Most people who read Hackaday have positive feelings about automation. (Notice we said most.) How many times have you been behind someone in a grocery store line waiting for them to find a coupon, or a cashier who can’t make change without reading the screen and thought: “There has to be a better way.” The last few years have seen that better way, but now, companies are deciding the grass isn’t greener after all. The BBC reports that self-checkouts have been a “spectacular failure.” That led us to wonder why that should be true.
As a concept, everyone loves it. Stores can hire fewer cashiers. Customers, generally, like having every line open and having a speedy exit from the store. The problem is, it hasn’t really panned out that way. Self-checkout stations frequently need maintenance, often because it can’t figure out that you put something in the bag. Even when they work flawlessly, a customer might have an issue or not understand what to do. Maybe you’ve scanned something twice and need one of them backed off. Then, there are the age-restricted products that require verification. So now you have to hire a crew of not-cashiers to work at the automated not-register. Sure, you can have one person cover many registers, but when one machine is out of change, another won’t print a receipt, and two people are waiting for you to verify their beer purchase, you are back to waiting. Next thing you know, there’s a line.
These systems aren’t cheap, which surprised us. A four-kiosk system might run upwards of $100,000. But that cost would be quickly absorbed if you could fire your cashiers and get customers to do their work for free. Faster? Some studies suggest that’s perception. Because you have an active role in the checkout process, it seems faster, even though it is often actually slower. Waiting in line or waiting for a non-cashier to approve things makes it even worse.
But Why?
So why is this a problem? Is it that the technology isn’t ready yet? Is it just poor implementations? Or do we need new strategies? After all, we’ve seen tech like videotape make false starts before catching on. We’ve also seen plenty of new products killed by poor implementation. New approaches are a bit more difficult, though.
One problem may be the whole idea of a checkout station to start with. Sometimes tech changes require you to approach problems differently. For example, Sam’s Club already lets you scan items as you put them in your cart using your smartphone. You pay on your phone; a human spot-checks you on exit. However, they are rolling out an “arch” you pass through, and cameras take pictures from all sides, verifying bar codes and items they can identify. Presumably, it will reject you if you have something extra and pass you if it can validate a certain percentage of your order. Amazon has famously fielded stores where you identify when you enter, load up, and leave. The store figures out what you bought and automatically deducts the cost.
ATMs have all but eradicated bank lobbies and tellers for all but the most complex transactions. But think about this: ATMs rarely fail. Sure, sometimes they are out of service or know they don’t have enough money or network connections and tell you that. But when was the last time an ATM gave you more or less money than you wanted without telling you? Imagine if you had to repeatedly scan your ATM card before it took and then, sometimes, it would not know if you had enough money, so someone had to check on it or you might have to go inside to get the 8th $20 bill of your $160 withdrawal because it only gave you seven bills. You probably wouldn’t use ATMs.
What do you think? Can self-checkout be saved? How? Will it sink beneath the waves only to resurface in 20 years with robo-AI cashiers? Let us know in the comments.
Of course, if you make your living as a cashier, this might not be at all amusing. While we think retailers are missing out by not “gamifying” self checkout — you win 10% off! — we don’t think competing for speed is the right game.
Banner Photo: “Self-checkout not-so-high-tech” by [Anj Simmons]. (WinXP!)
Probably doesn’t help that they originally started using these for express checkouts, but then figured, “Hey why not just replace all of our workers?”. When it was just for express checkouts, it was great.
Came to the comments to say _exactly_ this. When stores started to put in a small self checkout section in ADDITION to the traditional cashiers, it was great. Then they decided, we’ll just expand that, and have NO cashiers… but the self-checkout will still be not at all designed properly for full carts. And now I have to stand in line waiting for people to SLOOOOOWLY go through a full cart that’s wedged in there, as they wrestle with the tiny little bag area. They had a good idea, completely broke it, and are now just getting rid of it entirely instead of going back to the good idea. Drives me nuts.
My local Target reinstated “10 items or less” for self checkout. It’s effective, it made up for the fact that 2 of the 6 self checkouts were broken lol.
I think it works great here in Finland. I would never go to a self checkout if I have more than I can carry on my hands, but if I have only few items and there is a line for the normal cashier I might use one. Never had any problems with them. Some stores try to make me show the receipt to a gate to get out, but I go to those so seldom that I always just throw it in the trash and have to ask for assistance to get out. I hate those places. Our society is based on trust and that makes me feel unwelcome. And my shopping has never been checked anywhere, but if that happened I would probably be so annoyed that I would tell them to keep the groceries if they don’t trust me and just buy them somewhere else. Even if I had already paid I would ask for my money back. But that would never happen. I have been going to the same small store for over ten years at least few times a day and the owner always says hi to me.
At least a few times a day?! I’ve heard of places where it’s customary to buy fresh food every day, but you’re making a trip for every single meal. I guess you can’t beat the freshness!
At least they aren’t paying for the privilege of working out inside a sweaty building with other people? 🤷🏼♂️. Seems healthier than driving 30 mins to buy 200 pounds of groceries twice a week. And better for the environment.
I have a dog that needs walking and there are at least 5 small stores, 2 medium sized and one supermarket within 600 meters of my home so I always combine shopping and walking the dog.
And they still have someone there watching 4 different people looking foolish trying to scan something.
Almost like automation is an excuse to get rid of labor with no care to the outcome. I would also argue against the premise, they aren’t a disaster at all. Instead they are often unmanned, unmaintained and only a few regular cashiers are kept open.
Corporate also pushes customer unfriendly “features” like disabling the mute function for voice.
Yep, ditto.
