It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. 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. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
The problem is that companies don't want that, because they're worried they'd get robbed blind if they did. In a sense it reminds me of the problems with our travel systems; if there were no gates, no security checks, etc, then they'd probably be a joy to use. But people suck so they're not.
Companies want insurance to pay for their losses, and it turns out the only thing the videos find on self-checkout stands is that customers are frustrated that the machine is calling them a thief, when the shoplifters, big surprise, don't stand around in line for 15 minutes to walk out the door without paying.
The loss prevention person at the door is more likely to find items you left behind than to stop a shoplifter, but insurance demands it.
And the false positives on those little loss control tags is so high that most of the time workers aren't even going to look your direction if something sets it off. Once again, this is all crap required by insurance.
Shoplifters don't care about any of this. They just grab what they want and leave.
There's the other kind of shrink at self-checkout where somebody weighs their produce bag of fair trade, heirloom organic apples; and "accidentally" keys them in as the cheap variety. This is pretty common.
I disagree. The majority of the problems that I run into with self-checkout are related to not being able to buy items I picked up off the shelf like Mucinex or children's cough syrup or alcohol without getting an employee to check me out... at self checkout.
What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required—not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process?
Edit: at least with alcohol I know it’s coming. But it feels like every time I try to use self-checkout I’m foiled by surprise rules about particular items.
I always gamble and scan any alcohol or age restricted items first. About half of the time, it throws an alert and flashes but lets me continue scanning, it just won’t let me complete and pay until someone has come over and approved.
For some reason though, some idiot designer who never actually thought about how these would be used in reality, decided to make it so that the other half of the time it immediately stops all scanning until someone comes to fix it.
In the first case, basically I waste no time. In the second, I lose however long it takes for the cashier to come.
The first hurdle with some self checkouts is before you even scan an item: Bags!
If you've brought your own bag and it weighs more than the mass of a few protons, the system assumes you're trying to steal something, and a human has to intervene before you can even get started.
And then they have to come back almost immediately to deal with age-restricted items or other glitches.
Definitely a yes-and scenario here. I was a cashier, I'm good at finding and scanning bar codes and PLU lookups. I was a damn fast cashier. That's impossible in a self checkout. And then you get carded for a can of spray paint, and the one attendant for 8 machines has three people with blinking lights. On top of that, most of these self-checkouts are not designed to handle a full cart of groceries, but also why do I want to do the work of ringing up and bagging a full cart of groceries by myself?
For the most part, in practice there's little or no advantage for me, the consumer with a cart full of groceries.
One exception was 2003-era Martins in Virginia - Walk in, grab a cart that had bags attached to the front, grab a portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and bag as you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register, show the attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done. No unloading and reloading the cart, no fiddling with plu lookups, fumbling with bags, etc. It was actually glorious, but relies on trusting your customers. Corporate stores seem to trust me even less than I trust them.
I'm somewhat ok with these things as a secondary 10-items-or-less option. But for the love of god staff enough cashiers to handle the grocery-shopping-Sunday crowds.
My favorite is when the system says "help is on the way" and then very obviously does nothing whatsoever to notify the attendant. I have to catch their eye myself every single time.
> What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required—not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process?
In my nearby Walmart they have a dozen or more self-checkout stations which only require a few staff in total. Most people don't need assistance.
This seems easily fixed: just ask the consumer to show a driver license or other accepted ID, with some software validating whether it is legit. It will still be slower than a regular cashier judging your full beard and receding earline, but it would remove most human oversight.
Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK supermarket there are cameras on each checkout station, which I guess go to some bored reviewer; so you could just alert the guy "hey, customer X gave us a valid license" and assume that he'll react if he can't see a realistic amount of wrinkles.
That's exactly how it works in the Netherlands, you just scan your items and go. There are no weight checks and you can scan items more than once and edit and remove things from the list. Apart from getting a poorly executed random check sometimes (which is far from effective for the purpose of avoiding theft imho) it actually works really well.
Same around here. Self-checkouts is hugely successful. I'm much slower going through the scan procedure than the person working at the conveyor belt is.. but that's more than offset by the fact that there are a large number of self-checkout counters and I don't have to queue up (for the most part). The only time I use the old non-self-checkout counter is when there are no customers and the person at the checkout looks bored. Then I go there.
Yeah, I think the UX here in the Netherlands is much simpler and easier than in other countries. When I go to the UK (e.g. Tesco Express) I have to select a bagging option, there's no "no bag" option at the beginning of the transaction even though I'm only buying a litre of milk, then when I put the carton down in the bagging area it triggers an alarm saying a store assistant is coming, but they never do because they're too busy serving all the other customers at the regular checkout. So I give up and try a different checkout, blocking the one I've just tried to use for 2 minutes.
This is the same here in Hong Kong. There are no weight checks and self checkouts are rather efficient.
That said I barely use them mostly due to ideological reasons. I don't like to live in a society that completely does away with human contact and until society is really built around a UBI, I think cutting away unskilled jobs is not necessarily positive for society.
Yeah, but these checks are bonkers. Whenever we get one (maybe 2x a month) the store worker literally takes everything out of our bag and scans it again. It takes forever, and then we have to repack the bag. Don't get me wrong, I vastly prefer it to the scales in the US, but they're terrible and do nothing to prevent stealing (in fairness anecdata, but Jumbo reported they lost millions to stealing and I know multiple people who say they steal from Albert Heijn every time they go).
