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Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

> In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient

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?

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The point is cost savings for the supermarket. That's it. Some customer prefer them, but usually that is the effect of deliberately understaffing the remaining cash registers, or the customer being completely unable or unwilling to interact with strangers.

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 wonder how much theft would be mitigated if you implemented a quasi-random “free item” feature - tune it so there’s a chance the last item you scanned rings up free. Tune it to be a 2-5% discount at most, similar to coupons. Make the customer feel they won something.

That sounds like how Star Market does things: everything is overpriced by a dollar compared to normal grocery stores (which unfortunately are a thirty minute drive from me), but they have rotating “sales” that are $1.00 off. I absolutely hate the store, because they aren’t fooling me, just overcharging me and then claiming I “saved” money.

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.

The worst example of that I know of is Kohl's - everything there is insanely overpriced, but there is almost always a combination of sales, coupons, and sacrificial goats that gets you to normal or below normal pricing.

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".)

It depends how the self-checkout is executed. In our one supermarket here in Germany (Globus) each customer gets a mobile scanner unit and you scan each item as you go through the store and put it in your cart. This has multiple advantages: You only have to touch each item once, not three times. You always know the accurate total price – no more counting in your head. And the actual checkout process is just the payment (plus the occasional random spot check), so there's almost never any lines. All in all makes for a much quicker and more relaxed shopping experience.

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.

> There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day

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.

> "There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day,"

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.

But having 1-2 cashiers is only the norm now because of self checkout. Prior to self checkout there used to be nearly all lanes staffed at our local grocery and wait times to checkout were low.

Well, not at my local Coop. They have three cashier stations, nowadays one or two of them are manned (and the third person is free to assist customers where needed).

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).

My coop has the worst of all worlds. There used to be four self checkouts, but they removed two during covid, and another one after it developed a fault. So you have one self checkout, with a member of staff that has to juggle baby sitting it and manning a basket checkout. It would be much quicker if they just removed the last self checkout and had the staff member man the checkout full time.

At my local store there is 1 cashier with one of those conveyor belts machines, and 6 self-checkout machines. The cashier and the conveyor belt machine takes up about room as 3 of the self-checkout machines, and operates at about the same speed as one of the self-checkout machines. Plus obviously it's more expensive as you need to pay the wages of the person standing there just to grab your food and bring it to the infrared scanner one by one.

So my experience is the polar opposite of yours, self-checkout is just superior.

Traditional checkout takes two peoples' time: one scanning and the other waiting. Self-checkout only takes one person's time.

So it'd have to be twice as fast to break even in terms of "time spent".

What makes you think it wouldn’t be twice as fast, assuming the same number of items was being purchased? That certainly seemed to be the case at my local Whole Foods before Amazon ruined it.

In 99% of cases I don't have time to wait because the cashier is so fast I can barely keep up putting the scanned stuff back in the cart. If I do self checkout I have to do both of those things myself, meaning I am guaranteed to be slower.

Because you don't stand in the queue to the cashier and don't have to wait minutes till the buyer in the front finds all the spare change they need.

Instead you stay in the queue for the self check-out, and have to wait minutes till the buyer in the front figures out how to scan their items.

I've never seen a queue for a check out where regular queue wasn't 3x as long. To a single till no less.

My neighbor works at a Walmart in the US and observes the following: They won't usually have more than 2 or 3 cashiers signed in at once. The cashiers are either elderly people who can't scan super fast or young people who don't care. So most people go to the self checkout unless they have a cart brimming full of stuff, and even then she sees more than a few go through the self checkout anyway.

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.

> Is this Walmart being cheap

> $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.

It's about the cost of the checkout staff, not speed. Stores were told that if they bought 4 self-checkout kiosks they could eliminate 3 checkout staff (keeping 1 to monitor 4 kiosks).

What the vendors didn't say was that shrinkage would increase.

Yes, some shops are, and I lost count of the times when me, carrying a basket with a few items, was behind several other shoppers with huge trollies full to the brim. Pick a busy time and all the lanes are held up like this. Now we have self-checkouts for baskets only, and life works much better.

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)

> There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day

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.

> 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.

Maybe Aldi has unusually high professional standards. When I worked in retail as a teenager there was an obvious split between the adults who had been working there for ages (and were exceptionally skilled and quick), and the high school/college students who were there for summer jobs.

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.

Many grocery shops in European cities are fairly small, especially near or in the city centre. They might only have room for two checkouts, or one checkout and 3-6 self-checkouts.

If I'm only buying a few items, I find it faster to use the self checkout.

"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."

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.

best self checkout is when the store gives you a handheld device to scan products right b4 you put them in bags in your cart. When you approach the cashier, they just scan your qr code and prompt you to pay. After that you just take your bags and go... Even faster if the bags are from bicycle and you just put them in the back and go...

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