If everything could be shipped that would cut deeply into grocery stores, and eliminate the question of self-checkout. Eliminate the “locked behind glass” problem as well.
Not really. My elderly mom can’t get out to shop any more, so she must use online grocery ordering and delivery. It solves her problem for sure, but the pickers sometimes screw up. And for things like meat, cheese or produce, quality can vary widely, which is why most consumers like to see and touch these items before selecting.
I was defacto forced to use online grocery delivery for a couple months during covid lockdowns and it blew my mind how many mistakes they would make, or alterations they would make to my inventory if what i ordered wasnt available. The most egregious example was when we ordered tins of formula appropriate for a 0-6 month old and they instead gave us formula for a 6-12 month old, and the solution from customer service was to simply go into the store and swap them. My heart goes out to the people who have to rely on these delivery services.
UK home delivery is pretty good. There are 3-4 big companies doing it you get told about any substitutions can return anything to the driver (even if you just changed your mind or clicked on the wrong thing) and don’t tip the drivers.
Expiry dates can be a bit short and fruit or veg isn’t selected with care.
Substitutions vary from fine to odd. We did once get an undocumented substitution of a bottle of prosecco instead of some roll on deodorant.. only noticed after they’d left and were told to keep it.
I do all my grocery shopping via delivery, as I have an autoimmune disorder that requires me to take a whole bunch immunosuppressants and other fun drugs that mean I get sick very easily, and get very sick whenever I do.
It really is hit or miss these days. It used to be great, back when Giant was running Peapod, and grocery chains had their own refrigerated trucks running deliveries directly from a warehouse – you could even specify how ripe you wanted your bananas.
Now, though, it’s all hired out to Uber Eats and DoorDash drivers, who aren’t on a regular pay schedule and drive their regular old car, and the grocery store staff has to pick your delivery out in addition to their regular work for no extra pay. The results, naturally, aren’t anywhere near as good.
If a specific item is out of stock or hard to find, they’ll frequently just skip it, or substitute it with something completely different – you technically get sent an email asking you to approve the substitution, but it always ends up getting delivered, regardless of how fast I hit “no thanks”. Sometimes drivers will forget a bag at the store, or grab one from someone else’s order. It’s pretty chaotic.
I can’t complain too much, though, as the alternative, especially at the height of the pandemic, would have simply involved me bulk ordering dry and canned goods online and living off of those for several years. This is definitely much, much better.
I still miss Peapod, though.
@Ostracus said: “If everything could be shipped that would cut deeply into grocery stores…” Eliminate the “locked behind glass” problem as well.
In my area everything can be shipped. But I never use that option because of: 1. The ever-increasing cost of mandatory tips for the human making the delivery. 2. The high error rate in what is actually delivered.
As for the “locked behind glass” problem, the solution is simple: 1. Actually punish the crimminals instead of releasing them. 2. Be thankful for and reward effective Law Enforcement.
you want to punish petty theft how? giving them fines they’ll never pay? putting them in prison? I don’t know where you live, but the united states highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world. that would be an incredible waste of resources just to not to have to press a summon an employee to get to the batteries unlocked in a big box store.
I believe the Islamic law system is called Shariah. For theft, your hand is cut off.
These days it starts wth the end of a little finger which is a better idea. Not for hmanitarian reasons – I don’t want people coming to my country so they can get extra ‘welfare’payments and swear that it was an industrial accident..
We used to have a thing called ‘Community Service’, but I think they stopped doing it at some point. And of course, laws (and punishments) vary wildly from location to location.
Perhaps like in singapore – whiplashes and cane strokes?
> giving them fines they’ll never pay? putting them in prison?v
Yes. Fines first, then prison if they keep on racking up fines, then longer prison sentences if they keep coming back. The problem is that there’s just some people who don’t give a s**t and keep on stealing, and under the kind of no-punishment “reformist” systems there’s nothing you can do about it except making life difficult for everyone else.
This is a good assessment.
“Mandatory Tips”? I don’t understand. Either it is a tip – voluntary, or it is a fee, you have to pay. But I do not tip delivery personal. Only the waiters in restaurants.
They ask for tips at the time of purchase. So, you might find that you’ve tipped for a total screwup. I want to be able to tip for good picking service and for good delivery service, AFTER I get what I ordered.
Just dystopia things™
I absolutely love self-checkout in the stores is here, and they seem to be working perfectly fine, so I didn’t understand what the problem is, until I went abroad and tried the self-checkout there. Oh god, who approved this?
In Zurich, the self-checkout is very simple. You basically have the same kind of barcode scanner as the cashier, and you just scan one product at a time, and put them in your bag. You can remove items if you scanned them twice by mistake, and even things that you weight get a temporary bar code generated by the weighting station.
But when I tried it anywhere else, they really made it too complicated. For instance, there is a weight sensor where you are supposed to put your bag, and it will ignore any items you try to scan until the weight of the bag increases. This is incredibly stupid, because it forces you to scan things one at a time. You are not allowed to edit the item list, or correct anything — you have to call the staff for it. In general, everything is ridiculously fragile because of all the additional checks that are supposed to make sure you are doing things correctly, but that don’t work correctly themselves. Just remove those locks and checks and it works perfectly fine.
Your system operates on trust that the people don’t cheat and steal. That’s why it works.
Elsewhere, you have to weigh your tomatoes at the cashier because if people were allowed to print their own barcodes, they would press the “carrots” button that is 15p cheaper.