There is a lot of theft though, and since supermarkets typically have fairly small margins this is also really cutting in to profit margins. I'm not sure how it compares to the weigh-systems though.
> It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that.
Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self checkouts.
For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start scanning items and placing them inside.
That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!
I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what, every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10 "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button after the scan.
While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.
I treat the self-checkout as if it has the "10 items or less" sign for an express checkout some supermarkets used to have. If I need multiple bags, it's probably not faster to use the self checkout.
> while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!
this is insane to me and if a manager was involved they should be fired. I dont think its reasonable to review video of a customer without probable cause they were stealing. In this case, the machines are so buggy (as you illustrated with your case) that a machine complaining is NOT probable cause. How to alienate your customers 101...
The first self-checkouts in Norway around 10 years ago implemented this weight thing to prevent shoplifting, but they dropped it pretty quick. Now there's just random spot checks (which can be frustrating enough when it happens). I encountered the weight again last year when vacationing in Denmark. So frustrating.
I'm not a particular fan of self-checkout for more than a handful of non-restricted bar-coded items. But, subject to that caveat I find that self-checkouts in general are far less fussy than they used to be about using your own bag etc.
I just scan the barcodes on my phone and place everything in bag as I go along. Before leaving the store a QR on the POS kiosk display is scanned with the store phone app and I just need to select on POS if I will pay through app (pre-added card info) or physical card/cash. As simple as it gets.
No one checks the products. Occasional random checks happen but the checking frequency probably depends if past checks have found issues, so I get a bag check once a year max.
Here in Finland one retail chain (of the whole multitude of two that operate nationwide) is experimenting with scan-as-you-go approach in a few of their largest stores, and it's awesome. You scan your bonus/discount/client card at the terminal near the entrance, which then lets you take one of barcode scanners from a charging stand (it's only for customers that have said card, but most households have at least one already). Then you put your reusable shopping bag(s) into a cart or basket, and go collect your items and throw them straight into your bags after beeping with the scanner. The carts even have a nice holder for the scanner so your hands can stay free. When you're done, return the scanner to another charging stand near the exit, go to the self-checkout terminal and pay - it will match you using the same client card, which in my case is also linked to my primary bank account (yep, the retail chain runs its own bank, it's a standard Visa and works with GPay). If there are age-restricted items, it will take about 20 seconds for the store employee to come look at my ID and beep their card to allow the purchase to go through (there are also a few other common non-error cases when a human is called). Once in a blue moon they can do a spot check, beeping a few random items from the top of my bag, though that happened to me just twice in two years of shopping there weekly, one of the occasions was at 4AM when I was the only customer in the entire store.
The biggest convenience for me is that I only have to handle the items twice: when I pick them from the shelves, and when I unpack the bags at home. Going to any other store that doesn't have this system now feels like there is a lot of redundant and unergonomic operations.
I have never understood the point of theft prevention at a self-checkout via the weight checks etc. If I want to steal something I just ... don't scan it? And keep it in my backpack. I don't see how the buggy weight checks serve any purpose other than annoying honest customers.
It’s a security feature sold to the stores against a possible but rare attack - barcode swapping.
It even occurs with human checkers but it’s quite rare (barcodes are fixed now, or the stickers destroy themselves if you try to remove them like at Goodwill).
The attack apparently would have you swap a barcode but still on camera scan it which I guess theoretically makes it harder to prosecute but I kinda doubt it.
It also helps catch misscans which is probably much much more common (someone scans an item, they thought it scanned, they put it in bagging area).
I only just learned about the concept of weight checks, I'd assume they weigh whatever you 'present' to have bought and compare that to what you scanned.
If you don't scan it and you put/keep it in your backpack, that's not different from doing the same but going through the cashier checkout right? They already had that problem, so if they keep that as it was but reduce the amount of personnel, that's a net positive?
In Waitrose (UK), they often don't have any scales, and as a result, there can just be one staff member watching over 20+ machines.
By comparison, the other day I was at Tesco and they had introduced these new large self-checkouts for trolleys (aka carts in US), but about halfway through my trolley, I started getting an error for every item I scanned. Turns out, the max weight for the scale was 20kg.
Waitrose are in the process of updating the self-checkouts to full trolley-style machines. My local store is not that large but has 12 of these now in place of the previous 4 old-style machines.
Despite many claims that people don't like them it is surprising how they are almost always in full use.
At the machines I've used in the US the way they deal with this is having you move your items off the scale into a bagging area (which is actually also a scale internally, though not one that needs to be officially calibrated).
It's 100% that. One of the grocery stores near me has no weight checks or baggage area rules. I can easily bag my groceries into my backpack directly, at other stores my backpack is too heavy to be considered my bag and so if I want to do that the attendent has to override it so I never bother. Then since there's no weight check you never run into the "unexpected item in bagging area" or "please place item in bagging area" issues ever where the scale/item weight isn't acting as expected.
> 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. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
The supermarkets in Sweden work like this, the only thing some of they do is random checks. In some chains you do need to sign up with your ID ahead of time though so they keep track if you get caught in a random check.
The big supermarkets in the UK have a "scan as you shop" system. There is a portable scanner you take along with the trolley and scan each item as you put it in the trolley (directly into a bag - avoiding the bagging step).
You then just go to the self-checkout and pay for what you scanned.
They do spot checks at the checkout, especially for "new" customers. It's tied to your identity (need to scan a store card to unlock the scanner).
