I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything.
Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_checkout_scanne... (Image uploaded 2011)
Surely this exists elsewhere too, or been judged to only work in certain contexts (like a high-trust environment like Sweden) and won't be the next realistic step.
When I moved to the UK, what surprised me is that Tesco self check out is so much more cumbersome. It weighs your stuff, stops working when something isn't exactly the right weight. Super annoying to use if you're used to the system used in Sweden and The Netherlands. But that was in stores in the middle of central London, it may be very different in more suburban "big" stores which is where it was first rolled out in NL as well.
And how that's set usually has more to do with the store's location than anything else.
I notice Costco has self-checkouts now.
I stopped using it after they required using their loyalty cards/apps to use it.
I also use one loyalty app only when I get an offer.
I’ve never seen a difference that huge before.
I think they just really want to display one price and charge a much higher one to most people.
Looks like they had it in 1996, 28 years ago. https://www.supermarketnews.com/archive/safeway-uk-expands-s...
You maybe don't know that Sweden is consistently near the top of shoplifting statistics in Europe.
I lived there for my first 20 years, and have since lived in Spain. The amount of trust between people in the Nordics is definitely higher than most other places in the world.
I just scan everything at the end. Not really any different than going to self checkout.
I also use checkout as a time to organize my groceries for unloading at home.
The main usage I see is mainly self checkout.
Please note that I'm biased towards dense areas. We have on-the-go scanning in super stores as well, I feel it's not being used but I could be wrong
its empty because it’s considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service. Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane.
One of those freak cases in behavioral econ where the causality is very straightforward and explicit.
In my own shopping, I just use whatever seems likely to be fastest or less hassle -- for me.
If I've got a bunch of stuff, I'm heading to the cashier because they're better-equipped to handle a volume of stuff than I am at self-checkout.
But if it's just a couple of small items, then the self-checkout seems fastest: Scan, plonk, scan, plonk, invoke the incantation so that it can take my money[1], and pay it.
(Unless one of those small items involves something like beer or something else requiring an ID check, wherein: It's back to the cashier.)
[1]: In my neck of the woods, Wal-Mart gets this best, with as few as one button-pushes required to pay and leave (and there was a time when it was zero button pushes to use a debit card at self-checkout there). Dollar General gets it worst, requiring at least 8 button pushes (with three different input methods! it requires input on two different touchscreens and one physical keypad) to pay them and get on my way.
It is?? I missed that memo. But in my part of the US, the manned cashiers always have a line for them, too.
The frustrating thing is that stores have fewer cashiers, so there's always a line. But often that line is shorter than the one for self-checkout.
Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few years using their "member cards" points, some chains are already up to this with specific penetration targets before they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge they're upfront about it.
Why not? what makes it unpopular?
And then if you are unlucky you hit a random "let's recheck everything" at the cashier which nullifies all the work that you have done.
The fact that you have to remember to scan every time you put anything in your basket is just worse for the mental load I find.
Don't forget to mention that with the manned checkout dishwasher, it's fast and powerful but you're stuck standing there until it's done.
For one thing I think these things take years for broad acceptance and for another the current scanners with their bright and large displays are just what was needed to make it attractive for the young and elderly.
Give a retailer a large display, and they will fill it with ads, with the important info in tiny type. Or even a small display. I've seen user-facing credit card terminals where the small screen is 3/4 ads, 1/4 transaction.
If they'd just put up "Place card against screen here" marker that was 1) where the antenna is, and 2) fully synchronized with when the system is ready for a card read...
Which part of France are you in? Where I am, Paris suburbs, I see it used all the time in Carrefour.
There is a learning curve, which I think inhibits wider usage. I used it a couple of times, and every time I forgot to scan stuff, or forgot whether I scanned stuff, and had to go over the last scans to check.
Isn't that basically what Amazon had claimed they were doing here, except apparently maybe they weren't?
Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.
You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make the added cost worth it.
The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand, Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.
But that said, interesting point. Didn't know the cost of an RFID tag was that high -- after all, Uniqlo is putting them on some pretty cheap clothing items!
For apparel, on the other hand, source tagging is common - even before EPC on higher end goods, Calvin Klein used to sew magnetostriction tags into clothing. Apparel just has so much more price elasticity and loss prevention is a huge part of that industry. Tools are another industry where EPC and source tagging are common, once again, high dollar items with a lot of theft.
I think it’s great, I get to go around the shop with a little laser gun.
The only thing I don't like is that they have added the option to the machines to scan all your things there instead of using the portable scanner. Which in my area has resulted in queues at the self checkout... Which used to be very quick when it was only used for the portable scanners.
Definitely makes big shops easier.
Why not wait a few years until even a can of beans has an rfid tag, put a rfid tag in 4 corners of the cart. You should be able to compute which tags are within the bounds of the cart and allow you to pay.
The hardware to read the tags is still too expensive to put in the carts and not liable to be available as part of everyone's phones that soon so the easiest thing to do is retain the existing self checkouts and just skip the part where you scan anything. Roll up to the front. Tap your prominently displayed cart number or numbers tap your card done.