I’m guessing that people are still held accountable for theft in Zurich.
there are random checks
Just dont piss off that cashier by buying an apple and not get a sticker. Ask me how i know but it had to be a SPAR in Zurich
It’s amazing when citizens, the government, and business mostly mostly work together like adults. The benefits for all are a clean country with low crime, and mutual trust. CH Rocks!
Yeah, the Swiss tolerate only the mega-criminals like big pharma, bankers, FIFA/FIBA and similar.
Or maybe they have a better social net, so people don’t feel the need to steal food to feed their families.
Exactly …
But a sufficient social net requires exactly the same: people responsible enough not to abuse the system.
It’s a myth that poverty causes crime (there is a correlation, but not direct causation, and crime causes poverty too). Many people steal for fun or entitlement, not out of necessity. And I agree with Jabberwock that a social net doesn’t prevent stealing it just creates new ways for people to steal, by abusing the system(fraud) or by stealing in addition to relying on the social net. Also a poorly designed social net will create an incentive to remain impoverished instead of helping people to escape it.
Here self checkouts work great.
I’ve used the systems he’s described at the local grocery chain. They’ve now doubled down and replaced that model with a new one that does exactly what he says.
He didn’t quite describe how bad it is. You scan an item you drop it in the bag, you wait for the system to unlock while the scale settles… then you can scan the next item.
It’s completely possible to get the same total item accuracy without forcing a stall between each scan. You let them scan and bag then at the end (or opportunistically) you perform a total weight check. The new system also has a much faster UI, the old one felt like it was swapping to disk for each menu load.
I think the only problems with self checkout is refinements. Common receipt paper rolls are probably too small, weight checks can happen when convenient rather than after each item, make it easy to look up produce (not just a static list, top #10 or something quick pick). Allow intuitive things like just tapping/swiping/etc instead of a three level menu system for selecting a payment option.
The Swedish store Rimi (ICA) in Latvia has added very loud beep whenever someone scans a fruit or a vegetable just for this reason. The person responsible to look after the machines then knows when to check if someone is cheating. Very irritating and embarrassing.
Same in Sweden. No scales for weight, so far. The only hassle is if you buy goods that might have an age limit, and then someone have to come and clear it. I have no idea about the loss to theft, but there is the occasional check, especially if you buy a lot at the same time.
Same here in Norway. Even the small corner shops have self checkouts, and they really work well.
You had to scan things ONE AT A TIME? Like… like… a cashier? Like the machine you’re using to scan things? Who told you to put the bag on the sensor? Did I tell you to put the bag on the sensor? I didn’t tell you to put the bag on the sensor. Putting the bag on the sensor! This is illusionary, illegitimate, illugubrious! Suzy, make an appointment with Dr. Bison. Tell him it’s for me.
That’s not my experience here in the SW US with self-checkout.
You just scan the barcode and go. Maybe certain kiosk types are covered by different stores and in different parts of the country.
90% the same in the NorthEast as well. Certainly the case with the two major USA grocery chains and WalMart. I always wonder what’s behind the outraged “Nothing Works” articles. That’s not anything I’ve seen.
Tops grocery stores have the horrible kind of scanner in Western NY. Max speed is about 1 item every 3 seconds if I execute the maneuvers PERFECTLY. Each fumble is +5 or +10 seconds, trying to put another bag on is +20, and there’s a 5% chance of needing employee intervention for +60.
Pretty much the same in Finland and for at least one of the shops I visited the last time I was in the UK. Works nicely and is popular and there is no sign of them being reduced in number. There is also always a staff member somewhere nearby if you need assistance.
One UK regional store has just started removing self checkouts. It’s called Booths of Preston and they say the system just doesn’t go well with their customer demographics.
Ah I like this system a lot. A local groceries store here (south west germany) implemented it and it’s great!
In the United States, the self checkout at Home Depot works this way (at least it used to in my area). The store is good about bar coding their merchandise and in many cases supports the manufacturer’s code in addition to their own label. I don’t know about their shrinkage rate, but the customer experience is pretty good.
Retail is an extra step between producers and consumers that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. Every extra person employed in retail increases the cost of goods or commodities for everyone, by extracting their living expenses from the middle of the value chain without really adding anything to it – so wishing cashiers their jobs back is a fool’s argument.
Problem is that General Mills won’t sell me less than a truckload of lucky charms. Retailers are indeed middlemen, but they serve as a buffer between the manufacturer and customer. The retailer can purchase the truckload(s) of lucky charms and handle the logistics to store and sell a whole bunch of individuals their one or two boxes of cereal each.
Deal with food recalls too which seem to be on the rise.
That’s what happens when people expect double minimum wage just to show up, god forbid actually do their jobs.
Get used to it – in our wonderful new society, holding anyone accountable for their own actions is a rapidly fading concept.
People wouldn’t expect double minimum wage if minimum wage were twice what it is.
Imagine blaming the people who are trying to scrape together an existence rather than the robber barons wringing us dry for society’s woes. Bizarre.
Wow… This is one of the most “Check your privilege!” provoking comments I’ve read in a long time…
> People wouldn’t expect double minimum wage if minimum wage were twice what it is.
Why not??
Dude, check your privilege. There are any number of reasons that people become cashiers and most of them involve some kind of desperation. Also, when they eliminated cashiers it’s not like stuff got cheaper- the companies just pocketed the money. Know what side of the labor struggle you’re on. As for me, I’m one of those reasons shrinkage is so high. If they’re going to make me check out my own stuff, I know I’m not working for free.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the case.
Shoving desperate and poor people into retail and services in general is just a symptom of outsourcing and off-shoring all production and industry – and it doesn’t result in any better conditions for the people because the value in the economy doesn’t increase by more people just buying and selling it. It’s just make-work.