I think it's a timesaver... even though it takes a bit of time to scan each item with the portable scanner, you get to skip the "unload from trolley -> scan -> load into bags" at the checkout.
The small Target downtown in the college town I live by, has only self-checkout. No human beings at all.
Further, my contact in the Target data center says the scales are disable (too many problems) and the camera showing you on the little screen over the kiosk, doesn't go anywhere but that screen.
So it's working for them, so far. You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
> You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
Most data on the issue of shoplifting in the industry show that the people who shoplift are not ones doing it out of necessity (e.g. they're poor and can't afford those items), most shoplifting is done out of intention and not necessity. This includes categories like underaged people stealing items that are age-restricted, or people stealing items that cause shame to purchase (like condoms, pregnancy tests, et al), as well as the now commonplace problem of shoplifting gangs in the US who steal en masse to list items via Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online markets. People who are productive adults in society very very rarely shoplift, and in the cases that they do it because of mental issues, like kleptomania.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Sam's Club in my location is like this. Their self-checkouts are a computer screen with a mobile scan gun. You pick up the scan gun and scan all the items in your cart however you want. Then you pay, then someone checks 2 or 3 items randomly on the way out to ensure they are on the receipt.
People are saying the same can be done with an app, but I don't want to install another app.
Oh, and the person who checks receipts isn't just casually looking. The person checking receipts randomly scans a few items in your cart and then scans your receipt and the computer tells them if anything they scanned in your cart is not on the receipt, so it's a legit check, and it's fast. The whole thing takes about 15 seconds per cart, and if there is a big line they have the option of just letting people go without getting checked, so I've never had to wait.
I have used multiple self-checkout stations in the United States that weigh items. If you add two cans instead of one into your bag, the computer terminal will inquire about it.
And security: You only need a single person standing there to scary away 95% of shoplifters.
I watched a YouTube video from the channel "Not Just Bikes" about grocery shopping in Amsterdam, Netherlands showed a supermarket where you carry the "pricing gun/lazer" with you and "beep" each item as it enters your basket. I have no idea how they reduce shoplifting. Can anyone comment?
You can get randomly selected upon checkout where they will sample a few items from your bag, and if it finds a discrepancy they will rescan every item you have.
These hand held scanners have been a thing for over 10 years, way before the current iteration of self checkout stations. They continue to exist side by side with self checkout stations at supermarkets mainly.
It also should be noted that I have not seen a single self checkout station in the Netherlands that puts restrictions on how you scan your items. It doesn't care about weight and in what order you scan and put items into your bag or if you just keep holding the items, and I never have any issues with this system breaking or complaining about anything.
Scan as you shop minimises shoplifting by requiring random spot checks. When you about to checkout, person comes and re-scans few items in your bags, if all were scanned you are good to go.
We have that in some places in the US as well. Stop and Shop has little mobile scanners or apparently you can use an App instead. They say they might randomly check your bags when you leave, but it only happened to me once.
I was at my local Vons the other day and had two identical boxes of rice at the self checkout. Scanned the one in my right hand and put the one in my left hand in the bagging area, then tried to scan the one in my right hand again (this was all to speed things up just slightly).
The screen threw up a message asking me to check on what I had put in the bagging area. Below it was a video of me shot from the ceiling, with bounding boxes drawn around the two boxes of right (basically identifying that the thing I had scanned was not what I had put in the bagging area).
I was actually pretty impressed... at my work we do some computer vision work, and we're dealing with fairly high-resolution, static images. This managed to draw perfect bounding boxes on a video, and the whole thing processed in less than a couple of seconds.
Seems like if you can do that, there ought to be other ways you can speed things up. Currently for produce with no bar code, I have to type in the name of the produce and then weigh it. They ought to be able to identify it as a zucchini via computer vision and skip the first step, at least.
Yes, exactly my thoughts - and they seem to use lower spec hardware leading to a perceivable delay between scanning -> putting on to weighing station -> able to scan next product.
Unless this is as designed too, for whatever reason, but this is what stops me from using them as I get frustrated.
The other thing that stops me from using them specifically in Lidl is that you cannot put a hazelnut croissant and an almond croissant in the same paper bag unless you take one out before you put it to weigh.
That's another good point. Self checkout machines are likely designed with lower specs in mind due to shops needing to either needing to have more of them (since there are often only 1 or 2 regular checkouts compared to 10+ self checkouts) or because they feel the expense of a better touch screen/recognition system is better justified if it's for a system the staff are using rather than the general public.
> It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. 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. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.
I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.
Many self checkout systems check for the weight of scanned items, so if you scan an item you have to put it down (“please place item in the bagging area”) in order to continue.
Self-checkout relies on high trust. There are places where this works and shrinkage is manageable, but that seems to be higher income areas.
So it works in Norway or Japan, but put this in Indonesia or Honduras or even in small city USA and it’ll run into problems. It can work in areas of larger cities where most of the clientele are high income, but it’s bound to fail in most other areas.
> 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.
I think coop/365discount has that. You scan the items with a mobile phone app while taking them of the shelf. You just show the digital receipt to the cashier while jumping the queue.
My experience with those is again they are ruined by overzealous anti-theft measures. Someone needs to come in and scan random items, which means you can't pack as you go, and it doesn't seem to let up even when it's tied to a loyalty card so they know you've used it before. After the system said the whole shop needed re-scanning, completely obviating the advantages, I've just stopped using it.
