with a receipt, or hop the turnstyle, etc. Hope you're not in a wheelchair and change your mind / the store's out of what you were looking for!
Also those stores, at least where I live, have no physical barrier to exit.
I posted about this on Linkedin too and got a few comments about the complexity in the UK, USA, France and elsewhere. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samcritchley_it-hasnt-deliver...
Also, the 'bagging area' is on different sides in different shops. Also annoying.
Unless this is as designed too, for whatever reason, but this is what stops me from using them as I get frustrated.
The other thing that stops me from using them specifically in Lidl is that you cannot put a hazelnut croissant and an almond croissant in the same paper bag unless you take one out before you put it to weigh.
By comparison, the other day I was at Tesco and they had introduced these new large self-checkouts for trolleys (aka carts in US), but about halfway through my trolley, I started getting an error for every item I scanned. Turns out, the max weight for the scale was 20kg.
Despite many claims that people don't like them it is surprising how they are almost always in full use.
My local Walmart allows this. Not sure what the impact on their 'shrink' is, but they must've decided it was worth it to keep lines moving. It's a very busy store.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they could change it based on time of day. And changing it based on rewards card or loyalty would also seem to be possible.
I think coop/365discount has that. You scan the items with a mobile phone app while taking them of the shelf. You just show the digital receipt to the cashier while jumping the queue.
How would it be more efficient than a traditional checkout? There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day, and at least the supermarkets I've visited don't have enough self checkout machines to balance that out.
Maybe it's just me but I genuinely don't get the point of self checkout. Are some shops so slow at reacting to long queues that it makes self checkout actually faster?
Supermarkets are now grudgingly admitting that self checkout systems cause a significant increase in loss due to theft, but that it is still cheaper than hiring actual staff for the registers.
In the Netherlands the current state of affairs in supermarkets with self checkout registers is that theft is on the up. People justify 'forgetting to scan an item' by the (perceived or actual) greed shown by supermarkets in terms of shrinkflation and the rising cost-of-living. Supermarkets did really well during the Covid-years, but customers didn't benefit from that in the slightest.
An additional problem is that the staff attending the self checkout registers are often young (because it is a position which would waste the skills of the more experienced employees), and they get bullied and berated by customers pissed off for getting selected for random (either actual or directed by the staff watching the cameras) checks.
I think this is how all Alberstons-owned stores work, because I’ve seen it an Randall’s and other places, but until now could avoid shopping there. I always wondered why Walmart said “everyday low prices”, because isn’t that normal? Well, apparently not.
JC Penny famously tried to get out of that and it almost killed them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
Walmart (and Costco, and Trader Joe's, and a few others) are so large that instead of making you dance around with coupons and such, they just tell the company to give them a discount and pass it on to the customer. An item at another store that needs a store app, coupon, etc, will just be dropped the same price at Walmart I've noticed.
(I hate the Kohl's style, as even when I stack coupons and get to 75% off on clearance, I still feel I missed something and got cheated. But apparently lots of shoppers really love that kind of "bargain hunt".)
Unfortunately I don't know any numbers re theft, but it's still running 5 years later. Of course being in a suburban area helps.
What the vendors didn't say was that shrinkage would increase.
So my experience is the polar opposite of yours, self-checkout is just superior.
Most of the time I use self checkout at the grocery store but when I don't the human takes longer than me, sometimes wants to have an annoying conversation, doesn't group things in bags, and uses way too many bags. Quicker and easier to just do it myself.
Absolutely true, and not only that - the cashier has a conveyor belt while the self-checkout counter has a slightly inconvenient and much slower system.
But that's totally offset by the fact that there's typically only one or two cashiers while there may be ten or twenty self-service counters. I don't have to stand in line.
In my other living place, Japan, the MaxValu supermarket has, I think, around ten cashiers - not only that, those cashiers are super fast and use double-buffering for payment: You can pay while they're already busy with the next customer. But still - they have also introduced self-service. They still have nearly the same number of inhumanely fast human cashiers but they now also have lots of self-service desks (and a person there to assist anyone needing it).
They still to have someone around, though, to satisfy the machine when it thinks that my newspaper is 25g too light, or I'm not old enough to buy alcohol-free beer (still haven't worked out the rationale for that one)
So it'd have to be twice as fast to break even in terms of "time spent".
Is this Walmart being cheap? Kinda, but I think the recent surge in living costs has made being a Walmart cashier an unattractive job. I think they have trouble keeping and retaining people who want to do the job and do it well. $15/hr. is nothing now, and the young people who are cashiers know that.
> $15/hr. is nothing now
I think you answered your own question. They are failing to hire cashiers because they aren't willing to pay enough. So yes, they are being cheap.
There is a huge potential market for cashiers. There is no shortage. There is only a shortage for the price that Walmart has decided is worth paying.
If I'm only buying a few items, I find it faster to use the self checkout.
Lots of people have at some point worked as cashiers, it isn’t some completely rare skill. Average person, sure they’ll be worse, but go up like one standard deviation in scanning skill and you can probably win. The cashier has also been there all day and can’t leave, so they aren’t in as much of a rush.
Some chains track the speed. Afaik Aldi sets 1 scanned item per second as the goal on average, and that's so fast some people literally complain that they can't keep up with putting the scanned items into their cart/bag.
No, there is no way a random person can match that if they don't have a lot of practice.
The majority of the employees were in the latter group and we didn’t have any special skill. I mean, lots of people work in retail when they are teenagers, so on average the people who have done that in the past are more experienced that those who are currently doing it, right? Unless there’s a skew that is causing people to stick around longer in retail jobs as time goes by.
Where I live, the speed of a cashier is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is waiting in the line after 3-4 people, especially if one of them has some issue "eh, I didn't want Foo, I wanted bar, let me run for it real quick".
Self-checkout parallizes the process, and if a single "Exception" is thrown, the other threads still run just fine.
The local grocery store screams for an attendant if a fruit fly farts on the scale.
One has a self checkout that lets you bag your items however you want, has a wireless scanner for scanning at your convenience, and just has one polite attendant monitoring to help with issues or enter birthdate for alcohol.
The other has one that screams at you about unidentified items in the bagging area if you so much as look in its direction, and cameras jammed in your face with a screen wrapped in white LEDs to make it obvious you're being recorded.
Guess where I prefer to shop :-)
No one checks the products. Occasional random checks happen but the checking frequency probably depends if past checks have found issues, so I get a bag check once a year max.
I use the mobile phone checkout for one of the stores I go to. Every time when leaving, they manually inspect every single item in my cart.
The biggest convenience for me is that I only have to handle the items twice: when I pick them from the shelves, and when I unpack the bags at home. Going to any other store that doesn't have this system now feels like there is a lot of redundant and unergonomic operations.
It even occurs with human checkers but it’s quite rare (barcodes are fixed now, or the stickers destroy themselves if you try to remove them like at Goodwill).
The attack apparently would have you swap a barcode but still on camera scan it which I guess theoretically makes it harder to prosecute but I kinda doubt it.
It also helps catch misscans which is probably much much more common (someone scans an item, they thought it scanned, they put it in bagging area).
If you don't scan it and you put/keep it in your backpack, that's not different from doing the same but going through the cashier checkout right? They already had that problem, so if they keep that as it was but reduce the amount of personnel, that's a net positive?
The supermarkets in Sweden work like this, the only thing some of they do is random checks. In some chains you do need to sign up with your ID ahead of time though so they keep track if you get caught in a random check.
You then just go to the self-checkout and pay for what you scanned.
They do spot checks at the checkout, especially for "new" customers. It's tied to your identity (need to scan a store card to unlock the scanner).
I think it's a timesaver... even though it takes a bit of time to scan each item with the portable scanner, you get to skip the "unload from trolley -> scan -> load into bags" at the checkout.
I think it is not as popular in some areas of the US because some parts of the country have very low trust.
People are saying the same can be done with an app, but I don't want to install another app.
Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self checkouts.
For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start scanning items and placing them inside.
That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!
I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what, every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10 "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button after the scan.
While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.
I just scan everything and bag the stuff after payment
When I've scanned the first item, I put it in the bag that's outside the scale and put the bag with the item on the scale.