Believe it or don’t, but for some, doing a cashier’s job, or waiting a table, or feeding the disabled… are pleasant. It’s only greed that has made these positions so bad-paying that only the desperate will do them.
We have a consumer economy. We need everyone earning and consuming, not just us self-righteous technocrats. Either everyone has a job they can live on, or society has to throw money at them so they don’t starve outdoors.
It’s not greed. It’s just that there are so many people with nothing else to do, and an economy that doesn’t need yet another coffee shop or a supermarket greeter.
The service economy is based on people doing nothing to replace their own consumption through labor, but simply causing other people to pay more and consume more. The more people who live on other people consuming stuff – adding themselves in between the value chain as middle-hands – the thinner the economy stretches and the greater the social and wealth disparities become.
Think about it this way: the service economy is a homeless person who tries to wash your car’s windscreen at the stop light to have an excuse to demand a dollar out of you. This is every person who tries to “create needs” and sell you something, or force you to pay for something you don’t need.
We have created an entire society that revolves around this point. Basically it’s people inventing ever more elaborate ways to pretend that they’re not just panhandling with an excuse.
Very few people can even imagine how their services actually contribute back to replace the value they’re demanding from the society – yet they’re complaining that they aren’t getting paid enough. It’s a travesty.
RE: Dude’s misc. comments –
Your view is very narrow minded. Of course items could cost less money, if you cut out all the services in between. Personally, I’m thankful for the farmer, distributor, and retail outlet. Go ahead to the country and dig up your own potatoes to save a buck.
You don’t think retail adds value? Are manufacturers supposed to each have there trucks deliver to you? Are to going to buy your milk and bananas on amazon?
Why dump on service industry? You should start your own restaurant chain, for people like you. Patrons can cook and deliver food to their own table.
So a guy trying to make a buck by offering to wash your car window is a problem for you? GOOD! Chances are he has no other option because of people like you. Likely not his image of paradise.
You only see the value as it affects your wallet.
Seems to me your theory is if only we could get rid of the poor, we’d all be rich.
Seems to me, if we’d get rid of the ignorant self-righteous, we’d all be happier.
>You don’t think retail adds value?
Yes. You already admit the same.
Contrary to what you’re saying, I’m not claiming that the producer – the farmer – adds no value. They do. The distributor likewise adds the value of transportation, but the retailer adds no value: products go in the store and come out at greater prices, and nothing about them is improved. If we could get rid of this part, we would all be better off – so how can you claim that retail adds value, when the removal of it would mean we save value?
> You should start your own restaurant chain, for people like you. Patrons can cook and deliver food to their own table.
That’s what I already do. By cooking at home, I save the time and effort (fuel etc.) of going out to a restaurant and paying five times the price for my dinner. What value does the restaurant add exactly?
With the money I save, I can buy other things – more useful things. It’s not like I’m going to sit on it like some Scrooge McDuck.
>You only see the value as it affects your wallet.
On the contrary. I see the loss of value in wasted effort in the entire society. The guy who tries to wash my windscreen is in his predicament BECAUSE of it. Even if I pay him, I’m not helping him. Even if I spent all my money on artisanal coffee and buying fancy dinners, I’m not helping anyone.
Services may contribute towards the production of value, but services themselves do not create new value, so the more people in society try to subsist on doing services for the sake of services alone, the less value we have to spread around and the greater the prices. In other words, the service economy itself creates and sustains poverty as people are merely trying to find excuses to get money out of each other rather than working to create the value and wealth they actually need.
>Seems to me your theory is if only we could get rid of the poor, we’d all be rich.
My theory is that we won’t get rid of poverty simply by paying the poor money.
People become poor when they lack the opportunity to create the value they need for their own sustenance. When a large group of people consumes more value than they create in a free market, the workings of the economy tends to make them poor. The grand illusion of service economies is that the other people are then supposed to be throwing money at these poor people, by consuming their services to keep them afloat.
You might as well mandate going to the circus every week as a form of social aid for poor clowns and knife throwers.
Another way of looking at it is to note that the service economy exists so the rich people would have cheap servants fighting over the scraps and crumbs that fall off their tables.
By replacing basic production, manufacturing and industry with imports and outsourcing, and replacing the working class with a servant class, it doesn’t matter if we pay these people welfare or give them our pocket change at the street corner; there’s no way up for the poor because their very means of self-sustenance have been taken away. They can be only lowly paid servants, or beggars.
Re: “Dude”‘s comments:
You’re only evaluating services based on YOUR need for them.
Personally, I can’t understand why someone would pay anything more than $1 for a cup of coffee. But, obviously, to a huge part of the population, it is of great value to have the Starbucks or equivalent experience. So it is with retail. I like the convenience of driving 5 min. and getting what I need immediately. Clearly seeing all my options at the store and handle them is another advantage.
Sure, you can cost cut and streamline everything, to where it’s a gray, boring world.
Enjoy your dreams of your Utopia (Dystopia to me). My guess is you’re an closet avid retail buyer, but can’t admit it to yourself.
I can only imagine your view if retail didn’t exist – “Why do they keep sending me brown bananas, bent 2 by 4s, dinged … What we need is a place where you go in, see what you like, pay for it, and take it home!”
>You’re only evaluating services based on YOUR need for them.
No. It’s just a case example. For what it’s worth, a lot of people could save money by eating at home instead of going out every day of the week, and then use the money on something more productive.
The absurdity is that you work for hours to have the money to have someone work for you. It’s an illusion of convenience, because you’re always paying more in your effort than the effort you actually get back, because of all the business overhead and taxes/profits etc.