IMO it's exactly this. Back when I was a teenager I worked at a supermarket and was able to scan a basket of shopping incredibly quickly. But the self checkout machines have so many pauses and errors that it's impossible to do anything at speed.
At Walmart, where I often shop, they have an overhead camera watching to make sure every item gets beeped. Sometimes I get stopped for that. Maybe that system is the bottleneck to faster scanning, or maybe they want to try to avoid double-beeping items and pissing off their customers so they set up a debounce. It would be great if stores were more open about their implementation.
> scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it
My local Walmart allows this. Not sure what the impact on their 'shrink' is, but they must've decided it was worth it to keep lines moving. It's a very busy store.
It seems to be a setting the manager can choose to change. Some Walmarts near me basically seem to have the scale off (a ten pound unexpected item doesn’t even phase it) and others seem tuned quite narrow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they could change it based on time of day. And changing it based on rewards card or loyalty would also seem to be possible.
> It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. 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. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple times if you were buying multiple copies of it.
A lot of them literally do work this way and just accept the risk of shrink,.
I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful, simply drop everything in!
And wait, there's more: did I say drop everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything? just put it in that basket, insert your CC and it's done. You don't get easier than that...
So yes, let's keep self-checkout, and focus on improving it!
It seems that in general, the US lags behind in retail technology.
In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout.
The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
The ones in Australia aren't perfect though. I use Coles and Woolworths mostly in the Sydney CBD:
- bad touch screens that lag.
- even more lag when you're trying to pay.
- frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging area, or some other reason
- unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap and pay.
I still use them most of the time because there is almost never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.
Data point of just 1, but even in a small college town in the Midwest US, 50% or more counters at the grocery stores I've visited have been self checkout. Some places are almost entirely self checkout, to the point where if you need assistance it's hard to find an actual person employed by the store.
On a trip to a sparsely populated part of Norway I hadn't been to before, I ran into my first unstaffed grocery store. You checked in with a bank card (they did that thing with reserving a 0.50 transcation) and it was self-service in there. Presumably someone would be in from time to time to restock the shelves.
I've used a few libraries that work like that, probably going back 10 or more years now. I was a little incredulous the first time - "You mean I really just plonk down a pile of books and press 'loan'? No individually placing each one spine-first in a tag-deactivator?"
I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with disposable ones
Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still uses barcodes.
No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and helping lower our environmental impact.
I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).
But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver.
I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big shopping day.
For larger shopping, I like to use the scanning gun.
I get that it's used to track me, but the fact is I get to track the price, pack items as I go and just pay on the way out.
> Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now).
something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore?
or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store...
maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
When I started looking at RFID tech in 2004, the disposable tags cost maybe $.50-$1 but general consensus was the costs would follow a Moore’s law like trajectory, halving every 2-3 years until they were on even the cheapest items. And yet here we are 20 years later and I don’t see RFID checkout systems very often at all. Are the tags still really expensive? Or is it the extra cost of attaching them to packaging?
Or just type the name of the vegetable or just copy the 4-digit code on the sticker attached to the vegetable. At least in the US there is no problem with buying vegetables in self-checkout.
Some stores here in Norway uses computer vision to identify the produce, I tried it out last summer and it successfully identified ~9/10 with the rutabaga being the one it didn't manage, but the touch keyboard was responsive and easy to use for that one.
For things with more than one option (e.g. organic/non-organic lemons) it would show the 1-4 products it though was relevant and I just had to click the touch monitor on the correct one.
I’ll leave a comment I’ve made last time this came into discussion:
Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely:
1) they have very bad interfaces
2) they don’t trust customers at all
3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and
4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)
Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit.
Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.
This is not my experience at all. Can you tell what retailers you are using, so I can avoid them?
If I don't have to otherwise, I only go to the store with a self-checkout near me. There are some ux problems which they should improve but all in all I'm happy.
Same here, not my experience at all. It would also be interesting if the stores are franchises vs corporate owned.
We have Rewe, Kaufland and IKEA supporting self checkout around here and the experience is decent. The interface is not the best. Sometimes a scan fails, but there’s always someone close by who can help.
I've accidentally failed to scan an item in the UK before which was caught during a random check. They just said "don't worry, it happens sometimes" and took me to pay for the item.
I do wonder how differently it would go down if I was a young black man.
As someone living here, besides all those points, I have seen what these machines have made to employment in supermarket chains in Portugal, hence I tend not to be yet another statistic of people adopting them.
Cashiers in the age of self-checkout machines are IMO a good example of a useless job, I'd rather prefer these people do something else with their time.
I would even feel guilty to make them work when they aren't actually needed. Indeed, in the current system if they don't work they don't get money, but to me it's a wealth distribution problem. I'd rather have them get the same money and do whatever they like. It would be a net gain for society and a loss for nobody.
However surely 'riding shotgun' (i.e. being there to help customers when things go wrong) on self checkouts is more interesting than mindlessly scanning items all day? (I don't know, I've done neither)
Furthermore, if there is less work to be done in supermarkets, then people can spend more time doing more interesting/productive work or simply enjoying their leisure. The issue is not that this (or any) automation is destroying people's livelihoods, but that the value added is being predominately captured by the already wealthy.
Portugal does suffer from an excess of 'work is for the workers' mindset, which is part of the reason it is so poor (compared to other Western European countries).
