Tesco trials giant trolley scales in Gateshead
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I thought that RFID was supposed to solve this 20 years ago. All stores have anti theft scanner that are the last line of defense but I never see anyone approached if that alarm goes off any more.
So what is a technically sane way to solved the self scan problem, and avoid replicating the security theatre at airports?
Sign in with the app then you scan the barcodes as you put items in the cart and I think it does some combo of weight and camera stuff to verify. You can also see/edit the list of everything it thinks is in the cart on the cart's display. If it does mess up (rare) you can fix it on the spot easily and without assistance.
Then you just go walk through the designated dash cart checkout lane, it blinks green and you're done and you walk out with the bags and the receipt is in your account history. Unless you need an ID check for something then an employee has to assist but they're generally pretty quick, but most of my trips don't require it.
Compared to "traditional" self checkout it's WAY better.
Oddly our local Whole Foods, is just a couple years old, and has very poor self check-outs. They error out on random bar codes and stop until a human staff member unlocks them. The Prime barcode scanner is “broken” half the time, and can’t be overridden by the human staff. It’s bad. I go on the human side now exclusively, where they also have hilarious problems. It's like grocery store management peaked, was utterly and perfectly solved, but Whole Foods can’t stop trying new things that only make the shopping experience worse.
Fresh seems to also be their technology test bed, and I hope the good parts can spread to Whole Foods as it gets perfected.
They tend to have a zillion aisles operating, with the cashier picking up and scanning every single item directly from your cart. At the exit there's always a 'check' but it's pretty farcical. Somebody glances at your cart, glances at the receipt, and then stamps it in about 0.5 seconds total.
The only downside is the requirement for self bagging (she simply puts the items right back in the cart - even if you bring bags), but that obviously wouldn't change with self checkout.
To me people pushing for self checkout sounds like somebody preferring self service over full service gas stations - I find it difficult to understand.
For gas stations, it’s faster for me to not have to wait for an attendant. I don’t have to let someone else touch my credit card and/or give them my zip code. And I don’t have someone else continue filling the tank after the pump automatically stops, preventing gas to drip down the side of the car.
For retail stores, self checkout is quicker, as stores are mostly not staffed well enough to compete with the self checkout lanes.
I love self-checkout as long as they give you the scanner to carry around (or mount on the shopping cart). The entire shopping process is just so much quicker, havent waited in a checkout line in years. The same amount of space for 3 cashiers can have 10+ self-checkout machines as least.
> To me people pushing for self checkout sounds like somebody preferring self service over full service gas stations - I find it difficult to understand.
Might be cultural, but full-service gas stations sound bizarre. Why would you need an attendant to do something so basic? Like a lift operator to press buttons for you.
Fewer employees to hire and manage. Seems like a straightforward benefit. I haven't seen a fully staffed grocery store in what feels like fifteen years but is probably more like five. This feels like a continuation of the same "disruption" that predated widespread self-checkout.
There are also people who claim to hate interacting with cashiers but I have a difficulty imagining this is the majority of people.
Hence moving to AI
> Once you get to a checkout, hi-tech cameras above the self-checkout machines now track all items being scanned and bagged.
> After that, smart gates will lock automatically to prevent anyone with unscanned items leaving the store, sounding an alarm in the process.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/eat/coles-introducing...
Those two points are infuriatingly well rolled out in Australia since that article - if your bagging technique does not match the AI model or the color of your fruit/vegetables does not match the AI model for the thing you choose, even if the weight is correct, it requires a staff member. If any shopper in the self checkout area has violated the AI, nobody is allowed to leave the store until the staff member does their check (it's like those automatic gates you'd see on an office building lobby).
The local Kroger tried to push those a while back, and then at some point they disappeared again.
Apparently they're losing less in shrink than they would paying cashiers, so it works out for them.
I have to say I'm guessing about that last statement because I have no idea, but if it wasn't saving them money, I don't see why they would do it.
I do notice that nearly every self checkout lane has no cash accepted though for some reason, at least by me.
Target and Whole Foods have minimal oversight and the machines are efficient and permissive. Delightful!
Costco has machines that are not permissive and complain a lot. I find this odd, considering that Costco is members-only and double-checks everyone when they leave.
IKEA has one employee per 1-2 machines. The machines are terrible. The scanners are unreliable, and the machines are slow beyond belief. I suspect they’re accidentally quadratic (with a bad constant factor), and I’ve had to pay part way through and start a new transaction to make forward progress at a reasonable rate. The employees might be there more to babysit the machines than to deter theft.
We are going to have to come to terms with the reality that for the first time since the plague employable humans are scarce. Now do you want them to work at Ikea or work in a hospital or school?
This assumes self-checkout is as efficient as a cashier? I'd say a good cashier is at least 5 times faster than I am, some discount store cashiers maybe even 10 times faster.
That's on purpose so they can monitor for theft from the customers and colluding cashiers. I worked in a grocery store with 1980's era IBM terminals and they were lightning fast compared to modern machines. You could throw cans rapid fire with just a twist across the scanner and have nearly 100% success.
I assumed that barcode scanners were solved technology and should be able to identify a smudged label in microseconds. If I were going to steal something, I am not sure what the slow experience does to deter that.
The places I go regularly seem to have units that work fine for me. It’s very very rare I get a warning about bagging stuff. And I can scan at a pretty good speed.
Not practiced checkout clerk high speed, but plenty fast to the point the limit is often me finding the barcode.
I can say I find the CVS machines slow the few times I’ve used them. Possibly Home Depot too but I have little experience.