Why not just cut out the middle person and work directly for yourself? Flip your own damn burgers and you’ll get twice as many.
> I like the convenience
That’s exactly it. Convenient, but not necessary as it goes for basic living standards. In other words, we’re talking about luxuries. Paying a dollar to have a cup of coffee handed to you is a luxury.
I’m not arguing against having luxuries per se, I’m just pointing out that trying to rationalize consuming luxuries as somehow helping poor people is absurd and ridiculous. You would help the poor more by NOT consuming luxuries and spending the money directly on their welfare.
>It’s an illusion of convenience, because you’re always paying more in your effort than the effort you actually get back
Unless of course, you’re rich and your wages are much higher than the average, so your hour of labor is paid many times their hour of labor – but that just goes back to the point about how the service economy is about rich people having poor servants. For the average person, buying services is a losing deal.
You know what was the main thing that amazed Gorbachev when he visited the USA just before the fall of ussr? The grocery store. The value they add is by sourcing, organizing, displaying, and just generally facilitating the purchase of these items. They hunt for the best price for items (so they can add more markup, but still effectively lowers cost for end consumer) you are discounting the practical benefits of specializing. For example, travel agents almost died off with the rise of the expedia and priceline sites that directly connected the airlines with purchaser, until apparenlty recently when they again began to show benefits by finding deals that became lost in the mass8ve deal sites as well as offering more coordination services not available elsewhere.
My point there is twofold, 1 if a service is offering no benefit, capitalism encourages undercutting and the death of that service. And 2, specialists become more important the more crowded a service market gets, and it seems everything is getting crowded.
Appropriate user name…
So you admit to stealing from grocery stores, say that most cashiers are there because they are desperate and still have the gall to tell someone to “check your privilege”. What an asshat!
Don’t know where you live, but cashiers make very good money and have good benefits (they’re unionized) and would be insulted if you suggested they were desperate. It is people like you that make all the extra checks required and slow things down for everyone else. Stop looking down your nose at people who are trying to do honest work, perhaps you should check your privilege.
As far as them pocketing the money when they were able to cut costs, this is absolutely true. When they had to pay extra out of their pockets to cover increased wages and benefits I doubt you were crying for them to increase costs. That’s how business works. It is competition that changes prices much more than just profits.
No disagreement from me regarding Herr Asshat and his(?) “… check your privilege…” remark, and the virtually limitless gall that’s requisite for any and all with the nerve to thumb their noses at anyone who’s choice is to do something different from what they do for a living.
I’m going to take issue with your comment slash opinion that “… cashiers make very good money and have good benefits (they’re unionized) …”. I’ve no idea who told you that; to what stores you’re referring; whether this was something you read in a newspaper that’s local to your area, or how in heaven’s name you came to surmise what you stated. I am certain that your assertion, at least, accross the entire retail grocery industry, is patently false.
I’m more familiar with numerous sectors of retail than most people who actually work in it, and know far more about all the little bits and pieces of it than you could imagine. Starting at some point in the 1970’s, I began writing computer software,
interfacing hardware from various vendors, developed various devices that were – and are – used for a variety of settings in “brick and mortar” retail establishments. And in warehouses. I’m not going to continue enumerating the things I developed and built; I’ve listed plenty already.
One thing I would note is that of the stores where the employees in individual departments or throughout the store unionized – they went out of business at łeast 20 years ago. The one chain that’s still around today paid there employees well enough that they didn’t feel they could justify the additional effort of unionizing, and didn’t feel they would make nearly as much after union dues and other costs. From what I recall, a quick cost / benefit analysis showed each employee would take home about $1.50 less per hour. So, the chain grew, slowly and carefully, keeping their stores suppliable from one central warehouse, initially. They eventually built at least one other, but never expanded to the point that they couldn’t resupply a store in a day.
Are you the person who made the bug in retail/grocery store software where if something sells out quickly, the system notes that no one is buying the thing any more, so a restock order is not made?
I’ve noticed this trend with different flavors of chips, milk, and more across many stores. A certain flavor will gain popularity and the whole stock will be purchased by the consumers. Then, after some time, it will never be restocked again. I can only guess that the system is seeing that particular flavor’s sales drop (because there is no stock, even though it is in demand) and it subsequently assumes that since no one is buying it, no one wants it.
I take it you don’t mind stealing from the people around you. Who do you thing pays for your share of the shrinkage? Because the retailer passes your “shrinkage” on to the other comsumers, it’s the honest consumer that you are indirectly stealing from. If you change your mind about your right to contribute to shrinkage, come join the rest of us humans.
Some feel being inconvenienced allows them privileges. Wrong is wrong. But, there are always those who look to justify there actions.
We need to focus on building better humans not just wiz-bang technology…
“We need to focus on building better humans not just wiz-bang technology…”
Ah, CRISPR and AI.
So humans with six fingers, then?
[Inhibit]
So humans with six fingers, then?
https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/sixfinger-sixfinger-man-alive-how-did-i-ever-get-along-with-five/
Retail is an necessary step between MANY producers and ONE consumer.
Without the retail be it online or in real life, you would have to cultivate and care for each and every seller individually. Retail is cheaper for everyone.
Secondly, you don’t have to pay unemployment benefits to people who provide you a nice place to shop at. Which reduces your taxes.
Since the retail workers are not unemployed – the devil find work for idle hands to do – your possessions and loved ones are safer. They cannot commit crime when in work.
And my cashiers are always friendly. It’s nice to meet friendly people.