I have given up on using my big Patagonia bag at lidl, because it never works. Last time it required the cashier to override the warnings once after each item was placed in the bag.
this is insane to me and if a manager was involved they should be fired. I dont think its reasonable to review video of a customer without probable cause they were stealing. In this case, the machines are so buggy (as you illustrated with your case) that a machine complaining is NOT probable cause. How to alienate your customers 101...
So it works in Norway or Japan, but put this in Indonesia or Honduras or even in small city USA and it’ll run into problems. It can work in areas of larger cities where most of the clientele are high income, but it’s bound to fail in most other areas.
What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required—not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process?
Edit: at least with alcohol I know it’s coming. But it feels like every time I try to use self-checkout I’m foiled by surprise rules about particular items.
In my nearby Walmart they have a dozen or more self-checkout stations which only require a few staff in total. Most people don't need assistance.
Like wtf. At the very least let me continue scanning the rest of my groceries so I can be done once this person helps me instead of still just 2 scans in..
For the most part, in practice there's little or no advantage for me, the consumer with a cart full of groceries.
One exception was 2003-era Martins in Virginia - Walk in, grab a cart that had bags attached to the front, grab a portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and bag as you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register, show the attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done. No unloading and reloading the cart, no fiddling with plu lookups, fumbling with bags, etc. It was actually glorious, but relies on trusting your customers. Corporate stores seem to trust me even less than I trust them.
I'm somewhat ok with these things as a secondary 10-items-or-less option. But for the love of god staff enough cashiers to handle the grocery-shopping-Sunday crowds.
They were doing this in a few Michigan Krogers within the last few years. I think they ended the program though.
Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK supermarket there are cameras on each checkout station, which I guess go to some bored reviewer; so you could just alert the guy "hey, customer X gave us a valid license" and assume that he'll react if he can't see a realistic amount of wrinkles.
On PI, I agree that there is a qualitative difference between a cashier and a machine if you assume, as most people do, that the cashier will not remember private details. This can be fixed with industry-wide agreements to not store such data, in the same way as merchants don't store your full credit card details. You could even allow people to bypass the check if a valid identity is registered against their store-issued fidelity card.
Honestly, the only hard problem is localization. At the moment you can sell more or less the same automated till to UK supermarkets, US supermarkets, or EU supermarkets; but document-checking code will have to be heavily localized. Still, EU driving licenses are already similar on the entire continent, and that's quite a critical mass one could hit. I would be surprised if manufacturers weren't already developing this feature.
Although I'm way beyond the point of caring about demographic profiling, I still don't want my home address to be available to everybody dealing with a simple purchase (although this perspective is probably greatly atypical on account of being a survivor of CSA).
For some reason though, some idiot designer who never actually thought about how these would be used in reality, decided to make it so that the other half of the time it immediately stops all scanning until someone comes to fix it.
In the first case, basically I waste no time. In the second, I lose however long it takes for the cashier to come.
It is always optimal to scan these first. You have two cases:
Blocking: scan 1 + wait for attendant + scan rest
Non-blocking: scan 1 + max(wait for attendant, scan rest)
However if you scan these items last the wait is always the same:
scan rest + scan 1 + wait for attendant
This is never shorter than either of the previous two. It is equivalent to the blocking case and almost always longer than the non-blocking case.
If you've brought your own bag and it weighs more than the mass of a few protons, the system assumes you're trying to steal something, and a human has to intervene before you can even get started.
And then they have to come back almost immediately to deal with age-restricted items or other glitches.
And security: You only need a single person standing there to scary away 95% of shoplifters.
I watched a YouTube video from the channel "Not Just Bikes" about grocery shopping in Amsterdam, Netherlands showed a supermarket where you carry the "pricing gun/lazer" with you and "beep" each item as it enters your basket. I have no idea how they reduce shoplifting. Can anyone comment?
These hand held scanners have been a thing for over 10 years, way before the current iteration of self checkout stations. They continue to exist side by side with self checkout stations at supermarkets mainly.
It also should be noted that I have not seen a single self checkout station in the Netherlands that puts restrictions on how you scan your items. It doesn't care about weight and in what order you scan and put items into your bag or if you just keep holding the items, and I never have any issues with this system breaking or complaining about anything.
Further, my contact in the Target data center says the scales are disable (too many problems) and the camera showing you on the little screen over the kiosk, doesn't go anywhere but that screen.
So it's working for them, so far. You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
Most data on the issue of shoplifting in the industry show that the people who shoplift are not ones doing it out of necessity (e.g. they're poor and can't afford those items), most shoplifting is done out of intention and not necessity. This includes categories like underaged people stealing items that are age-restricted, or people stealing items that cause shame to purchase (like condoms, pregnancy tests, et al), as well as the now commonplace problem of shoplifting gangs in the US who steal en masse to list items via Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online markets. People who are productive adults in society very very rarely shoplift, and in the cases that they do it because of mental issues, like kleptomania.
The loss prevention person at the door is more likely to find items you left behind than to stop a shoplifter, but insurance demands it.
And the false positives on those little loss control tags is so high that most of the time workers aren't even going to look your direction if something sets it off. Once again, this is all crap required by insurance.
Shoplifters don't care about any of this. They just grab what they want and leave.
In fact, we use RFID tracking to know when goods are stolen, not to save money, not to catch shoplifters, but to improve inventory management and ensure that we get a replacement item on the shelf to avoid losing sales.
A lot of them literally do work this way and just accept the risk of shrink,.
The screen threw up a message asking me to check on what I had put in the bagging area. Below it was a video of me shot from the ceiling, with bounding boxes drawn around the two boxes of right (basically identifying that the thing I had scanned was not what I had put in the bagging area).
I was actually pretty impressed... at my work we do some computer vision work, and we're dealing with fairly high-resolution, static images. This managed to draw perfect bounding boxes on a video, and the whole thing processed in less than a couple of seconds.
Seems like if you can do that, there ought to be other ways you can speed things up. Currently for produce with no bar code, I have to type in the name of the produce and then weigh it. They ought to be able to identify it as a zucchini via computer vision and skip the first step, at least.
Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.
I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.
But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver.
I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big shopping day.
The cost for an RFID tag is minimal if you can guarantee the proper orientation. If you can't, they get very expensive (relatively speaking).
something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore?
or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store...
maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
And if you’ve been in any UK supermarket near closing time on a busy weekend day, you’ll see that they routinely sell out of many/most items before restocking overnight. Stuff that hits its best-before date gets marked down to sell. Generally speaking, there isn’t a huge amount being wasted.
Check out getfairaboutfarming.com
Besides, if a purchase agreement falls though with produce already grown, normally what happens is the produce is sold on the wholesale market instead. In that case, growers might receive a lower price, perhaps resulting in a loss, but that's not as bad as leaving it "to rot" and getting nothing at all.
Produce would typically only be dumped in the case of a huge market glut (when prices are so low that it is not even worth harvesting/transporting them), or if there are labour shortages making it difficult or uneconomical to harvest.
We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead, or worst case, the overpriced Publix (if Aldi doesn't have it).
Funnily enough, in the UK, Aldi produce is generally very fresh and still cheap. There's plenty of turnover, precisely because people shop at Aldi so much.
Bananas for example sell for around $0.58/lb around here. Which seems unprofitable but you wouldn’t believe the size of the banana rooms that these grocers have at their warehouses. It is easily the largest space dedicated to a single sku in the warehouse.
I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with disposable ones
No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory, not only do they want to verify the existence of the books, but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading" accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.
RFID might speed up checkout at a library by a small fraction, but you still have the issue that most patrons check out a book or two, you still have to check that the DVD is in the case either way, and the self-checkouts aren't backing up anyway.
(Similarly most libraries have given up on fines, at least around here - the overhead of dealing with them and "scaring" patrons away was much worse than the people actively "stealing" books.)
Not to even get to barcodes (like CVS files) are quite interoperable, and you can relatively easily change one barcode system to another, just my importing the data. RFID readers often need specific RFID tags and it locks you to a vendor (who often promptly goes out of business). Over time things like that get noticed.
Yeah, I’ve seen this in a few clothing stores (Uniqlo, H&M, Zara). UHF RFIDs embedded in the tags.
It’s more for the store’s benefit than anything (makes stock takes very easy, for example!), but the neat self checkout is a nice side-benefit.