Reducing checkout to 6 seconds from multiple minutes will obviate the new loathsome situation where you actually wait in line to self checkout and will be close enough to normal procedures that it should be easy to transition to.
I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers is idiotic.
With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while items were being scanned with it.
If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this would be tractable however how do you keep people from stealing or destroying them?
Walmart and Sam’s Club have both had this for years. It is only available at Walmart if you have Walmart+. I tried it when I had a Sam’s Club membership and it was ok but occasionally I’d have account issues, alcohol purchasing issues, and someone still wants to see your app receipt when you walk out the door issues.
We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries. Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers are.
It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
With mandatory paper bags they seem to have made them as flimsy as possible. I can't go grocery shopping when its raining any more, the bags just turn into mush at the slightest drizzle.
Having developed a hate for all those one use bags clogging your trash also helps. I've started doing this before it was the eco thing to do just because I hated accumulating bags.
Walking to the corner store(tm) if that option is available to you requires a bit more discipline, but I mostly remember to pick a bag when leaving home.
So I always bring a bag or a foldable crate, throw everything in while shopping and then put that in the car.
Heck, I even do the 'leave the bags in the car' trick too. I'm going to be using the cart anyway, so why do the extra step at the checkout instead of just loading it directly into the bags in the car.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good way to do it.
Seriously, I have a hard time caring about this.
My current local grocery store has been my local grocery store for most of those 20-plus years. I remember when it was still a Super Fresh. It was a better place to shop then, and had about twice the current staff, despite at that time being quite a bit smaller.
That Giant has hollowed out the workforce is not in question. The question has been why; I didn't know grocery workers here were unionized, but if the union here is as effective as the one I hoped to join in my own high-school summer job days bagging groceries, then this frankly makes a lot of sense as a reason.
So if you have six of the same yoghurt, you have to scan them and then place them in your bag one at a time. And if you have a 24 pack of sodas, you need to haul it out of your cart onto the scales as you're checking out. And if anything goes wrong (item didn't weight what the system expected; you moved the item too fast onto the scales etc) then you get a "please wait while someone helps you", which involves an employee having to come and clear the error.
Unfortunately I doubt you'll ever see this happen.
Sure, it's supposedly possible to buy an RFID chip for 1p - but you can buy a can of beans for 23p so that 1p is probably their entire profit margin.
I've also worked with a variety of RFID readers; none of them can provide reliable reading, even in favourable conditions.
If my Business Studies teacher ~20 years ago was, and still is, correct then they are a loss leader.
My city use it for public transit tickets
They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name, or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that identifies the product and the weight.
At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item.
Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that doesn't involve making other people wait.
This process would work the same, I think, for applications where portable scanners are in-use.
And it has several problems as well with respect to loss (e.g. adding more items to the bag). To deal with that, you'd have to weigh it or count again to verify.
> so you might as well get that done in advance
1. The PLUs are posted on the price signs in the produce section, so it's easy to remember them accurately when I weigh stuff. Entering the 4-digit PLU for starfruit is faster than navigating a list of pictures or searching by name, and is easy when I just saw it a moment ago: Short-term memory is a blessing and a curse, and this process makes good use of it. (I probably won't remember the PLU by the time I finish shopping and reach the self-checkout, except for bananas: That PLU has made it all the way to long-term memory and is 4011.)
2. Stress. The whole time I'm weighing out my produce at one of these fancy scales (I have to weigh it eventually anyway), I am at ease and am free to work at whatever pace I wish. This is not necessarily the case at self-checkout when there is a line of people behind me who simply want me to get done and be out of their way, so they can be done and out of there themselves.
3. The self-checkout line moves faster when my produce is already weighed. This offers me do direct advantage. But unlike some people, I am not a sociopath: Given the choice to make a thing easier or harder for someone else, at about equal cost to me, I try to do the thing that makes it easier for them. So I prefer that the line move faster, even if that doesn't actually save me any of my own time.
tl;Dr, I could behave more like crabs in a bucket, but instead I choose a more-orderly path and weigh my produce in advance.
Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd imagine.
I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost.
Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you).
The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.
Walmart was also working on similar technology, but from what I heard they couldn’t convince suppliers to include RFID tags on all of their products.
I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.
This is actually already somewhat solved. The other day I was at a Safeway and one carton of milk had an unreadable label so I scanned a different carton and put the unreadable one in the bag instead (same product). The system showed me a video of me doing that, highlighting the fact that I didn't put the item I scanned on the bag (!) and asked me to wait for an assistant. Pretty impressive.
Or shop somewhere where they have all that turned off.
You scan your loyalty card (in my case a picture of it on my phone) and it releases a wireless barcode scanner with an android touchscreen phone-like thing in it.
Walk around the store, scan things and put them directly in my bags.
My favorite part is checking out without scanning anything and getting bemused looks (and occasional challenges) from other customers -- sometimes even from store staff.
Definitely saves time in my opinion over any other option. I only need to touch things twice vs 3 or 4 times and the wireless barcode scanner is much more reliable than the cacophony of things yelling at me with the self checkout. Weights don't always match, vision sensors think i'm doing the wrong thing.