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Comment by fennecfoxy | Hacker News Reader

And the self service kiosks/checkouts at supermarkets. So infuriating! Like I'd have to try to make something that slow myself on purpose!

Besides the fact that scanning a barcode seems beyond much of the general population, they do it so sloooow.

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Some of these are just dumb terminals with the entire state handled on a server. I've seen a bunch of them freeze at once where no UI would respond (but the interactions were buffered) and then when the network hiccup was over they all unfroze and reflected the input.

The self service kiosks are intentionally throttled when scanning barcodes, at a guess to prevent people accidentally scanning the previous/wrong item - I once had some problems with one and a staff member flipped it into supervisor mode at which point they were able to scan at the same rate you'd see at a manned checkout.

I think that's handled by the barcode scanner itself, at least on the ones I've used. The scanner will not recognize the same code immediately, but will immediately pick up a different code.

What's slow is that after each scan it needs to check the weight which means it lets the scales settle for one second before accepting another scan.

Now take that, and add someone in our Polish supermarket chain (Biedronka) having the dumb "insight" to disable "scan multiple" option. Until ~month ago, whenever buying something in larger quantity, I could just press "Scan multiple", tap in the amount, scan the barcode once, and move all the items of the same type to the "already scanned" zone. Now, I have to do it one by one, each time waiting for the scales to settle. Infuriating when you're buying some spice bag or candy and have to scan 12 of them one by one.

Idt that's it, at least in my experience.

I scan as fast as a manned checkout (I did my time in retail). And I can scan my groceries at the speed whilst the people next to me spend most of their time rotating an item to find the barcode.

I found that checkouts in Belarus in cheap store are terrible. Checkouts in Latvia in cheap shop are slightly better.

Checkout in Rimi, premium Danish store are superb. Work well, UI clean and clear. No ads, no excessive clicks.

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