In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout.
The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
- bad touch screens that lag.
- even more lag when you're trying to pay.
- frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging area, or some other reason
- unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap and pay.
I still use them most of the time because there is almost never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.
How about that bar code label on the spinach/parsley/cilantro? It's paper and it gets watered regularly so it is not uncommon for it to be illegible, even to the expert parser, the human.
Those stickers do fall off.
Is every brussel sprout going to have a sticker? Jalapenos? Okra? Mushrooms? Cherry tomatoes? Now according to the industrial/minimize human costs imperative you buy a prepacked batch, and in that batch are stinkers hidden below the visible top layer. Onions have dry skins that occasionally shed... whoops there goes your sticker.
Let's talk about lentils. Obvs they're going to be batched "for you" now, and how big a batch do you need? How about 3 lbs, if we're following along with the Costco Walmart paradigm. I mean you're all happy with your 3 gals. of Walmart dill pickles for $3, yes? No more does the pantry maintain a steady less than a 1 lb inventory each of a dozen different legumes for you... well who does their own cooking these days, that's what door dash is for!
And now for that "oh just look it up on helpful screen!" Except for at least a half dozen times the screen, either via the picture section or the "type the name" option, does not have the item in its inventory. For instance Pasilla/Poblano and Anaheim/Cubano chiles (names not precise anywhere) are often not present in the system. In our stores there is a small section containing up to half a dozen specialty types of tomatoes. You know, the ones that potentially have flavor. Since these inventories change more rapidly than the straight industrial space ship foods, I know those are at risk of not being in the system. Contrast to at the checkout line the checker either knows the name or takes my word for it, and occasionally just asks me the price and we're good to go. At the automated checkout, I just pick something close as presented (but cheaper, oh yes) and I move on to the next indicated item. Maybe I enjoy the frisson of being an industrially nudged criminal... it's certainly novel.
All this said, for some reason where I live, in suburban Atlanta, the automated checkouts are quite a bit more popular than the human checkers, so there's typically a 10 deep line for the automation, and maybe 2 deep occasionally but usually less for the humans. That's a no brainer.
In other countries eg brussel sprouts, mushrooms, tomatoes, etc are weighed by the consumer at the vegetable section.
- Next to the specialty tomatoes there is a label that says the name, price and _number_ for the specialty tomatoes
- Pick an individual tomato or put multiple in a small plastic/paper bag from next to the tomatos
- Put the tomatoes on a scale right next to them
- Enter the _number_ from the label, no need to search for or type anything complex
- Get a sticker with the price + barcode
- Put the sticker where ever is reasonable (on the tomato or on the bag or where ever, no one cares where you put it)
- In self checkout scan the sticker
Or even better, use a system where you are carrying a scanner when pickig stuff from shelves and at self checkout you only have to pay, since you have already scanned everything.
Ah the name… but is it a golden extra apple or a yellow apple? Or perhaps a extra fresh guaranteed apple?
Additionally, my personal experience with things like this is that human cashiers aren't any better than me at looking up produce in the absence of a PLU code. In fact, I'm generally better because I know what I picked up (or intended to pick up), so I just look for the right name.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-...
but yeah, if your store has no number stickers and multiple types of apples I can imagine self-checkout being a major pain. (I can think of a few ways to make this easier -- like provide a roll of stickers next to each variety so customer can attach them to the bag themselves -- but I've never seen this implemented)
Ok I buy Swiss Chard and persimmons and so on, the usual teenage checker has never seen them before, so maybe I'm having more trouble than most.
For things with more than one option (e.g. organic/non-organic lemons) it would show the 1-4 products it though was relevant and I just had to click the touch monitor on the correct one.
These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and helping lower our environmental impact.
Look up ynvisible
Disposable is really in the eye of the beholder. Just because it can be single use, or even if its biodegradable, doesn't change all the resources that go into manufacturing them in the first place.
Just toss a bunch of unlabeled apples in a bin and let a human cashier who has already learned all the product codes for produce just type them in. Or if we really want self checkout, put a barcode at the bin and no labels on the apples at all.
Not me. I really loathe it a lot, unless I'm buying just a single item and I'm in a hurry.
Increasingly, the self-checkout lines tend to be the really long ones anyway, so using them isn't even any faster. Just more work.
Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely:
1) they have very bad interfaces
2) they don’t trust customers at all
3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and
4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)
Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit.
Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.
I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.
There's still some variance in the latter countries between supermarket chains as some are noticeably faster or require fewer taps than others, but the general experience in most every chain is far less pleasant than in every major supermarket brand in Switzerland.
Rather have my actions support the employees.
Furthermore, if there is less work to be done in supermarkets, then people can spend more time doing more interesting/productive work or simply enjoying their leisure. The issue is not that this (or any) automation is destroying people's livelihoods, but that the value added is being predominately captured by the already wealthy.
Portugal does suffer from an excess of 'work is for the workers' mindset, which is part of the reason it is so poor (compared to other Western European countries).
I would even feel guilty to make them work when they aren't actually needed. Indeed, in the current system if they don't work they don't get money, but to me it's a wealth distribution problem. I'd rather have them get the same money and do whatever they like. It would be a net gain for society and a loss for nobody.
I bet many would rather do a useless job than staying at home getting Hartz IV.
I bet many would rather do hiking, writing or going to the cinema if they were paid the same. And since their job is useless already, it wouldn't change much. It wouldn't actually be a loss for anyone compared to the situation now (modulo the price of the machines and their maintenance, which is much less than a cashier's salary). However, replacing them with machines and giving them less money is a win for the shareholders, and that's what counts most in our system.
I've seen whole development teams that were more useless then that.
If I don't have to otherwise, I only go to the store with a self-checkout near me. There are some ux problems which they should improve but all in all I'm happy.
We have Rewe, Kaufland and IKEA supporting self checkout around here and the experience is decent. The interface is not the best. Sometimes a scan fails, but there’s always someone close by who can help.
DM has indeed some pretty good self checkout tills. IKEA is pretty good also. Obi and Bauhaus are abysmal.
When I got stopped walking out of a supermarket with an item with an RFID tag on it, I don't think the security guard (who had no direct view of the self checkouts) even bothered to check that, just asked me to confirm the checkout that I'd used and roughly how much I'd paid for it. And sent me on my way with the advice that it might be a good idea to ask for a receipt when buying electronic items in case they were faulty and I needed to return them!
I do wonder how differently it would go down if I was a young black man.
Every once in a while I'm reminded to be grateful I live in North America.
I have no bad experiences with self-checkout. None.
Going to a staffed-only checkout feels like going back 20 years in time. They take up more space, they can move slower, suddenly customers will kill the speed because they need to look for their coupons, pay with change, or whatever.
1. The people who say they have had a problem actually have had a problem, and some other people have gotten lucky.
2. The people who say they have had a problem are lying, or deceived.
The article actually ends with "shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time." - and that is clearly false for me and everyone I know. "rarely" or "occassionaly"? maybe. But not "most of the time".
Bold of you to assume you're not the minority.
All they need to do is drop everything to learn one of the most competitive and hardest cross-disciplinary skills and jump into a shrinking market!
You scan the products. Confirm that you've scanned everything. Want a shopping bag, yes/no? Pay.
That's it. The scanners work. Payment work. Getting a receipt works.
Maybe I've just been lucky, who knows.
Me: I don't have to scan, check I've scanned everything, enter the number of bags, put groceries in those bags. Instead I put my stuff on the belt, I pay and walk out w the groceries--and the cashier is a pro at scanning and bagging, whereas I am not.
Plus, it's not like these stores are going to pass along the labor savings to us. They'll just pocket the difference.
I remember the time before self-scan machines, and the lines were not shorter. Even "10 items or less" registers had huge lines.
They are not hard to clear issues and I could do them myself but only the cashier has the ability to clear those errors and sometimes there is that one customer that is taking the 1 cashier for 8 stalls for like 5 minutes complaining about a coupon.
I think dismissing the issues is sure fire way for more issues to come up.
Not me (aged 60, happy with using self-checkouts in general, resigned to the occasional glitches)
I can pack stuff in my bags with no rush (there's usually no line for self-checkout, since not everyone uses it), just scan the bar codes for products that have them and pick from a menu/search for those that don't (e.g. freshly baked goods in paper bags). Then, I can pay with my card, or sometimes have to verify my ID with the shop attendant when buying something like energy drink.
