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Comment by hackan | Hacker News Reader

I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful, simply drop everything in! And wait, there's more: did I say drop everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything? just put it in that basket, insert your CC and it's done. You don't get easier than that... So yes, let's keep self-checkout, and focus on improving it!

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It seems that in general, the US lags behind in retail technology.

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.

The ones in Australia aren't perfect though. I use Coles and Woolworths mostly in the Sydney CBD:

- 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.

My wife and I have found that the self checkouts at Coles that have the conveyor belt (like the manned checkout lanes) are the best as they don't have a scale so you can scan stuff fast and it won't make you wait for it to check the weight for each item. The smaller self checkouts are horrible though. Only ok if you're just grabbing a few items.

Data point of just 1, but even in a small college town in the Midwest US, 50% or more counters at the grocery stores I've visited have been self checkout. Some places are almost entirely self checkout, to the point where if you need assistance it's hard to find an actual person employed by the store.

Same experience in a _very_ small college town in Midwest US. Though, the walmart did just "upgrade" their self checkouts. They improved nothing! They added a bunch more cameras and apparently the thing now has some predictive visual algorithm that will not allow you to scan multiple identical items at a time. They still haven't added the tap to the card terminal! Just let me tap! Everyone else does, crazy they haven't figured that out yet. They also have started making their greeters check receipts, which is insane knowing the culture of the again incredibly small town. I just walk right past them. Check my receipt in hell, nice old lady or wheelchair bound man, i got places to be!

On a trip to a sparsely populated part of Norway I hadn't been to before, I ran into my first unstaffed grocery store. You checked in with a bank card (they did that thing with reserving a 0.50 transcation) and it was self-service in there. Presumably someone would be in from time to time to restock the shelves.

I've used a few libraries that work like that, probably going back 10 or more years now. I was a little incredulous the first time - "You mean I really just plonk down a pile of books and press 'loan'? No individually placing each one spine-first in a tag-deactivator?"

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

Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still uses barcodes.

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.

That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much.

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.

So many of these "technological solutions" end up being "spherical cow" type things.

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.

That sure is a lot of single use NFC tags though.

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.

RFID tags are already used for inventory management for some items/retailers. A system like this can just piggyback on the existing tags.

It would need to expand to every product though, right? From produce to packs of gum, they would all need tags that can be reliably scanned by the bag/cart.

I’ve seen it at stores where each item is relatively more expensive (e.g. a Uniqlo).

We nowadays have disposable smart labels with integrated screens.

Look up ynvisible

Those seem really wasteful too IMO, why do we need them?

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.

This. We need many fewer disposable things in this world, not more.

I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).

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.

For larger shopping, I like to use the scanning gun. I get that it's used to track me, but the fact is I get to track the price, pack items as I go and just pay on the way out.

Some of the UK supermarkets are bypassing the scanning gun now and just doing self-scan with an app. Works really well. Nice price checking feature in some of the apps too.

You kind of need it for the big & heavy stuff. I hit somewhere without one and of course half my basket was 50lb this and 32ct that.

> Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).

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?

Produce is not a loss-leader. Pretty solid margins if you compare market prices on produce with what the supermarkets sell them for.

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.

The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of tonnes of produce to rot.

Check out getfairaboutfarming.com

It is certainly unfair to growers if supermarkets are reneging on purchase agreements. But the link you sent has just a single anecdotal "case study", and the site seems to be a marketing site for an organic food box supplier. Hardly by itself evidence of a systemic problem.

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.

Supermarkets have put a lot into adding more organic options and just greater variety in general in their produce sections. I don’t think they lose money or that they are going anywhere.

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.

How much to swim in the banana pit?

You ever shopped at kroger? Their produce selection is so bad and/or rotten that I don't even want to buy produce when I shop there. They don't even care and I think use it to drive buying more predictable goods (like canned). Their subsidiary Pick N Save in the midwest was similar, but not near as bad as Kroger in the south.

We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead, or worst case, the overpriced Publix (if Aldi doesn't have it).

> We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead

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.

That’s really the key I’ve found - fresh deliveries of produce are about the same everywhere; what matters is how fast the turnover is. And it varies by area which store is “the good one”.