That's a store policy problem; it shouldn't be difficult for them to confirm that a payment has been made for the equivalent set of items within the last 5 mins, and even possible for them to cross reference with your card.
When I got stopped walking out of a supermarket with an item with an RFID tag on it, I don't think the security guard (who had no direct view of the self checkouts) even bothered to check that, just asked me to confirm the checkout that I'd used and roughly how much I'd paid for it. And sent me on my way with the advice that it might be a good idea to ask for a receipt when buying electronic items in case they were faulty and I needed to return them!
That’s the problem with the money incentive most stores have here - what I mentioned in the original post, that the security personnel receives 50 - 100 euros per “thief” caught
You'd think the article was written by a rep from the cashiers union.
I have no bad experiences with self-checkout. None.
Going to a staffed-only checkout feels like going back 20 years in time. They take up more space, they can move slower, suddenly customers will kill the speed because they need to look for their coupons, pay with change, or whatever.
Don’t forget that “cashiers” aren’t a real job anyway, and with self checkout technology it allows someone who was a checker to be inspired to be a software engineer.
All they need to do is drop everything to learn one of the most competitive and hardest cross-disciplinary skills and jump into a shrinking market!
Not saying that they don't exist, but my experience has been nothing but positive. It must be 8-9 years since we got one locally, and it's been smooth sailing for me.
You scan the products. Confirm that you've scanned everything. Want a shopping bag, yes/no? Pay.
That's it. The scanners work. Payment work. Getting a receipt works.
Opinions on self checkouts are age tests. The older you are the more likely you are to hate it. You can basically peg someone to 45/50 or older if they complain. I say this and I'm near that age range. On Facebook: I bagged my own groceries! Is someone going to pay me?!?? And yeahz you're 52? Yup, over and over.
I disagree being a young 26 year old, I have had dozens of issues with self checkout getting stuck for 5+ minutes at a time over things that don't have bar codes and require hand typing. Or Heaven forbid you don't put the item precisely on the scale bench and it flags you as being 0.1 oz off your checkout basket.
They are not hard to clear issues and I could do them myself but only the cashier has the ability to clear those errors and sometimes there is that one customer that is taking the 1 cashier for 8 stalls for like 5 minutes complaining about a coupon.
I think dismissing the issues is sure fire way for more issues to come up.
In the stores here in Latvia, I've had reasonably positive experiences with self-checkout.
I can pack stuff in my bags with no rush (there's usually no line for self-checkout, since not everyone uses it), just scan the bar codes for products that have them and pick from a menu/search for those that don't (e.g. freshly baked goods in paper bags). Then, I can pay with my card, or sometimes have to verify my ID with the shop attendant when buying something like energy drink.
Smaller stores probably won't have self-checkout any time soon and some stores like Lidl don't seem to have it either (the prices there are nice, but bagging your products always seems so rushed), but where it's available, it works pretty well (like Rimi, Maxima).
I really appreciate it being optional, though, as well as having the more traditional option with shop attendants and the small conveyor thing.
I was trying to pick up some food at the only grocery market that was within walking distance of where I was staying. The grocery store only had self-checkout machines. As the checkout line piled up, the payment system failed to process my card. I gave it another try with another card, and after a long wait that one went through. By that time as I was looking around, I noticed that pretty much everyone else around me was stuck at the machines and weren't moving on. I assumed there was some sort of outage going on.
I guess I came within a few seconds of needing to scramble to try to find a way not to go hungry that night. I had plenty of cash on me, but that wouldn't have helped me complete the purchase because the machines simply didn't accept cash. There was no obvious way to get an employee's attention so I could give them my money. They were probably stuck with some of the other customers scratching their heads as to why the magic card charging system, which appeared to have been the only possible way to pay for food at that grocery store, wasn't working.
Agreed - that's been a huge annoyance to me as well. What's worse is many of the self-checkout stations around where I live used to accept cash, but the stores have been transitioning a larger and larger proportion of them to card-only.
Another annoyance I've run into at one store in particular is that the self-checkout machine no longer pre-calculates the tax amount. Now, I have to hit the pay button before I'm given the true amount due.
The self-checkout machines are getting worse over time. It's quite reminiscent of how ATMs have evolved.
The fact that a credit card CAN have an outage is ridiculous. They were invented as an eventually-consistent system first! Just save up the credit card info, and charge the bank when the network connection is back up.
This capability is actually built deeply into the chip payment specification used by most credit and debit cards, but it's fallen out of fashion in favor for online-first processing:
The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores.
Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc.
That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards.
I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)
I completely agree. When I worked as a cashier, we had no problem letting people pay with credit cards even in the event of a full-on power outage. We just used a credit card imprinter, which was quick, cheap, and easy to use.
Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like outages are rare.
It no longer works that way in Europe (or basically anywhere outside the US): most customers and banks insist that they see payments in real-time (in the name of fraud prevention (user-controlled credit card locks are a thing here) and convenience).
Here a lot of places have these auto-cash-counting machines you just throw the money in and it counts it and feeds back to the PoS; MASSIVE noisy machines that are stuck half of the time. So while stores must accept cash & cards, cash is often simply broken and the employee cannot really help anything as they are not allowed to process manually, so they can only throw their hands up.
I'm seeing mixed responses, so it may be a locality thing as to whether machines generally accept cash. For example I remember almost all machines in Japan accepting cash.