Smaller stores probably won't have self-checkout any time soon and some stores like Lidl don't seem to have it either (the prices there are nice, but bagging your products always seems so rushed), but where it's available, it works pretty well (like Rimi, Maxima).
I really appreciate it being optional, though, as well as having the more traditional option with shop attendants and the small conveyor thing.
The best ones I’ve used are at Rossmann. Completely silent, and don’t measure the weight of anything, so you never get to the “sorry, your shopping’s weight is off by 1g” part. The UI is also very efficient, where in Carrefour they seem to periodically add more popups to the process.
I'm usually using ANC headphones when shopping, so it's not a big deal for me, I dislike all the usual peeping, squeaking and alert bells in contemporary shopping environment.
>The best ones I’ve used are at Rossmann. Completely silent, and don’t measure the weight of anything, so you never get to the “sorry, your shopping’s weight is off by 1g” part.
Agreed, but this is due to specific requirements of a drugstore - measuring weight is meaningless if you have 100s of nail polishes or toothpastes weighing pretty much the same.
When I was on vacation in London about 5 years ago when Visa had an outage: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
I was trying to pick up some food at the only grocery market that was within walking distance of where I was staying. The grocery store only had self-checkout machines. As the checkout line piled up, the payment system failed to process my card. I gave it another try with another card, and after a long wait that one went through. By that time as I was looking around, I noticed that pretty much everyone else around me was stuck at the machines and weren't moving on. I assumed there was some sort of outage going on.
I guess I came within a few seconds of needing to scramble to try to find a way not to go hungry that night. I had plenty of cash on me, but that wouldn't have helped me complete the purchase because the machines simply didn't accept cash. There was no obvious way to get an employee's attention so I could give them my money. They were probably stuck with some of the other customers scratching their heads as to why the magic card charging system, which appeared to have been the only possible way to pay for food at that grocery store, wasn't working.
Another annoyance I've run into at one store in particular is that the self-checkout machine no longer pre-calculates the tax amount. Now, I have to hit the pay button before I'm given the true amount due.
The self-checkout machines are getting worse over time. It's quite reminiscent of how ATMs have evolved.
Ooof. I haven't seen a SCO with no cash capability. I know cash-handling equip costs but if they don't want pay for that, they might need a cashier.
Walmart may have a couple SCO that won't do cash temporarily - but there will be 10 more fully working.
The machines at the Whole Foods near my house, for example, only accept cards, phones, or palm prints. Only half the machines at a Safeway near my house accept cash. The machines at another grocery market (Haggen's) are card- or phone-only, and they furthermore show a video feed of you on the screen with a "You're Being Watched by AI" warning to try to cut down on thefts.
The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with the sandwich I bought.
I hit that a couple of times but I scan stuff quickly. I also live in a house of 6 adult guys. It's lots of buying & lots of scanning.
Cashiers had it sorted before I figured out something was up.
Totally off-topic, but I challenge you to try writing without using any parentheses. They generally don't contribute positively toward either the legibility or impact of your prose.
The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores.
Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc.
That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards.
I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)
Merchants can just note down the card number and manually charge it, though. I've definitely had that happen in the past somewhere. The downside is that the merchant is fully on the hook for chargebacks for such payments.
Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like outages are rare.
Where outages are more common it’s more likely people have workarounds - kind of like how when there was a power failure and the power company told the local store it would be 4+ hours to recovery they declared “discounted dairy”.
It's just cheaper to say "Sorry nothing we can do"
I definitely see the issue with theft. I do suspect that this is a result of tech failures. Customers just go "fuck this, it doesn't scan so I'm not paying." It's not unreasonable, given the issues with staffing them when there are technical issues.
Somehow, the self checkouts in Switzerland are mostly free of both problems. I’m guessing they’re more willing to take the theft risk, to increase throughput.
My point is that giving up on this technology seems rash, when it could be tweaked to work well with a software update and a policy adjustment.
For example today I still struggle to scan things with the laser barcode scanner, where as cameras are much more reliable for scanning barcodes today.
The system could collect data when an item does not match the weight in the database and 'learn' that it should be different, but this is impossible as behind the scenes it's still using a POS system that was designed 30 years ago.
You're experiencing the difference between high- and low-trust societies.
One thing that I have seen actually adding value is where there’s a scanner that you carry around and scan items as you pick them up (some shops can let you do this with your phone's camera). This does save time and you simply pay at the end and don’t need to scan and bag everything since you’ve been doing that on the go.
Of course, these days I use the delivery service and get groceries delivered once a week so that’s kind of the ultimate convenience ;)
Think 'serverless' technology - there is still a server, it's just no longer owned by you.
Seeing how the customer had to wait for the labor to be executed anyway in the past, I see this as a win.
I wander around putting things in the cart, and then at self-checkout I sort and balance it all into bags. If I was scanning as I went, I couldn't carry everything. If I put it on a conveyor belt for staff to scan, then I don't have time to sort or balance when repacking.
Worst of all is the receipt check after the process - looking at you Costco. It feels like checking pockets in a diamond mine. If I am going to be doing all the work to save the store money they should loose the right to check it.
Regarding that last point, has anyone tried brushing past them or refusing? I doubt they can detain or stop you without evidence. I guess the worst case is they could ban you or cancel a membership.
Most places have turned off the weight balance on the two sides, so it is no longer an issue.
I don't have a receipt check, but I do remember walmart did that before I moved ~10 years ago - those Walmarts didn't have self-checkouts, so it definitely isn't because of those. Stores thought this was good before self-checkouts were everywhere.
My mother once refused. They harassed her, and she ended up yelling. I cannot recall where this was, however, since there were not a Costco in the area.
I do - at some stores - get a random check, where they check a few items to make sure they were scanned. And then most of the time, I scan my receipt to get out of the check out area.
My guess is that the "featurism" of the weight check was promoted so much that they feel weird just relying on the tendency of people to be honest. But people do tend to be honest (especially when there is a small chance of being caught)
I've done it before when busy, the line was long and I just needed tp (I was fortunate Costco was essentially my closest grocery store at the time). The girl doing receipt check looked non plussed and "Sir'd" me, I just smiled held up the receipt, told her have a nice day and kept going. No issue. Full cart might actually get a response though.
Costco is also technically a private membership club, not a store. That’s why they can check your receipt.
The other big difference in smoothness of experience is having sufficient staff to come and deal with problems. Firstly, because user or machine error will always be non-negligible, but also because age challenges are quite common too. It's frustrating queueing and seeing a good 4 or 5 machines in a blocked state (and sometimes abandoned due to it) and there being no or insufficient staff around to unblock them
So for the last 2 store hours there's 1 cashier - and they're in back performing the 12 other duties they have.
I just stood there in utter disbelief as they rummaged through my neatly packed bag to mess everything up, scan only a handful of items, and then present me a bill that's several euros lower than it was before they started re-scanning stuff (e.g. they missed items).
What is the point of self checkout if you are not going to trust that your customers scan everything?
Conversely, I've been self-checking in Japan for years, and they've never checked the contents of my bag.
i'm surprised by the bill though, are you sure it wasn't due to discounts or something? usually they just scan 5-10 items (and will try to scan the most expensive ones)
I was mildly frustrated because it was the second time in as many days that they checked me.
However, they don't happen to me too often, and it's as common with 3 items as with 30 so I think it's truly random. It seems like about the right frequency to catch thieves.
Another thing I really hate is that I've seen locked exit barriers that open when scanning the receipt. In sweden there is a real disregard for workplace safety :(
I guess other than "honoring the people who died in the disco fire in the 90s in the local museum", there is no will to do anything practical.
Here in Sweden you can just push those out of the way (it sets of an alarm but if you push it back to closed position the alarm stops). FYI Sweden has strict workplace safety rules, not sure why you think there is a real disregard for this.
Try to do that on a wheelchair or with crutches now.
> FYI Sweden has strict workplace safety rules, not sure why you think there is a real disregard for this.
I'm sure the rules are there. They are just ignored, like the supermarket case.
