Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I’ll leave a comment I’ve made last time this came into discussion:

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.

I think that's a Germany problem rather than a self-checkout problem.

I tend to agree on this. I never heard such (horror) stories in Switzerland where self-scanning is also present for the two major retailers.

To be fair, there's a massive difference between the machines I've seen at least in Switzerland and the ones in the UK/US. In the latter, they seem far more anti-shoplifting focused, forcing you to place each item and wait for some delay before you can scan the next item, loudly announcing every step of the process, etc.

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.

Thats more of a thieve problem facing the consequnces of their actions.

This is not my experience at all. Can you tell what retailers you are using, so I can avoid them?

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.

Same here, not my experience at all. It would also be interesting if the stores are franchises vs corporate owned.

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.

My problem was with Obi. Most stories I read on Reddit were from Rewe, especially when using those self scanning guns.

DM has indeed some pretty good self checkout tills. IKEA is pretty good also. Obi and Bauhaus are abysmal.

I've accidentally failed to scan an item in the UK before which was caught during a random check. They just said "don't worry, it happens sometimes" and took me to pay for the item.

I do wonder how differently it would go down if I was a young black man.

> 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)

Every once in a while I'm reminded to be grateful I live in North America.

As someone living here, besides all those points, I have seen what these machines have made to employment in supermarket chains in Portugal, hence I tend not to be yet another statistic of people adopting them.

Rather have my actions support the employees.

However surely 'riding shotgun' (i.e. being there to help customers when things go wrong) on self checkouts is more interesting than mindlessly scanning items all day? (I don't know, I've done neither)

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).

Yeah like gettting unemployment support money.

Cashiers in the age of self-checkout machines are IMO a good example of a useless job, I'd rather prefer these people do something else with their time.

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.

Assuming there is usefull job to get instead.

I bet many would rather do a useless job than staying at home getting Hartz IV.

That's the wealth distribution problem I was talking about.

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.

It's a loss of even more human interaction. And there are a lot more useless office jobs.

Cashiers in the age of self-checkout are attracting old-fashioned customers. Without those cashiers you would lose a large customer base >60. So in itself it's not useless as people can't cope with technology and need human interaction.

I've seen whole development teams that were more useless then that.

That's a store policy problem; it shouldn't be difficult for them to confirm that a payment has been made for the equivalent set of items within the last 5 mins, and even possible for them to cross reference with your card.

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!

That’s the problem with the money incentive most stores have here - what I mentioned in the original post, that the security personnel receives 50 - 100 euros per “thief” caught

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