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Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly how it works in the Netherlands, you just scan your items and go. There are no weight checks and you can scan items more than once and edit and remove things from the list. Apart from getting a poorly executed random check sometimes (which is far from effective for the purpose of avoiding theft imho) it actually works really well.

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Same around here. Self-checkouts is hugely successful. I'm much slower going through the scan procedure than the person working at the conveyor belt is.. but that's more than offset by the fact that there are a large number of self-checkout counters and I don't have to queue up (for the most part). The only time I use the old non-self-checkout counter is when there are no customers and the person at the checkout looks bored. Then I go there.

Yeah, I think the UX here in the Netherlands is much simpler and easier than in other countries. When I go to the UK (e.g. Tesco Express) I have to select a bagging option, there's no "no bag" option at the beginning of the transaction even though I'm only buying a litre of milk, then when I put the carton down in the bagging area it triggers an alarm saying a store assistant is coming, but they never do because they're too busy serving all the other customers at the regular checkout. So I give up and try a different checkout, blocking the one I've just tried to use for 2 minutes.

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...

99% of the time I use the 'weigh your own bag' option it asks someone to approve my bag. It's annoying.

Also, the 'bagging area' is on different sides in different shops. Also annoying.

That 2 minutes is nice, in Poland a checkout station that was abandoned is blocked until an assistant notices it, so more like 30 minutes.

Weird, I've never seen a self checkout in the UK that doesn't provide the option to select no bag or key in 0 bags.

This is the same here in Hong Kong. There are no weight checks and self checkouts are rather efficient.

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.

Yeah, but these checks are bonkers. Whenever we get one (maybe 2x a month) the store worker literally takes everything out of our bag and scans it again. It takes forever, and then we have to repack the bag. Don't get me wrong, I vastly prefer it to the scales in the US, but they're terrible and do nothing to prevent stealing (in fairness anecdata, but Jumbo reported they lost millions to stealing and I know multiple people who say they steal from Albert Heijn every time they go).

I believe the difference is living in a high trust society.

Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.

Nah, don't worry. Theft at self checkouts is turning into a national hobby¹.

1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-stij...

Every time I read one of these articles the naivety and tone-deafness from supermarkets over these self-checkouts amazes me.

"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.

The way you phrase it (but maybe I get you wrong) suggests that the customers are somehow in their (moral if not lawful) right to do this because of previous policies from the supermarkets. They (supermarkets) may have been wrong, but so is stealing. They don't cancel each other out, nor do two wrongs become a right.

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.

> booking record high profits

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.

> Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society

"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.

Most ways, as the research of Robert Putnam has documented well.

https://wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/downside-diversity

I see no mention of whether they adjusted for age and urban vs rural settings. Dense metropolitan cores, where most economic activity happens, tend to be both younger and highly diverse ethnically as the jobs there attract migrant flows. It is unsurprising that younger people in dense metropolitan "the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects". That's what retired people do.

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.

Turns out, like almost all things, homogeneity has positive aspects, too. Weirdly enough, this almost seems like forbidden knowledge depending on what political side you are on.

Also, as Denmark recently discovered, homogeneity is not simply dependent on a social safety net but exists within a symbiotic relationship with the latter.

One of the biggest hurdles to getting a social safety net past public perception in the US is that people are easily swayed against it if they're told that people of other races will benefit from it. A certain portion of the population automatically sorts any public benefit into a weird racial zero-sum game, where any support given to <people of that race> is a dollar specifically taken away from <people of my race>.

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.

Sam's Club does this in the US and it is great.

Dubai also has self-checkout machines that don't require you to weigh anything, just scan and go, and it's an extremely heterogeneous, low-trust society. People are just very afraid of the police and being deported.

Seems to work similarly in Singapore. Low trust can work when there are harsh punishments for violations. But do we really want to live in that type of society?

Do I want to live in a society in which criminals suffer the consequences of their crime? Is this a serious question?

Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.

It's not exactly Japan-level high trust, but it is compared to most other countries in the world.

It really depends; in some areas it's exceedingly low-trust, almost paranoid. In some other areas it's probably not too bad.

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".

Whenever I see anyone use "homogeneous" in this context I always consider them a racist...

Meanwhile Netherlands elected an anti-immigration right-wing government in their last elections: https://time.com/6339173/dutch-election-results-geert-wilder...

23% did, just to be clear.

Being conservative on immigration (and in general) is not necessarily the product of racism.

This exists to some extent in the UK with the self scan widgets. Waitrose had it before self checkouts. It works really well.

That’s not the full story though because there are random spot checks and they’re very very annoying when they happen.

Annoying? A person comes and scans a few of the items on the counter, then leaves again. If that is already annoying to you, you must live a very stressed life

It's super annoying. We'll often have groceries for the next few days, which includes a lot of baby food. So yeah, they're scanning like 40 items, and we have to repack the bag to not squash produce/bread and such.

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!

In Waitrose (UK) stores at least this is not the case. When you are spot checked the staff member spot checks that a few things in your trolley have been scanned. They tend to check some higher value goods like alcohol.

Also those stores, at least where I live, have no physical barrier to exit.

Honestly why did you all have to Brexit. Would have loved to immigrate to the UK. Had to settle for NL.

The scan as you go app is quite good until you get a rescan. The issue there is on the employees handsets. They never seem to be able to log in

Same in Switzerland. I got so annoyed the first time I used a self-checkout in Germany.

There is a lot of theft though, and since supermarkets typically have fairly small margins this is also really cutting in to profit margins. I'm not sure how it compares to the weigh-systems though.

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