Retail is necessary, but retail WORKERS aren’t. We would rather spend the minimum possible amount of resources on the logistics of it, so we could spend what we save on the products and commodities themselves.
It’s kinda like government bureaucracy. Doing administration just for the sake of administration is pointless and wasteful.
When they can rid of ALL the workers in a retail store, there will be no more need for toilets. Then what will YOU do. This may sound silly, but wait til you get older and the plumbing has a mind if its own.
My local supermarkets have customer toilets not just for the customers benefit. I believe that they get business rate relief (property tax rebate for those outside the UK).
>Which reduces your taxes.
It makes no difference whether I pay for their unemployment through taxes, or their wages through the prices of products. The unemployment would be cheaper overall, because there’s other costs involved with work than just the workers themselves: all the facilities, commuting, energy etc. that you don’t need to spend if the work is removed.
Ideally, the person would not be working retail or collecting unemployment, but doing something that replaces their spent value to the economy and perhaps even turns a little surplus for everyone.
Not everyone has the capacity to “do something” other than what automation and/or AI take away from them. Not everyone can be retrained with a higher skill set.
So are you saying that automation and AI do not need a facility or energy to operate? And commuting is not a cost to the employer. The employee pays for is own way to work.
The thing that keeps going over your head is that people who do not work do no spend. Spending is the main cog in capitalism. Spending generates profit and if people are only earing unemployment, they can only afford the bare necessities. And robots to not earn any money so they do not spend either.
People who do not work DO spend, either from savings or from unemployment. Just not much. Unless they have a side income that they don’t want anyone else to know about.
If you want to cut cost there are two places to start:
1) payments to stock holders
2) Bring executive payments back in line
Start busting up the power of big corporations. That’s where you lower prices and improve peoples lives.
Your cutting jobs and pay at the wrong end.
Number one is US. Something EVERY single suggester forgets, intentionally I suspect so one can play the, us vs them game.
Before i get slammed: yes, I misspelled “your”. should be “you’re” …
Except that it does need to exist.
One day, sure, automated systems can handle last-mile distribution from massive robot warehouses.
But then again, one day, automation will eliminate wholesale too – you’ll just grow everything you need from you nano factory.
Today, however, retail is how you handle customers who don’t have huge warehouses to store all the stuff they bought for the year in one day.
Sure, but griping about automated point of sale systems because they displace workers is false economy.
It’s ass-backwards to have robots farming for food or building cars and people working cash registers to earn money to buy the food. People talk about “productivity”, but that’s just confusing things. An industrial robot may do the work of ten people, but it can never work more than the ten people can buy, and they can’t buy anything because they’re working for minimum wage in superfluous jobs that don’t create any value.
What you are talking about is capitalism. Nothing more. Capitalism works on the premise that everyone works and earns money. Then that money is put back in the economy from those working by spending it. That in turn fuels the cyclic behavior of working, earning and spending. Companies and businesses make profit off these workers’ spending habits by charging (more than it costs them) for the goods and services they provide. This profit in turn is theoretically is supposed to go back into the the company to make it grow and become more profitable.
So by replacing a worker with a robot, you now have a member of society that can no longer fend for themselves and then become a burden. And since automation is aimed at replacing jobs of people with low skill sets, the chance of them getting work without a higher skill set is slim and retraining is costly and might not work out, even after the training has completed. Not everybody can become a self-employed entrepreneur or an engineer or doctor or an influencer. For some people, being a cashier or working at a call center is about all they can do. That is why they are doing these types of jobs in the first place.
Regardless, they are no longer contributing to the economy but drawing off it. This means everyone else will have to pay more taxes so that these people can be taken care of. Those implementing these replacements are certainly not going to pay for it. And as more jobs fall to AI and automation, the more people will be out of work and need assistance and taxes will get higher and higher.
AI and automation are being implemented in the business sector for one reason only…greed. And this very greed is blinding them to the fact that they are eating their own legs out from under them. Yes they are making more profits now because automation never stops working. It does not need to have a lunch break or time off to have a baby. No dental plan or profit sharing either. But as more people are replaced, then their profits will fall, since robots make a wage nor do they buy anything. And if enough people are replaced, then capitalism will fail since there will be not enough people left with money to buy their goods and/services and their profits will fall accordingly.
Implementing AI and automation only puts a greater burden on society and makes the rich richer.
Well-said.
I will buy into Dude’s version of the lean economy when it also provides a livable Universal Basic Income to everyone, so that the people he doesn’t think we need to have jobs for are free to study, or create art, or raise kids, help seniors, assist in schools, or all the other important volunteer work that society runs on, yet can’t be arsed to pay for.
Back on topic, I don’t hate all self-checkout, just the sh1tty implementations. In most cases it is best implemented in tandem with staffed checkouts. Eg self-checkout just for express.
“And since automation is aimed at replacing jobs of people with low skill sets”
The goal of automation is to make more profit, not replacing jobs.
On one hand some jobs will become obsolete or will be needed less,
on the other hand it will make workers more productive (require less training and/or time to produce the same output) so they can earn more and have more job security, so increased profits can be split between worker and company.
Companies that over-automate things will end up not increasing their profits. There is a careful balance between automation and human labor.
“AI and automation are being implemented in the business sector for one reason only…greed.”
Greed is coveting what someone else has. Increasing your profits by increasing output per hours worked is not that.
If you train generative AI on copyrighted works of art then that is greed in my opinion because you earn money from the work of others.
The idea that the local grocery store doesn’t add value – but has been able to survive for generations as a ‘parasite’ on the economy . . .
Kinda eye-opening isn’t it?