The machines at the Whole Foods near my house, for example, only accept cards, phones, or palm prints. Only half the machines at a Safeway near my house accept cash. The machines at another grocery market (Haggen's) are card- or phone-only, and they furthermore show a video feed of you on the screen with a "You're Being Watched by AI" warning to try to cut down on thefts.
The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with the sandwich I bought.
This may be regional or brand-specific. As a data point, the Winco I frequent has seven SCO stations - three accept cash, four are card-only. There is a single cashier monitoring all seven stations.
There's likely a way to use cash, but it probably requires an employee override and a receipt that you take to a customer service desk to continue the transaction.
I would not call self-checkout a failure. Yes things like weight checks are annoying but what self checkouts are great at doing is increasing throughput through a store checkout. Often times I can be standing in line to a self checkout with 10-15 people in front of me and only wait 2-3 minutes because there are 6 self-checkout registers, meanwhile the folks waiting at traditional checkout are still waiting as I'm already walking out.
I'm surprised to read this because my personal experience is they've gotten better now they're at critical mass. I feel like I'm able to get through them quicker than a staffed checkout.
I definitely see the issue with theft. I do suspect that this is a result of tech failures. Customers just go "fuck this, it doesn't scan so I'm not paying." It's not unreasonable, given the issues with staffing them when there are technical issues.
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The problem is that companies don't want that, because they're worried they'd get robbed blind if they did. In a sense it reminds me of the problems with our travel systems; if there were no gates, no security checks, etc, then they'd probably be a joy to use. But people suck so they're not.
The loss prevention person at the door is more likely to find items you left behind than to stop a shoplifter, but insurance demands it.
And the false positives on those little loss control tags is so high that most of the time workers aren't even going to look your direction if something sets it off. Once again, this is all crap required by insurance.
Shoplifters don't care about any of this. They just grab what they want and leave.
What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required—not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process?
Edit: at least with alcohol I know it’s coming. But it feels like every time I try to use self-checkout I’m foiled by surprise rules about particular items.
For some reason though, some idiot designer who never actually thought about how these would be used in reality, decided to make it so that the other half of the time it immediately stops all scanning until someone comes to fix it.
In the first case, basically I waste no time. In the second, I lose however long it takes for the cashier to come.
If you've brought your own bag and it weighs more than the mass of a few protons, the system assumes you're trying to steal something, and a human has to intervene before you can even get started.
And then they have to come back almost immediately to deal with age-restricted items or other glitches.
For the most part, in practice there's little or no advantage for me, the consumer with a cart full of groceries.
One exception was 2003-era Martins in Virginia - Walk in, grab a cart that had bags attached to the front, grab a portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and bag as you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register, show the attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done. No unloading and reloading the cart, no fiddling with plu lookups, fumbling with bags, etc. It was actually glorious, but relies on trusting your customers. Corporate stores seem to trust me even less than I trust them.
I'm somewhat ok with these things as a secondary 10-items-or-less option. But for the love of god staff enough cashiers to handle the grocery-shopping-Sunday crowds.
In my nearby Walmart they have a dozen or more self-checkout stations which only require a few staff in total. Most people don't need assistance.
Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK supermarket there are cameras on each checkout station, which I guess go to some bored reviewer; so you could just alert the guy "hey, customer X gave us a valid license" and assume that he'll react if he can't see a realistic amount of wrinkles.
I posted about this on Linkedin too and got a few comments about the complexity in the UK, USA, France and elsewhere. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samcritchley_it-hasnt-deliver...
That said I barely use them mostly due to ideological reasons. I don't like to live in a society that completely does away with human contact and until society is really built around a UBI, I think cutting away unskilled jobs is not necessarily positive for society.
Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self checkouts.
For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start scanning items and placing them inside.
That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!
I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what, every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10 "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button after the scan.
While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.
I just scan everything and bag the stuff after payment
this is insane to me and if a manager was involved they should be fired. I dont think its reasonable to review video of a customer without probable cause they were stealing. In this case, the machines are so buggy (as you illustrated with your case) that a machine complaining is NOT probable cause. How to alienate your customers 101...
When I've scanned the first item, I put it in the bag that's outside the scale and put the bag with the item on the scale.
No one checks the products. Occasional random checks happen but the checking frequency probably depends if past checks have found issues, so I get a bag check once a year max.
The biggest convenience for me is that I only have to handle the items twice: when I pick them from the shelves, and when I unpack the bags at home. Going to any other store that doesn't have this system now feels like there is a lot of redundant and unergonomic operations.
I use the mobile phone checkout for one of the stores I go to. Every time when leaving, they manually inspect every single item in my cart.
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It even occurs with human checkers but it’s quite rare (barcodes are fixed now, or the stickers destroy themselves if you try to remove them like at Goodwill).
The attack apparently would have you swap a barcode but still on camera scan it which I guess theoretically makes it harder to prosecute but I kinda doubt it.
It also helps catch misscans which is probably much much more common (someone scans an item, they thought it scanned, they put it in bagging area).
If you don't scan it and you put/keep it in your backpack, that's not different from doing the same but going through the cashier checkout right? They already had that problem, so if they keep that as it was but reduce the amount of personnel, that's a net positive?
By comparison, the other day I was at Tesco and they had introduced these new large self-checkouts for trolleys (aka carts in US), but about halfway through my trolley, I started getting an error for every item I scanned. Turns out, the max weight for the scale was 20kg.