Most buildings (including office buildings) have doors that have unreasonably strong springs (for no reason whatsoever, a much weaker one would suffice), and require 2 hands to be opened from inside to get out (a latch and an handle). Try getting out of those doors on a wheelchair if the electricity is out. That's an easy way to have multiple people die in a fire.
What they would have if they were safe is this thing: https://www.toolshopitalia.it/imagecache/uploads/images/ninz...
The fact that you are getting triggered and rushed to respond without even stopping to think is a problem.
But, living in Sweden, I'm kinda used to the smug (and unjustified) sense of superiority of the locals.
Not being able to access sucks, but isn't a safety concern strictly speaking. Not being able to get out quickly and potentially blocking the path for a crowd is.
In practice, it usually takes longer to get an employee's attention and have them come press the button. So I don't bother. It's usually quicker to bag everything at the end, and I tend to get fewer "unexpected item in the bagging area" issues when balacing everything on the scales.
While I often prefer self checkout for small purchases, the counter-shrink measures at make the entire experience worse -- locked up products, weird checkpoints after you finish purchasing, etc.
This would be legit terrible. My shopping trips are almost all groceries and the few locked-down things are behind the service counter or at the Rx. Pseudoephederine is only restricted item I buy.
In Hongkong, most major supermarkets have self-checkout sections now. Usually, there is a single person standing by to fix any issues. I am sure the labour cost for checkout is much lower in those areas.
In Tokyo, Japan, most convenience stores have at least one self-checkout register. (Can anyone comment about combini other regions of the country? And, Aeon: Do they have self-checkout yet?) The interface in each chain takes some getting used to (so many steps!), but then you get the hang of it. Unsurprisingly, many natives continue to queue for service, even if it takes longer than self-checkout.
Can anyone comment on the situation in Singapore, another highly developed, but very low crime location?
this is exactly what you'll see rolled out over the next few years, all of the equipment vendors have been showing prototypes of it
They had one of those in a larger supermarket I visited last summer. (EDIT: In Norway) They also had those mobile bar code scanners you bring with you and dock in your trolley, and app payment (including receipt storage), so the entire process was pretty smooth.
I live in a city so I don't use those large supermarkets, so I don't know if this is something new or not.
The basic assumption is "trust the customer". Thus, the self-checkout devices don't have the annoying "you must weight the article you just scanned".
You just scan them one by one, add them to your bag, pay at the end, and that's it. Sometimes (it happens to me around 1/year) you get a random search, which is not that bad as they just randomly scan ~10 articles from your cart and it just beeps (i guess ?) if they're not paid for in your receipt.
This article mentions the south of England but they’ve rolled it out country-wide since:
https://www.gettyimages.de/detail/foto/row-of-newspaper-vend...
I’m in an Eastern European country and have the same machines in some supermarkets, no scales, no gates just scan the stuff and go.
That would’ve been unimaginable 15-30 years ago. Theft and violent crime rates were sky high. Having your home broken into or even getting mugged in broad daylight wasn’t that special (these days you have a high chance of getting a story in a national newspaper at least if you get mugged).
Of course it’s far from perfect and there are other issues that need to be solved. However under the right circumstances significant change is possible even during relatively short timeframes.
Have also used some in the UK a few years ago, and the UX was much worse. Usually slow user interface, some of them are even speaking to ask you to put down every single article... might be fine as tutorial, but so slow if you actually use them regularly.
Sainsburys annoys me every time. The slightest delay in putting the scanned item on the scale and it starts nagging you, very loudly. I avoid them as far as possible. M&S is the same - nice place to shop in, but self checkout is unpleasant.
However, they are much less annoying here. I assume it's all just parameters that are tuned to local requirements.
(Have you swiped your Nectar card?)
The touch screens for the ones in Manor are terrible OTH, they seem to require a very precise light touch, but not too light, I find it strange that the more "upmarket" Manor has the worst ones.
I scan everything beforehand with their device, then head to the self-checkout with a shopping cart full of items (already put into bags), I scan the QR code there and I pay. Done.
The whole operation is like 20 seconds max, and it's how it should be.
Using self checkout in the UK, US or in Italy is a nightmare. First of all, they don't trust you by default so you have to weight everything (this operation takes on average 10s per item). Half of the time the systems are broken (in terms of UX) and you need to do things in a specific order (e.g: you can't scan a rewards card with the other items - you have to do it BEFORE even starting to scan the products).
You can still chat with them, they have time for it now but even if you couldn't, if I had to chose between those 2 jobs I would rather not chat with you. That's putting it politely...
We have 3 systems, the conveyor belt, a hand held device with which you can scan products while shopping or you can scan everything at the check out. They check 3-4 products for one in about 5 customers.
It's a great system. I can do shopping during rush hour without standing in line or having to dump everything on the conveyor and bag it again in some neurotic ritual.
Why not? I think I'm missing the insinuation there...
Other irritants are the ones who watch the cashier scan every item and waiting to pay before they even think of clearing their items from the conveyor thing, so you have to wait for them to mess around putting their wallet away, then get out their shopping bag and start packing
That sounds like a societal failure more than a shopping tech failure.
I personally like them...as long as they aren't the kind that weigh the items. Those always end up needing staff override because the stupid thing is too sensitive
The weight thing is often enabled because of theft.
It might not be the solution designer's "fault" if they couldn't figure out a workable way to account for the problem, but it does make the solution a "failure".
I guess the scales might also be there to help confused customers. A little bit. But I believe it was really about theft.
The scales also made the experience terrible. The last Walmart in the area with scales got rid of them. Their SCO is much improved. I can't speak to Walmart's bottom line but I do appreciate being treated better.
FWIW, this whole region has tons of poor areas and massive homeless communities.
And don’t try to pass it off as a “convenience” for the customer. It was never about that. I would call it “automating” a job away but that would be too generous. No, it’s just asking the customer to do a job for free and selling it as more convenient. No thanks.
Only if the creation of jobs is slower than the displacement... Which I agree it is, with this tech (and our slow response in gov, universities etc.). But sometimes (sounds callous but just pondering this small part of the equation), maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on? And this tech will open up other opportunities.
Else we are just all herders/farmers/hunter-gatherers indefinitely.
Regardless, it's quicker for me to scan my goods than for someone else to do it (and with half the people, since I've freed someone up). Same for most other people around me, from what I see (1/4 or 1/5 seem to need help or prefer talking to the cashier). It's a net win for society in the long run - And I think that employment changes are very liquid in this industry, so I am not as concerned as if it were a coal miner for example.
(My concern is more that supermarket workers probably correlate strongly with hand-to-mouth living, and governments should ensure there are appropriate retraining/growth paths. Which they don't, at least to my satisfaction. Which loops us back to us both pretty much being in agreement, I would guess)
I don't want us to handicap ourselves (tying our bionic arm behind our backs to artificially reduce productivity, in the name of keeping jobs)
> maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on
Nah. This is just lying to ourselves to feel better. Workers do not need to be compelled and it does not help them at all. The changes may be helping overall economy in the long run or just be irrelevant overall, but individuals on the receiving end are just not helped.
"maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on" was meant to indicate a benefit to society, not the individual. I.e., society demands that they move on, for better or worse. I don't think anyone's pretending that they're doing the individual a favour, in the short run at least.
- self checkout was only thing going on in the economy, - cashiers represented overwhelming majority of employees.
Otherwise you are making overly large prediction from a single small data point.
-------------
Let me say opposite theory: if self checkout would be "freeing people for more useful jobs", cashiers salaries would be raising prior self checkouts. As employers would compete for people, they would pay cashiers as much as those "more useful jobs".
That did not went on. These were and are minimum salary jobs.
I'll do the work so I can save the time. It's a godsend that way.
Perhaps this is a location or shop specific effect?
> The real future will be no-checkout though: just take the stuff you need and go, shops would be able to detect what you got there and bill you.
I really hope not. That would be a privacy nightmare. And how would I then pay in cash?
Like famine, poverty, cancer and CSS? ;-)
Yeah, sure.
Seriously though: history shows that if official money is not trusted (for some reason), another form emerges. So no, cash will be there as long as humankind exists.
What makes you think the US are immune to disasters resulting in having no internet for weeks or longer?
One where you use a remote to scan the products as you add them to cart, then just put away the remote. The other one where you scan at the station.