Retail is a necessary evil. The profits it pays to the owners of retail corporations are completely unearned – since retail is a cost, not a contribution, to the amount of value that we can spend as a society. Minimizing retail and re-distributing the labor effort into actual productive work would improve everyone’s living standards.
More cringe-worthy than eye-opening, because it’s wrong.
Of course retail adds value.
Retail – the sale of goods and services itself – does not add value. It serves the point of logistics – of distributing goods from producer to consumer – and in doing so it costs some of the value we would like to have.
Bread goes into a supermarket at a cost of 50 cents and comes out for a dollar. It’s the same bread, the same value, but having this supermarket and the people it employs, and the people it profits, adds cost to it. This is not a factory that improves the bread to make it 50 cents better – it’s a factory that just makes bread 50 cents more expensive.
This is why we do not want to pay for retail itself – any more than is presently necessary.
RE: Dude below “Retail – the sale of goods and services itself – does not add value. …”
So, where you shop, you pay for transport, storage, unboxing, … separately, or is that for free in your town?
Where I am, these cost become part of the price of goods. Yes, the retailer even demands a little something to make it worth his while, too. A loaf of bread 200 miles away has a much lower value than one in my breadbox.
Retail is a value-add because I don’t have the time or inclination to visit every separate factory, field and slaughterhouse to buy every item I hope to eat.
If you offer a service that people are happy to pay for, that offers convenience and time-saving, that’s a value add. Logistics is a value add; stuff doesn’t deliver itself.
“Retail is a necessary evil”
Wrong. It’s not strictly necessary, but very useful, if not we wouldn’t have it. There is nothing evil about it.
“retail is a cost, not a contribution”
While a middle man adds overhead, it also adds value:
-economy of scale: a middle man can sell more goods to more people than a factory could, more goods sold lowers the cost per unit
-lower transportation cost per item: all consumers driving to all individual suppliers is less efficient than huge trucks delivering all those things to a grocery store.
-refrigeration/storage/inventory: factories can focus on production
-handling recalls
-minimizing waste by matching supply to demand and lowering price for goods close to expiration date
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the jobs these things eliminate.
But then, is that really the only way to employ people? Hold labor reducing tech back so people can be paid to do something that could easily be automated away?
If that’s the only way to keep opportunity available for everyone to be employed is it worth it? How is it different than just doing the automation then giving the would-have-been employees a free cut out of our taxes? In some cases maybe that would be better, at least the roads would be less crowded during rush hour.
No, I don’t really want to see free money handed out, nor people paid to do “busy work”. And I definitely don’t want to see unemployment rise. I’d rather see a system that encourages new, useful jobs. Maybe hire more teachers to teach more things to our kids? Maybe hire more city workers to keep our cities nice and maintained? Maybe start up the d4mnd space program again for real?
Ok, enough ranting. Time to go!
Dude, you seem to comment on every single Hackaday article, and always with the most insane takes. Of course retail needs to exist, it’s effectively a distribution network which moves the resources to people. It’s an entirely different task from manufacturing, which is why it’s a separate industry. Having competing retail companies avoids the monopolies you’d get from vertically integrating with manufacturers. In your mind, what kind of jobs “add value” to society?
It’s cute you think the stores would pass on the savings to their customers instead of just pocketing the extra profits. :D
Oh boy we’re going to try and centrally plan things again! I wonder what easily-predictable downfalls there will be this time? How many will starve due to a momentary hiccup in a massively centralized system of essential goods which has no locality or fallbacks? If only there was a very recent history of this we could read about somewhere
Thought experiment: Q) Will people steel more if you let them. A) Yes on the west coast they allowed people to shoplift without penalty and people are routinely going in and just walking out with things. Q) Do self checkouts make it easier to steel? A) Yes if you were in Walmart and you put something in your jacket you might get detained. If however you scan one thing and put two things in your bag you can simply pretend you didn’t realize it and avoid serious penalties.
It seems to me that we simply need more accountability in some ways. Part of the equation for Walmart and Cosco is that the added shrinkage is offset by the fewer workers. The only question remaining is, was the savings enough to justify the initial investment?
It depends on your location – see for example the guy from Zurich in the comments – shrinkage there would most likely be very different.
Umm… No.
Shoplifting allowed? That sounded so ridiculous I had to look it up.
“Shoplifting is a misdemeanor in California with punishments of up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine, according to the text of the measure. While the maximum sentences for some low-level thefts changed, they were not eliminated.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/09/13/post-falsely-claims-shoplifting-is-allowed-in-california-fact-check-theft-prop-47-950-stealing/70827188007/
Sounds like the kind of story the right-wing rage machine pushes to keep the cult members fired up. Did shoplifting spike? Probably did with a stupid rumor like that going around making people THINK they could get away with it.
hard to charge if the police don’t even bother showing up
Wow they have flags in bio on here too, amazing
People who live within a short walk from a supermarket don’t need to do a weekly shop. The advantage of this is choosing what you want on the day, as well as not needed three freezers to store food. This is common in London! Self checkout makes more sense for these customers. It is infuriating when people use the self checkouts for a trolley full of shopping – and worse, when they scan all of their shopping, only to then bag it after paying. Is it SO hard to think that it might be better to put the shopping straight into a bag?