Despite many claims that people don't like them it is surprising how they are almost always in full use.
The local grocery store screams for an attendant if a fruit fly farts on the scale.
The supermarkets in Sweden work like this, the only thing some of they do is random checks. In some chains you do need to sign up with your ID ahead of time though so they keep track if you get caught in a random check.
You then just go to the self-checkout and pay for what you scanned.
They do spot checks at the checkout, especially for "new" customers. It's tied to your identity (need to scan a store card to unlock the scanner).
I think it's a timesaver... even though it takes a bit of time to scan each item with the portable scanner, you get to skip the "unload from trolley -> scan -> load into bags" at the checkout.
Further, my contact in the Target data center says the scales are disable (too many problems) and the camera showing you on the little screen over the kiosk, doesn't go anywhere but that screen.
So it's working for them, so far. You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
Most data on the issue of shoplifting in the industry show that the people who shoplift are not ones doing it out of necessity (e.g. they're poor and can't afford those items), most shoplifting is done out of intention and not necessity. This includes categories like underaged people stealing items that are age-restricted, or people stealing items that cause shame to purchase (like condoms, pregnancy tests, et al), as well as the now commonplace problem of shoplifting gangs in the US who steal en masse to list items via Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online markets. People who are productive adults in society very very rarely shoplift, and in the cases that they do it because of mental issues, like kleptomania.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So my experience is the polar opposite of yours, self-checkout is just superior.
So it'd have to be twice as fast to break even in terms of "time spent".
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.
What the vendors didn't say was that shrinkage would increase.
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)
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.
If I'm only buying a few items, I find it faster to use the self checkout.
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.
People are saying the same can be done with an app, but I don't want to install another app.
And security: You only need a single person standing there to scary away 95% of shoplifters.
I watched a YouTube video from the channel "Not Just Bikes" about grocery shopping in Amsterdam, Netherlands showed a supermarket where you carry the "pricing gun/lazer" with you and "beep" each item as it enters your basket. I have no idea how they reduce shoplifting. Can anyone comment?
These hand held scanners have been a thing for over 10 years, way before the current iteration of self checkout stations. They continue to exist side by side with self checkout stations at supermarkets mainly.
It also should be noted that I have not seen a single self checkout station in the Netherlands that puts restrictions on how you scan your items. It doesn't care about weight and in what order you scan and put items into your bag or if you just keep holding the items, and I never have any issues with this system breaking or complaining about anything.
The screen threw up a message asking me to check on what I had put in the bagging area. Below it was a video of me shot from the ceiling, with bounding boxes drawn around the two boxes of right (basically identifying that the thing I had scanned was not what I had put in the bagging area).
I was actually pretty impressed... at my work we do some computer vision work, and we're dealing with fairly high-resolution, static images. This managed to draw perfect bounding boxes on a video, and the whole thing processed in less than a couple of seconds.
Seems like if you can do that, there ought to be other ways you can speed things up. Currently for produce with no bar code, I have to type in the name of the produce and then weigh it. They ought to be able to identify it as a zucchini via computer vision and skip the first step, at least.
Unless this is as designed too, for whatever reason, but this is what stops me from using them as I get frustrated.
The other thing that stops me from using them specifically in Lidl is that you cannot put a hazelnut croissant and an almond croissant in the same paper bag unless you take one out before you put it to weigh.
Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.
I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.
So it works in Norway or Japan, but put this in Indonesia or Honduras or even in small city USA and it’ll run into problems. It can work in areas of larger cities where most of the clientele are high income, but it’s bound to fail in most other areas.
I think coop/365discount has that. You scan the items with a mobile phone app while taking them of the shelf. You just show the digital receipt to the cashier while jumping the queue.
My local Walmart allows this. Not sure what the impact on their 'shrink' is, but they must've decided it was worth it to keep lines moving. It's a very busy store.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they could change it based on time of day. And changing it based on rewards card or loyalty would also seem to be possible.
A lot of them literally do work this way and just accept the risk of shrink,.
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In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout.
The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
- bad touch screens that lag.
- even more lag when you're trying to pay.
- frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging area, or some other reason
- unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap and pay.
I still use them most of the time because there is almost never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.
I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with disposable ones
No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and helping lower our environmental impact.
Look up ynvisible
But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver.
I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big shopping day.
something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore?
or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store...
maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
For things with more than one option (e.g. organic/non-organic lemons) it would show the 1-4 products it though was relevant and I just had to click the touch monitor on the correct one.
Yeah, I’ve seen this in a few clothing stores (Uniqlo, H&M, Zara). UHF RFIDs embedded in the tags.
It’s more for the store’s benefit than anything (makes stock takes very easy, for example!), but the neat self checkout is a nice side-benefit.
Not me. I really loathe it a lot, unless I'm buying just a single item and I'm in a hurry.
Increasingly, the self-checkout lines tend to be the really long ones anyway, so using them isn't even any faster. Just more work.
Self-Checkouts have been really problematic in Germany with stores rushing to put them to use and namely:
1) they have very bad interfaces
2) they don’t trust customers at all
3) it’s easy to report cases to the police and
4) stores have people hired to catch thieves and their incentive is that they are paid 50 to 100 euros per report (paid by the person caught)
Now a combination of all of the above leads to a not insignificant number of people having police files for missing an item while scanning. I read about cases about once a week on Reddit.