When I started looking at RFID tech in 2004, the disposable tags cost maybe $.50-$1 but general consensus was the costs would follow a Moore’s law like trajectory, halving every 2-3 years until they were on even the cheapest items. And yet here we are 20 years later and I don’t see RFID checkout systems very often at all. Are the tags still really expensive? Or is it the extra cost of attaching them to packaging?

RFID tags are ~10c (Impinj) and are getting cheaper each year. they're widely used in apparel stores. think it'd be tough to justify attaching them to low value items in a grocery store. self checkout prob more effective using computer vision

Are you suggesting to put trillions of copper, silicon, and aluminum parts on disposable items like bananas, so people have a slightly better shopping experience?

We kind of already do that, just with plastic, adhesive, and ink.

My bananas don't have plastics, adhesive or ink and regardless, adding another chip to them won't make it any better.

You’ve yet to experience the glory of individually shrink wrapped produce. Bananas and oranges especially egregious but the shrink wrapped watermelon was whole nuther world.

I was thinking more along the lines of produce stickers.

I've seen it, just rarely.

Yes, that should be reduced, not added to.

We already use plastic bags, paper bags, takeout food boxes, wrap products in plastic and sometimes styrofoam. From an economic perspective its not too far off to think that if the part gets cheap enough you can put it on everything.

I am not suggesting it. It was widely presented as inevitable once the costs dropped enough. Retail inventory management and checkout is expensive.

Apologies for the strawman then. I just hope humanity can pass on that one, for once.

Absolutely worth it

When I was messing with RFID for a fulfillment line to improve handling returns, the biggest challenge was orientation.

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).

Metrc charged $0.40 for single use RFID for cannabis plants starting in 2014.

things like razors interfere and so they are not accurate enough to use. They probably work great in niches, but they are not a universal answer.

Not seen it on groceries, but I know Uniqlo use this same method and it's fantastic.

Want to buy this vegetable? Now try to find it among these 300 icons of vegetables! Enjoy!

Or just type the name of the vegetable or just copy the 4-digit code on the sticker attached to the vegetable. At least in the US there is no problem with buying vegetables in self-checkout.

I just find it almost impossible to believe that you regularly buy vegetables or other bulk goods via checkout and have few or no problems.

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.

I do not know what to tell you, I have never had any of the problems you list (I live in the Northeast, but I doubt that matters). Apple-sized things have little stickers, smaller things are batched with a barcode, and when somehow these fail, typing the name (or synonym) takes less than 10 seconds.

Indeed, you just start typing and usually 3 letters is enough to click something at the screen. Of course, this depends greatly in the buyer being... honorable, so I can understand if it doesn't work in many places.

Your thoughts are limited by the environment you live in and your imagination.

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.

The tiny stickers on all the veggies at my grocery store all scan just fine.

There are no stickers here. Just the peel. But It doesn't scan so well.

Ha! Even the checkers at my grocery store have problems with vegetables. Always a big lurch while menus are gone through and labels squinted at. Maybe a manager called.

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.

Vegetables don't have stickers. They are vegetables.

Ah the name… but is it a golden extra apple or a yellow apple? Or perhaps a extra fresh guaranteed apple?

I believe the GP is referring to price look-up codes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_look-up_code). These are often applied via sticker to the produce, as shown in the Wiki images. Every self-checkout system I have used has allowed me to directly type in the PLU for produce, which is what a human cashier would normally do as well.

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.

it's 4021 apple, because it has a sticker. So you try to scan tiny barcode (if one is present, you can see it on bananas) but if it's missing or dirty, you enter 4-digit PLU by hand. It's very simple and fast:

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)

at that point, is it really stealing to just make your best guess? are they going to detain you because you input an apple that is $0.04c cheaper than the real one?

At least over here, differing varieties of the same fruit often cost the same, probably precisely to avoid this problem.

Some stores here in Norway uses computer vision to identify the produce, I tried it out last summer and it successfully identified ~9/10 with the rutabaga being the one it didn't manage, but the touch keyboard was responsive and easy to use for that one.

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.

> ”DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything!”

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.

It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.

The items are also all high enough margin to cover the extra tag cost. Isn’t going to work for supermarkets.

It's not just for payment though, it also helps for theft, and I suppose inventory management is improved on many aspects as well.

Yup, tagging and all the related costs are only reasonable for high-margin/relative high value products, not food

> I love self-checkout, honestly.

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.

Uniqlo's system was discussed here in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111

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