But at Target, Whole Foods, and two local grocery chains it just hasn’t been an issue.
The UI is slow if you need to enter a code for a vegetable or when you hit pay, but for scanning it works fine if I ignore the slow prompts and just go at a comfortable speed.
The ones at my usual store have accent lights that turn green when it's willing to take the next scan. The machines register scans perfectly if I wait for the light and dont even try if I don't wait, which used to look like being flaky until I noticed what the lights did.
> Are the self-checkout isles busy taking pictures of me from every angle before they approve the swipe?
I'm pretty sure it recognized my bananas the second-most-recent time without me having to find them in the menus. But then the most recent time I had to look them up again...
There was also a time that another customer whose station happened to be facing towards the waiting line needed staff assistance with something, and it made the (clearly impatient) staff person watch a video of the person scanning things before letting them do whatever it was they needed to do.
It would be so easy to cache the last few items for repeat scans (after all, the list is right there on the device, so it even has the data in memory). And I guarantee Tesco has a profile of my usually-bought goods tied to the Clubcard that I scanned to get the scanner. After all, that's why they want to railroad everyone into having Clubcards. So why not have the system pushing likely next scans based on what I just scanned, combined with where it is in the shop and what I usually buy.
Even to a hype-weary AI sceptic, that's a textbook example of machine learning: overwhelming amounts of perfectly labelled data, a great feedback loop (cache hits and misses), and negligible penalty for mistakes (cache miss).
It also means that the embedded developers can't start writing web frameworks into the devices, so they might actually ship this decade.
* The switch to self-checkout overlapped with the push for reusable bags. Some sturdy reusable bags are significantly heavier than others, and at certain stores they choose to make this fail badly (this is by brand, not neighborhood). Sometimes this can be worked around by adding bags gradually when adding variable-weight items. "Skip bagging" is probably how it's supposed to be done though.
* Self-checkout forcing serialization as each item is put into the bagging area. Traditional checkout allows each item to push the previous down the belt.
* Self-checkout often has size limits, either employee-enforced or practical (e.g. by drastically shrinking the item pre-scan and bagging areas; I suppose bag-weight errors also count for this), even if this conflicts with the other major push that stores have ("spend more in one trip!")
* Some items (mostly produce) lose their label and/or don't have one in the first place, and are hard to look up too. Admittedly, this is largely a matter of competence and I've had employees make errors on the same things.
* Items with ad-hoc discounts may be handled badly in several ways ("x% off" stickers usually require employee assistance; full-blown price-replacement are more likely to work but can fail if the original barcode wasn't fully covered)
* Sometimes the scanner beeps, but it's a rejection beep rather than an acceptance beep and those of us who don't spend all day doing this can't tell the difference. If you continue scanning and it keeps beeping, it can be difficult to resynchronize once you realize the problem.
* If anything at all goes wrong with the price of an item the system does register, noticing and arranging for the fixing of it is entirely on you, while you're busy doing work. With traditional checkout, you both have another set of eyes and are not distracted during the process. IME this causes problems at least one per month, and some of the errors reek of at-least-borderline fraud (four common kinds: 1. advertised price only applies to packages of a particular shape/color/size despite literally all the writing being the same; 2. "selected varieties" arbitrary excluding certain flavors/varieties which is impossible to check unless you can make the buggy app/webpage navigate through the huge list; 3. advertising a product not actually sold in the store (or removed for just this week) but then putting a similar-looking item on the shelf; 4. arbitrary limiting a particular digital coupon to the specific store in town you have selected, even though the exact same coupon is also available to those who select the other store). With a real employee, you have someone who both prompts and knows how to simple handle things like "did you enter your rewards card correctly?" [which can be done in parallel - though on one rare occasion they actually finalized the checkout, changing it to card-reader mode before I could finish entering it!], and is always available to handle errors immediately rather than requiring you to queue for customer service. Because of how frequent errors are (and just how terrible many customer-service people are at math), on the rare occasion that a pricing error is in my favor at a grocery store, I do not feel at all guilty about just taking it (all other kinds of IRL store have thus far dealt with me honestly so I remain obligated to do the same).
Surely a moment's reflection on the state of the UK at the moment would offer some ideas about why this is.
Self checkout offers a (supposed) benefit. No waiting in a checkout line with 9 people or huge carts when you want a few things. Or maybe you don’t want to interact with a cashier.
I’m not saying the benefits have worked out, especially when places replaced all cashiers either self checkout instead of supplementing.
But there is nothing inherently draconian about it to me. I like the option of self checkout and often use it.
Those scales in the picture just scream “prove you’re not a criminal, scumbag”.
There used to be nothing pleasant or helpful or anything like that about them. And if people have to walk through them they could be weighing their customers too. Used a loyalty card? They know your weight!
Hopefully they aren’t doing that. But you get my point. It actively feels hostile. The supposed benefit of finding things that got double scanned seems incredibly unlikely to me. That’s clearly an excuse.
If you’re not going to pair something like this with a very big benefit, like a one in 100 chance of getting your entire cart for free, why would anyone opt into this if you can go to a different store instead?
Don’t necessarily disagree with you though, I feel like there’s a decent likelihood it just slows everything down in practice.
So what? This seems like such a weird thing to be concerned about. Do you get upset when you are asked for ID when you buy alcohol? Or when a police officer asks to see your driving licence?
>why would anyone opt into this if you can go to a different store instead?
Because weighing your trolley only takes a second and still saves time over scanning things manually?
This is Gateshead, so a fair question actually 8P