Aaand I am one of them, luckily without the police report because they saw that it was an error, but with a permanent ban from the store. My mistake? Went to pay, scanned my customer code in the store’s app so I get the e-receipt and the payment failed without me seeing that it failed and I went out the door. Their reasoning for banning me? Should have asked for the physical receipt. I say me having to operate two devices that I’ve never seen in my life and some really bad UI/UX were at fault but at least I’m glad they didn’t call the police.
I don’t use self-checkouts anymore.
If I don't have to otherwise, I only go to the store with a self-checkout near me. There are some ux problems which they should improve but all in all I'm happy.
We have Rewe, Kaufland and IKEA supporting self checkout around here and the experience is decent. The interface is not the best. Sometimes a scan fails, but there’s always someone close by who can help.
DM has indeed some pretty good self checkout tills. IKEA is pretty good also. Obi and Bauhaus are abysmal.
I do wonder how differently it would go down if I was a young black man.
Every once in a while I'm reminded to be grateful I live in North America.
Rather have my actions support the employees.
I would even feel guilty to make them work when they aren't actually needed. Indeed, in the current system if they don't work they don't get money, but to me it's a wealth distribution problem. I'd rather have them get the same money and do whatever they like. It would be a net gain for society and a loss for nobody.
Furthermore, if there is less work to be done in supermarkets, then people can spend more time doing more interesting/productive work or simply enjoying their leisure. The issue is not that this (or any) automation is destroying people's livelihoods, but that the value added is being predominately captured by the already wealthy.
Portugal does suffer from an excess of 'work is for the workers' mindset, which is part of the reason it is so poor (compared to other Western European countries).
When I got stopped walking out of a supermarket with an item with an RFID tag on it, I don't think the security guard (who had no direct view of the self checkouts) even bothered to check that, just asked me to confirm the checkout that I'd used and roughly how much I'd paid for it. And sent me on my way with the advice that it might be a good idea to ask for a receipt when buying electronic items in case they were faulty and I needed to return them!
I have no bad experiences with self-checkout. None.
Going to a staffed-only checkout feels like going back 20 years in time. They take up more space, they can move slower, suddenly customers will kill the speed because they need to look for their coupons, pay with change, or whatever.
All they need to do is drop everything to learn one of the most competitive and hardest cross-disciplinary skills and jump into a shrinking market!
You scan the products. Confirm that you've scanned everything. Want a shopping bag, yes/no? Pay.
That's it. The scanners work. Payment work. Getting a receipt works.
Maybe I've just been lucky, who knows.
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They are not hard to clear issues and I could do them myself but only the cashier has the ability to clear those errors and sometimes there is that one customer that is taking the 1 cashier for 8 stalls for like 5 minutes complaining about a coupon.
I think dismissing the issues is sure fire way for more issues to come up.
Not me (aged 60, happy with using self-checkouts in general, resigned to the occasional glitches)
I can pack stuff in my bags with no rush (there's usually no line for self-checkout, since not everyone uses it), just scan the bar codes for products that have them and pick from a menu/search for those that don't (e.g. freshly baked goods in paper bags). Then, I can pay with my card, or sometimes have to verify my ID with the shop attendant when buying something like energy drink.
Smaller stores probably won't have self-checkout any time soon and some stores like Lidl don't seem to have it either (the prices there are nice, but bagging your products always seems so rushed), but where it's available, it works pretty well (like Rimi, Maxima).
I really appreciate it being optional, though, as well as having the more traditional option with shop attendants and the small conveyor thing.
When I was on vacation in London about 5 years ago when Visa had an outage: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
I was trying to pick up some food at the only grocery market that was within walking distance of where I was staying. The grocery store only had self-checkout machines. As the checkout line piled up, the payment system failed to process my card. I gave it another try with another card, and after a long wait that one went through. By that time as I was looking around, I noticed that pretty much everyone else around me was stuck at the machines and weren't moving on. I assumed there was some sort of outage going on.
I guess I came within a few seconds of needing to scramble to try to find a way not to go hungry that night. I had plenty of cash on me, but that wouldn't have helped me complete the purchase because the machines simply didn't accept cash. There was no obvious way to get an employee's attention so I could give them my money. They were probably stuck with some of the other customers scratching their heads as to why the magic card charging system, which appeared to have been the only possible way to pay for food at that grocery store, wasn't working.
Another annoyance I've run into at one store in particular is that the self-checkout machine no longer pre-calculates the tax amount. Now, I have to hit the pay button before I'm given the true amount due.
The self-checkout machines are getting worse over time. It's quite reminiscent of how ATMs have evolved.
The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores.
Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc.
That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards.
I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)
Why has this suddenly become so difficult? It's not like outages are rare.
Ooof. I haven't seen a SCO with no cash capability. I know cash-handling equip costs but if they don't want pay for that, they might need a cashier.
Walmart may have a couple SCO that won't do cash temporarily - but there will be 10 more fully working.
The machines at the Whole Foods near my house, for example, only accept cards, phones, or palm prints. Only half the machines at a Safeway near my house accept cash. The machines at another grocery market (Haggen's) are card- or phone-only, and they furthermore show a video feed of you on the screen with a "You're Being Watched by AI" warning to try to cut down on thefts.
The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with the sandwich I bought.
I definitely see the issue with theft. I do suspect that this is a result of tech failures. Customers just go "fuck this, it doesn't scan so I'm not paying." It's not unreasonable, given the issues with staffing them when there are technical issues.