I would say I see 5x reduction of actual people working behind the checkout.
And I basically rarely wait in queues any longer.
I have never witnessed a singular tech failure either.
The newer gen hardware is much better than the old stuff and is now pretty reliable. Some of the older machines were painfully unreliable.
My closest big Sainsburys only just upgraded from the original generation stuff and they perpetually had a quarter of their self checkouts broken for various reasons. I once saw them have a technician out to service all the machines one day, and the very next day 2 of them were already broken.
If you want to make a cab driver happy, pay them with a wad of low-denomination notes at the beginning of their shift. I did this once in Melbourne and the cabbie was effusive. I asked for a receipt for my work, and he wrote an amount that was about 50% higher than what I actually gave him. And now I've admitted an alternative (unintentional) form of theft.
Or is it? Talk about vending machines with a person of sufficient age, they'll tell you stories about getting cheated, not getting it to take their money, taking their last dollar and not giving any product.
Yet that's largely been cured. The vending industry has matured and such problems are reported to be largely extinct.
I wonder when the self-checkout woes of the first years will give way to flawless self-checkout, but with people still complaining because of something that happened years ago?
I don't know if people are just really dumb or I'm really lucky, but I very rarely have issues with self checkout.
I beg to differ! Just last year, I was at the platform for Gleis 11 at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof trying to buy a drink at the vending machine. After waiting in vain for the VISA transaction to go through, I cut my losses and caught my train with only a few seconds to spare. I never did get my bottle of Fanta, and it's still on my to-do list to find out if the amount was actually charged or not.
In those brief moments between observing that the machine wasn't working and running for the train, I surmised that the vending machine's payment terminal was running some version of Android, probably 4.4 or 5.0 judging by the GUI, and had lost its Wi-Fi connection. That's rather sloppy UX in my opinion, and I've made a point of using the (somewhat) more reliable cash vending machines instead (human-staffed counters are even better!)
I do not want to encourage stores to remove such jobs for an automated solution.
There's a huge wealth of folk songs from around the world that were sung at work, serving both to coordinate the workers' movements and to strengthen the social bonds among them. See for instance the Scottish 'waulking song'. Singing/whistling at work is pretty rare now anyway, but the complete lack of any constructive social interaction in some recently-invented jobs is a new low.
1. Human is nicer than cold robot 2. Liability to scan items is the stores responsibility
It works fine in most stores, and the queue is not infrequently longer than in manned tills because many people seem to prefer the convenience of self-checkout, that's my case too. The few stores I knew which had painful self-checkout machines (usually related to weighing items, and needing precise timing between putting the scanned item on the right-hand platform and scanning the next item) seem to have fixed their problems in the last few years.
Many stores are moving to scan-as-you-go, you scan your customer card when entering, get a handheld scanner, and just hang it down and pay when leaving. With a random but infrequent check by personnel. This is by far the most convenient method and I see it in almost all supermarkets now (well, the French and Dutch chains that operate in Belgium at least, but now that I think of it, it seems the Belgian ones don't do it). There's also the Decathlon system where every item has an RFID tag and you just put everything down and it detects things without scanning, but I think it works because people generally don't buy lots of things at once at Decathlon (a large sports apparel and equipment store). I don't think this is viable for supermarkets.
Also, being "caught" not having scanned something (just forgetting to scan before putting something in the cart must be rather common, it's human) never seems to be a problem, it triggers a full rescan and probably increases the chance of getting checked later one, but even that doesn't always seem the case.
So from my point of view, it's clearly not a "spectacular failure", customers certainly don't hate it, and it's not going to be abandoned anytime soon.
The larger supermarket chains (Tesco, Asda, Morrisons) have low-cost lines to cater for the wider market. That means it's harder to distinguish between a thief and a genuine customer, as they'll come from the same socioeconomic backgrounds i.e. they'll dress the same way.
I wonder if there's crossover with what you see in the Netherlands?
- No thefts
- Many people with card payments
- Working self checkout machines
Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is pioneering so many tech but fail to implement any, such as:
- Payments: No SWIFT/IBAN, still lots of cash usage, no e-invoices (ie for utility bills), still using paper checks, physical emails
- No national identification cards or numbers
- Very limited e-government services
And the argument I've been hearing the most is freedom; which also sounds oxymoron, coming from the country with the worlds strongest 3 letter agencies.
To me, it seems like given the size, market maturity, but especially the legal and political environment of the US, any change requiring large-scale coordination between multiple actors, especially public and private, has become very hard.
Single-actor innovation requiring no cooperation of existing stakeholders has become the way to go: That (plus large existing car-based transport stakeholders) is why there is Uber instead of a working public transit system in most cities.
That's true for most systems you list: Anything payments related – the US has over 6000 banks; even given the population size, that's enormous! Identification cards – it's about immigration status at least as much as it's about people being skeptical of the federal government. E-government: Ok, that one is probably due to a lack of trust in the federal government's tech capabilities, which at this point has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't think it's a numbers issue. Japan with 127 million has multi-provider solutions such as IC cards, and I've heard India has Aadhaar and China has similar services.
But I agree with the federal part. I guess it makes things harder as federal states of Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Spain) has some centralization and bureaucracy issues, but at least they still manage to get a national systems such as ID cards.
Japan is much more homogenous than the US, as far as I understand, and trust in government institutions also seems to be much higher. Both advantageous preconditions for establishing a national eID system!
> Estonia
>>
Population
• 2024 estimate
1,373,101[2]
• 2021 census
1,331,824[3]
Of course comparing the entire US with tiny individual European countries is always silly.
Plenty of large swathes of the U.S. have plastic cards, e-invoiced bills, and yes, even zero-cost non-drivers ID cards which work across state lines, along with several forms of national ID if one chooses. Hardly anyone writes checks or uses physical mail — a common joke is that you have to buy a pack of 50 envelopes to send 1 letter every few years. Widespread cash is a benefit, not a demerit, as it gives one purchasing power even if out in the countryside with zero internet — indeed the physical dollar is so powerful that I can take it nearly anywhere in the Americas and spend it directly, down to the poorest most remote villages.
> even if out in the countryside with zero internet
I think I can safely say even the remote countryside of any part of Europe has card payments now.
You might be thinking about SEPA. SWIFT is slow, expensive and also available in the US.
One reason is that credit card fees are much higher than in Europe (up to 3% or so) due to lack of regulation (of course a significant proportion of those fees are returned to the card users as cashback, so it’s not like American companies are much more greedy, it’s still not a very efficient system of course..)
And it's just not the credit cards. Many people here (including high school students) are provided and using debit cards for virtually everything.
I don’t know what a “physical email” is. I occasionally receive bills in the postal mail (mixed in with all the spam our postal service likes to deliver every day as some sort of sick and twisted jobs program) but they usually have a QR code I can scan to pay them online.
Social security numbers are de facto national identification numbers. The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself. But you can use a passport or even get a passport card instead if you really want to.
“E-government” is a broad subject. In some use cases (internet voting) I don’t trust it one bit. In other use cases (filing and paying taxes or instant background checks), we have it covered. And in yet other use cases (buying health insurance), it was actually easier to do online before the government took it over, at least in my experience. My previous state set up an online system to file for unemployment during COVID but then lost millions of taxpayer dollars to overseas scammers who would steal the identities of residents at random and file for unemployment in their names; a better system probably could have been implemented if it wasn’t done at the last minute and with zero verification.
Sorry, it's embarrassingly my bad. I meant physical mail/postal mail/snail mail.
> The US is a federation of fifty states so photo ID cards are issued at the state level, similar to how your national ID in Europe will be issued by Spain or Estonia rather than the EU itself
I would argue against this. The EU is a continental union[1] and not the same as the US [2]. All european countries are fully soverign states (unlike US states) and most of them are unitary. A few of the EU/European states are federal states/governments, like the US. So I think it'd be more correct to compare the US with Germany, Switzerland or Spain. EU would be something more similar to African Union. And there's also an upcoming EU-ID project [3].
About the US "E-government" (and I'm don't even compare it to systems like Estonia's, but) the problems you described sounds like bad system design and lack of identification.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_union [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#Contemporary [3]: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Furthermore, EU member states are, in terms of population, much closer to individual US states in size than any of them are to the US as a whole. My state has three times the population of Switzerland.
