Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

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My first comment was in jest, but perhaps it wasn't making the point clearly enough:

The children of the 2020's will find it inconceivable that you DON'T deliver some package to your neighbors on the way home from the grocery store :)

We are moving in the direction of cost-cutting and streamlining so much that many jobs really are going away, the prices of goods are dropping, and fewer people are working. Who would have thought, twenty years ago, that YOU would be the checkout person, and the bagger, at the supermarket? (Yes, non-USA people, they still have bag boys at many supermarkets!)

The service jobs that are not being replaced by robots, are being done by you, in the name of "self service" to lower costs - and they pass the savings on to you! ;-)

This move makes perfect sense and it is a natural progression of the trends that have been happening over the past years and decades.

I'm not convinced. The self-service registers at the Walmart near me took up nearly 1/3rd of the space at the front of the store. Well people suck at checking out. Either they don't know how the machines work, move too slow, or have a problem with the scanner/price check. The lines were getting long and people were getting pissed at having to wait because the damn machine didn't think you actually put the bottle in the bag.

A few years ago that Walmart moved into an even bigger store. Before it was consumer products and some groceries. Now it's 50/50 with a bank, Macdonalds, and dentist. That self-checkout line has been reduced to 1 lane with 4 machines.

The cashier may be disappearing soon but it's not being replaced by self-service. Compared to a good cashier they are ridiculously slow. If anything they will be replaced with good computer vision or RFID.

I had the same reservations when I first saw these machines, the software was buggy and hard to use and people just weren't used to it.

However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems.

The queues are dramatically smaller, the software has gotten better and people are now more used to using it.

They are still slower than a human checkout for very large quantities of shopping, but if I want to make a very large order it's easier just to do it online anyway.

However a few stores near me have now removed human checkouts entirely and just have 1 member of staff floating around to deal with problems.

Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique where you may buy half a dozen things and I've done it at the Boots, CVS, Apple store. But that bi-monthly food shopping trip, complete with coupons, is completely unworkable with those machines.

I've found my online shopping has actually decreased because I'm eating healthier. I'm eating more fresh veg and meats which you need to physically inspect. Plus, the online shops have a 60-100€ minimum and I can't plan that far in advanced.

"Like the Apple Store? Who has done away with the idea of checking out completely. I can see self checkout working at a boutique "

Apple and boutique same thing high price and margins on the products (generally).

Important to factor in that at the Apple store the margins are extremely high. So this is not the local drugstore making pennies when selling razor blades.

You can't really lift the computers and desirable products and the other things come with enough margin to cover any theft. If you've ever priced some of either the add ons (like hard drives) laptop bags vs. what you can buy them on Amazon for you can see how much they are making and that well covers the cost of some shoplifting.

And on the Apple products even larger. An Apple lightning to 30 pin connector sells for $39. I wouldn't even want to guess how cheap this is to manufacture (I'm talking about marginal cost of course) in other words what their loss is if one is lifted.

This was at Tesco, if the queuing is short enough perhaps you don't need to buy so much stuff in one go and if delivery gets cheaper then online purchasing gets more attractive.

Don't blame just the users. The machines suck. They take what should be a simple scan and swipe, and add latencies to everything to make it slow and painful.

Then they don't trust you (which perhaps makes sense), so if you do something off-script, it halts the entire process.

Self-checkout

Problem: Wal-Mart has an awful time getting cashiers to show up for work (apparently they aren't paying enough or aren't selective enough when hiring). But the shoppers keep showing up.

Solution: Let the shoppers run the check out.

I don't know, there's a huge difference between self-service, in which I do something for myself instead of relying on an employee, and the idea presented here: doing something for someone else which normally would be performed by a paid employee. I care about getting gas into my car or getting myself groceries, and as a not-very-social person, I see some value in just doing it myself (edit: or at the very least, I don't mind). But what do I care about joe schmo down the street and the jazzercise DVD he ordered from Walmart? I am not remotely interested in dropping that off to him.

Maybe if Walmart wants to pay customers to do it? Just lump that in to their shipping fees? But then they're kindof employees at that point. Or at least something like a contractor.

An oddity in all of this is that Wal-Mart has been removing the self-checkouts from here in Canada.

The comment I got from a family member who is a contractor for them is that they removed them due to the fact that there was an increase in theft upon their installation. Having been unable to reign it in, they have since been removed and the express check-outs were doubled.

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