Source?
"Shop thefts have more than doubled in the past three years, and the boss of M&S says the reduction of service plays a crucial part"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/21/middle-class...
- https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/11/shoplifters-of-the... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38129353 - https://www.numbeo.com/crime/
Sure, self-checkout is annoying. Mostly because of measures to combat thievery, which I notice have got more hair-trigger recently. The level of anti-theft paranoia that's dialed-in varies depending on the supermarket - the more downmarket the place, the more the self-checkout is calibrated to not trust you.
I'd be really surprised if they end up being phased out.
This is me. At a Walmart this weekend the machine booped instead of beeped, and I didn't get that meant it didn't scan, and dropped the item into a bag. An employee was watching and swooped right in and fixed it. But paying that much attention meant that she might as well have checked me out herself, probably a lot faster.
AI could change the economics soon, but apparently not yet.
I routinely forget to scan whatever is on the bottom of the cart. Usually cases of water but a few times it was the box of 32 hamburgers. I never had a cashier catch it - and they're invariably surprised when I come back into pay.
Another store (I forget which) had a full cart camera and prompted me to check my cart for remaining items because I had unused reusable bags in it.
I've seen that, now that you mention it. It must have been on a trip. None nearby have it.
> Another store (I forget which) had a full cart camera and prompted me to check my cart for remaining items because I had unused reusable bags in it.
That's a new one. I'm not sure if getting flagged would be more annoying than having to go back.
I have seen these customers. I do not understand.
What are they doing at the self-checkout that is confusing? I have used dozens of different implementations and they are all simplicity incarnate.
So I just lump them all in with the folks who don't know that cars need oil changes, take more than 45 seconds at an ATM, get flustered by airport self-checkin machines, or sit in the drive-thru line of a fast food restaurant staring at a menu whose items have scarcely changed in 40 years confused about what's for sale.
To give a practical example, fresh produce have that 4-digit code to identify them (e.g., 4011 for bananas). But some fresh produce comes in containers that have barcodes on them, like grapes in plastic bags or clamshells. The machine expects the 4-digit code (printed on the container), but the customer expects to be able to scan the barcode just like everything else that comes packaged. The barcode fails to scan, and the customer will hold up the line to have a worker explain the mismatch in expectations. All because the machine designers built in an assumption (for efficiency's sake) that doesn't match the real world, and the machine can't adapt to it on the fly.
> I have seen these customers. I do not understand.
One applicable scenario I have observed at my local super market is people for whom English (or the otherwise locally-dominant language) is not their first language. The machine may have a 'clear' error message displaying and speaking "return last scanned item to bagging area" but imagine that you don't understand the language the machine is using very well. At a register with a human, a person can unload groceries on to a belt, hand the cashier some bills that they may or may not entirely understand the value of or swipe a government-provided benefits card, and get back their items and any applicable change without needing a firm grasp of the spoken or written language.
Also, for everything that can't be scanned (like freshly baked bread etc.) there are images and a search function to find these items.
- bringing my own bag and a bag blows over triggers a theft check
- purchasing alcohol distributor or many medicines in my state requires an id check
- multiple upcs on an item requires a void
- large item like dog food and you don't get to "skip bagging" quickly enough
Airport self checkin machines are the same - but also lacking the range of options the expert member of staff has.
This is obviously something that should be fixed in the system, but it's nothing that the consumer can do anything about.
I am glad to see biometric pay become a thing at Amazon, it has been too slow for this to progress. Being able to take a walk to the store, and not carry a wallet is a huge convenience. Shame I am not shopping with them much other than the occasional Whole Foods purchase after being thrown into the law enforcement vs local response loop when analytics were being misused.
The palm biometric solution is a decent happy medium (vs fingerprint or retina scanning) and something international travelers are already used to.
They didn’t show me any examples of RFID issues other than some guy obtaining a wand and taking inventory of the dogs in the neighborhood. Not a big deal compared to the personal bias and insults they could chase one around with - all over internet platforms using fraud and marketing analytics.
The loyalty programs are in pretty bad shape. I dropped a bunch of them wasn’t worth maintaining for the level of griefing someone can do on games and social media about purchases.
I'm happy with SCO. That is, I am happy now that registers stopped monitoring the bagging area for weight. That was a miserable disaster every trip. Like when I'd buy 50lb bags of cat litter and cases of water.
Grocery stores (I can afford) stopped the weighing and checkout is a good experience. I take packed carts thru SCO because that's usually faster than the cashiers.
The difference may be that there is zero expectation of theft here, with shoplifting also being punished as the crime it is.
Then, all the stores removed the possibility of using cash in the self-checkout, so I stopped using them. I haven’t used them since.
Talking to one of the store staff they said they were losing too much at self checkout. They dropped it to ten items and forced eleven plus items to the registers. Hire a few older people at minimum wage to slowly scan your items and get you on your way. That initial month they went to ten items was around the holidays and all the new register people were sooooooo slow. It was painful. They just didn’t know what they were doing. Seemed like they were thrown to the registers to make it work.
Supermarkets where I live have 2-6 kiosks, and there is usually one employee overseeing it and helping people. Once in a while a kiosk will beep and the employee has to pick out a few random items and scan them. If they scan something you didn't pay for - you're in trouble.
Personally, as a customer (UK), it's been pretty damn good. Especially scan as you shop.
They're not perfect, everyone's experienced "unexpected item in the bagging area", or had a quick trip halted by having to wave down a staff member for a full cart scan.
Part of the problem mentioned at the top of the article is the store's cut too many staff from checkout; having only one on hand to manage the "fleet" of 12-20 tills does not work well. You need 3-4, so you've got some leeway if a few customers need a verification (full scan, or restricted goods) or a till needs some troubleshooting at the same time.
But when it works; the queue moves quicker, stuff isn't being thrown along the till haphazardly.
I’m not going to go on about the surveillance tech used in Australia as part of the self check outs but here are a few gripes, the problem is a lack of trust of the customers.
1. You have to tell it you have bags (fine) then it seems if you have lots of bags on the platform (or bags with items in them?) you have to wait for an attendant to check you’re not doing something dodgy
2. If you have other stuff in the trolley, say, your handbag or bags from other stores, or you put the grocery bags back in the trolley before you pay, you have to wait for an attendant to check you’re not doing something dodgy
3. There are other inexplicable reasons the system gets locked up and needs an attendant, I haven’t found rhyme or reason to some of them. I have though seen the attendant required to review and ‘Ok’ photos of stuff I’ve scanned and put in the bag.
This is probably not an issue in many countries but for example in Switzerland where space is limited in many stores this makes a huge difference. You can have double or triple the checkout points than if you had regular checkouts.
I have seen optimized regular checkouts (no conveyor belts) in super markets now as well but they still require double the space than a self checkout.
Generally I also only see 1 attendant for 10 or so self-checkout machines. They carry a special phone which lets them deal with age checks or random inspections. In some places the random inspection can even be done without the attendant (the attendant can release the register to allow you to follow the steps yourself.).
I would bring my cart over to them, and an employee will scan each item at the self check out. As someone who would rather just use the self check out to get in and out, it's been a bit annoying.
When I asked an employee why they are staffing the self check out machines instead of the actual registers (which are still empty), she responded in saying that the self check out machines have a simpler interface than dealing with the traditional cash registers so they have begun using the self check out machines instead.
Of course the scanner doesn’t know this so will happily beep each time as you scan 10 more things that don’t get registered because someone didn’t learn why modals are a bad idea.
Never seen that. Is it an American thing? Or maybe I just didn't by things that have to be attached to a wall.
[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/secure-it-creati...
[2]: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/campaigns/secure-it-pub10077d91
Does anyone know how are those achieved (from a technical standpoint)?
On a similar note, I'm blown away by the checkout system in Decathlon stores. You literally just throw the item into a checkout bin and it somehow detects what the item is (maybe NFC tags?) And just adds the price on the screen. No weighing or scanning barcodes. Really futuristic!
Once you've seen it you'll be baffled as to why it isn't a global solution. No need for the employee or others to wait while you count your coins or bag up, and no need for anyone to wait behind you while you wait for the self-service checkout to weigh each item individually, fail to scan etc.
My local Walmart recently did a major renovation that doubled the number of self checkouts. My local target usually has as many self-checkout slots open as cashier-operated lanes, and there aren’t caps on number of items.
Several parallel commenters have pointed out that self-checkout can be good or bad (pretty much the same way there’s places where cashier-operated checkout is good or bad). But I also think it’s heavily dependent on things like regional crime rates / customer volume, among other variables.
If I had to complain about things (except that it increases unemployment): People are bad at it and it's probably because of the slow, buggy, difficult UI.
I don't get that in 2023 we still have UI that bad, probably created by some agencies that payed some poor coder in an developed country to code this. You don't cherish your product, you get bad product.
Now if only they'd remove that obnoxious "WOULD ya LIKE to PRINT a RECEIPT?" at the end... :P
If you minimize your screwing up their environment, they'll return the favor.
Of course there's also things like Amazon's system, where you literally just walk in and out. Which is a lot tech heavier, but a lot more convenient too
I found it an interesting cultural difference, and I can't help but wonder to which extent it's influenced by the preference for human interaction in both countries.
Cashiers are nice, I guess. But stores are not a social call for me. I want to buy my stuff and not deal with ridiculous people in front of me.
Also self-checkouts just move faster. This probably wouldn't be true if stores had the same number of cashiers they used to, but it really reminds me of mu youth where you could be in and out of a store without a significant wait to check out.
I lived in France for a bit and the stores were completely different. Speedy and plentiful lines, so that's probably the difference between Spain and the UK
(Only used it because I bought an electronic with a security hockey puck that had to be unlocked.)
Lidl is famous (or notorious) for its demon-speed cashiers, and they actually worked hard both to train them and to make packaging easier for the scanner to "see"[1]. I don't see them implementing self-checkout soon.
[1] https://www.behance.net/gallery/114753219/LIDL-Packaging-Gui...
Heavy stuff in the beginning, fragile stuff at the back, from large to small (so that I bag the heavy and large stuff in the bottom and then fragile and small I squeeze in carefully).
I recently heard of a tip from people who become anxious at the cashiers: Fruits and veggies at the end, because often they need to weigh it and sometime also input numbers manually, this gives those extra few seconds at the end.
The User Interface on them is often pretty crappy, but they do work even if you need to get helped sometimes.
I've never been checked, except for the scanner system at pak'n'save where you scan as you pick items into your cart using a handheld scanner and only pay at self-checkout on exit (don't need to scan items on exit).
Waitrose, M&S and Sainsbury's seems to be going nearly all in on the machines in my town.
Their TV ad made was so cool, so well done and so "I want to live in this world" that became one of my favorites even today:
The link the BBC article has to cite this is unavailable, so who knows what it means, but "run six figures" presumably is a little over £100k. That cost, for 4 kiosks, is actually much more reasonable than I expected. Compare that to the salary and other costs of 4 cashiers and that probably pays back extremely quickly.
I guess the article is specific for the US or the UK. I don't think the technology is a failure at all, the problem seems more specific to the culture.
(as for "retail shrinkage": here newspaper boxes do have a slot for coins but don't have a lock on the door)
I blip my card, scan my items while bagging them, and finish the purchase on the terminal. Random checks from an employee happen every 10th/20th time I use one and it's pretty painless.
Yes you need 1 person to solve issues people have (which are mostly mistakes they make) but that 1 person is amortized over all the self-checkouts so it's still worth it.
As I said in another comment, I think it works for Decathlon because you usually only buy a few items, but it probably wouldn't work for a supermarket where people have a dozen identical things in their cart, and often 50 or 100 total items.
Checking out is much less dirty than checking the packaging back in.
It isn't unthinkable for all products/packaging to get an RFID tag. On that scale they will be cheaper and perhaps some can be reused. Passive tags cost only 8 cent atm.
I also suspect you need an average price per product that's too high for supermarkets to make it worth it.
You do get people complaining about them on Twitter/Facebook/Nextdoor - mostly old people - but in reality, I find people usually prefer to use the self-checkout. Even if they can be a pain sometimes.
People get their backs up hard on this topic!
As you get older, a lot of the people you interact with regularly you have a responsibility for/to. Co-workers, bosses, family, kids.
With strangers, even the grumpy interactions are fun. No responsibility.
https://www.walmart.com/cp/scan-go/9679980
And I believe Sam's, the Walmart wholesale club, has it in store.
I get that "this is why we can't have nice things", that people will take a sticker off a can of beans and put it on a PS5 or other shenanigans to try to steal/shoplift/cheat. I'm not doing that, and it makes it a massively worse experience. The worst thing of all is companies have huge self-checkout areas and then don't open any registers (or maybe 1 to sell tobacco products). Which means I have no choice. I actually prefer delivery, because it's a flat $5 fee and I don't have to mess with any of this anti-consumer bullshit, but it also reduces profitability for me as a customer because I don't make incidental purchases by not being in the store at all.
Doesn’t really matter though. The next gen tech is coming soon. You won’t have to scan anymore and theft will be next to impossible.
This sounds like some tech utopia t thinking. What's gonna stop someone just grabbing something and walking out? The employees?
In theory there is an standardized mapping of the whole GS1 labeling system onto UHF RFID and the only thing that prevents universal deployment is some kind of critical mass. Somewhat surprisingly the standards even take into account the privacy issues inherent in that and the tags do not have fixed physical address (unlike HF RFID/NFC with 1wire-style deconflicting UIDs) and the contents can be progressively masked out, with command to completely disable the tag being mandatory.
On the other hand, first demonstration of that I can remember was by Siemens in 1991, so there is probably another 30 years to go for that to become widespread :)
Although it sounds a bit too much for a store, technically it could be done.
- Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Most of their items has this tag inside the regular tags, I guess this would be much harder to implement in a regular store.
Also very uneconomical. RFID tags have a cost, while printing a barcode on a package that is anyway printed is totally free. Unless there's a clear economical advantage that compensates for the lost revenue, this is a no-go for less expensive items like what you find in a grocery store.
Self-checkout seems to be the happy middle ground where the lost turnover/angry number of customers is reasonable enough for it to be possible.
People really don't like "computer says no" when their money is involved and that's the barrier you need to clear before auto-checkout is a thing.
They work very fine, just not replace as many workers as expected
What bothers me about a lot of self-checkout machines are the annoying attempts to "up-sell" me on stuff; in quotes because these hoops that you need to jump through before paying are not always trying to literally sell you something. No, I don't want to scan a loyalty points card. No, I don't want to donate to your charity. No, I don't want an email receipt just print it please. And I don't care about whatever announcement you want to shove in my face before I can pay. Just let me pay and be on my way already FFS.
Umm, what? I see no evidence of this. There are more self-checkouts than ever. Many shops in London are almost entirely self-checkouts now, with just one or two token staffed check-outs for people who want to buy vapes or whatever.
Besides, where would they even get the staff to go back to manual checkouts? It’s already super frustrating when a shop doesn’t have enough self checkout machines and you have to line up!
Many supermarkets are offering self-scan via apps now anyway, so you can skip the check out entirely (except that you still need to use the self checkout machine to do the final payment).
The dream was that we could just take a cart full of items through a gateway and all the items would be instantly tallied and ready to take home. I could actually see this happening, but perhaps at Costco instead. Costco doesn’t weigh or bag items.
Even if self-checkout results in more theft or other issues, some companies may figure that is worthwhile to keep the workforce in line.
The last time I bought something I got through the human-staffed checkout much faster than anyone got through the machine-staffed checkout. I'm starting to see cult mentality that the self-checkout must necessarily be faster or more desirable, and that's causing people to put up with longer waits for them.
Also when Visa went down in the UK, the grocery store I was shopping at only had self-checkout machines. None of which worked because of the Visa outage, and the machines didn't accept cash. So there's a problem when the mentality of "the self-checkout is clearly better" gets too ingrained in the minds of pointy-haired bosses.
I mean, for me it's not a hard decision.
Self-checkout is enshittification. It diminishes the shopping experience so the company can save a few bucks by not employing cashiers.
How wild would that be.
Groceries and such are some of the trickest bits to handle (especially since another human is stowing them on the belt this way and that, in piles or spread out), and a robot what could handle a conveyor at Aldi even 1/100th the speed of an employee would be a mind-boggling result.