Using your own bag? So, you place your bag down. “Unexpected item in bagging area”… call assistant who can see that you have picked up a alcoholic beverage, but they only approve the bag itself and then walk away, only for you to then have to wait for them to comeback to approve your item. Maddening!
yeah i was thinking the same thing. i don’t really have a preference but i’m very good at self-checkout because i go 3 times a week, doing about 3-10 items at a trip. so i stay in practice, and i care more about time in line than about time to scan, and it’s never a complicated scenario if the guy needs to come over and fix something.
the only thing i hate is a couple months ago kroger pushed an apparent race case between the checkout computer and the credit terminal, and accordingly i’m becoming all kinds of superstitious about the exact right moment to tap my card without sending it into a poo loop. but i also learned how to abort the poo loop without calling the attendant. sigh.
Why would there be a scale? I just put everything straight in to my bag after scanning. If they added a scale I would go back to normal cashier for the inconvenience. And if they had long lines I would just ask if they would open a new cashier because the lines are too long and if they refuse I would leave my shopping there and send them some feedback online. But I only go to the chain that has highest quality and best service and don’t really care about the price as long as the service is good and fast and they trust me. I don’t think I could even find an edible bread in a normal supermarket. Even the butter i buy is from France, has sea salt crystals in it and weeps when you take the butter knife to it.
> Why would there be a scale?
Perhaps your fresh veggies and fruits are pre-bagged and barcoded, but if not, they’re sold by weight; you tell it what you’re buying, and it tells you to place your item(s) on the scale, so it can calculate how much to charge for those grapes.
Even more onerous, in the USA, retailers are calling the police on people who truly accidentally fail to scan something. Personally, I’m careful to listen for the acknowledgment beep for each and every item I scan but not everyone I believe is as careful, resulting in a police interview and quite likely an arrest rather than simply encouraging the patron to rescan.
Exactly. It’s why I refuse to use self-checkout at Walmart (and even went out of my way to abandon a purchase when there were no cashiers on duty at all), because they *intentionally* use the system to randomly accuse people of theft. It’s the same premise as roadside cops randomly selecting drivers to give a speeding ticket to whether they were speeding or not… revenue generation for the police.
I would probably only use doordash in the US. It’s way too easy to get murdered by trigger happy cops. But realistically I would never move in to a shithole like it.
I’ve abandoned carts at checkout also. I think it’s great way to make ones position clear. it’s not legally and morally wrong such as spite-stealing as others have suggested above.
But, Walmart “intentionally randomly accusing people of theft”: Loosen your tin hat.
The article completely ignores the social aspects. Many human beings – admittedly underepresented in the readership here – actually like interacting with other human beings, and the consistent drive to replace social interaction with faceless machines just shifts us further towards the tech disutopia.
We have a winner! Agree 100%.
That’s why I avoid machine checkouts. To say hi and to make sure those people stay employed. Living in a small town I know personally most to the checkout folds. They are not dumb or unskilled, they just need work. Kids, mums, dad’s and grandparents.
Definitely agree with this 100%
A lot of shops around here seem to have no staff at the two remaining checkouts unless there are enough shoppers in the store, which forces you to use the automated ones.
The times where I’ve wanted to give the machine a kick when it says “please wait. an assistant is coming”, “don’t forget to swipe your loyalty card!” or the ever perennial favourite… everyone… together in unison “Unexpected item in the bagging area!”.
It’s nice to converse with a fellow human and I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t friendly on the checkouts in shops.
“It’s nice to converse with a fellow human and I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t friendly on the checkouts in shops.”
That’s called ‘Emotional Labor’, though a coworker of mine once coined a much better term: ‘Non-consensual Conversation’. Pretending to enjoy listening to the customer yammer on is just another tedious repetitive task in the day of a retail worker.
If you want a social interaction, go find someone who actually has a choice in the matter..
If you don’t want to deal with people don’t work in a job that requires it or find one that requires less. Work as a shelf stocker rather than a cashier or even better work the warehouse. Having worked a little of each of these, one is not harder to get than the other.
And besides you can easily pass on conversation by simply not being engaged, people stop trying to talk to you.
But I need the scripted interactions, otherwise I don’t talk to anyone face to face. Someone handing me my change might be the last mooring line to my humanity. If it wasn’t for cashiers I’d have to pay attention to professional sports or go to a house of worship. I’d rather teach the young cashiers the difference between a zucchini and a cucumber :)
> don’t work in a job that requires it or find one that requires less.
It appears many people don’t get that kind of choice.
> And besides you can easily pass on conversation by simply not being engaged, people stop trying to talk to you.
Some people would talk to a wall. Since they’re talking to you, though, they expect an answer.
We have some stores that are opening special slow registers where you can talk with the cashier for as long as you want. It’s because we have pensioners who are lonely and have no one to talk with and it’s good publicity for the store to open a slow register for them. And busy people get the rest of the registers and don’t have to wait behind lonely old people who just want to talk to someone. That same chain has also made all of their stores bullying free safe areas and reminds that every child can come there and ask for help if they are bullied.
Whenever I see someone make this argument, I always wonder if they’ve ever actually worked in retail.
Working retail made me expect more not less.
I’ve noticed that people who work in positions where they have to interact closely with customers for a number of years tend to change in one of two opposite ways.
Either they learn to realize that the person behind the counter or on the phone is just a human being, trying to get by. Most of the time they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, between the Karens and Kens all day making unreasonable demands and the management who will never have to deal with a customer and just wants to wring the most profit out of them… so they become more patient and understanding.
Or they go the other way. I did it! I put up with that bullshit! Now it’s my turn to dish it out! And they become the worst customers ever to escape the bowels of hell.
I have very little respect for that latter group.
Expecting better does not mean you have to treat people badly. You can be patient and understanding but still expect that people working in customer service can try to provide good service.
Working retail is annoying at times and boring the rest of them but it’s just not that hard to learn how to make an interaction with a customer land on the neutral-positive side of the spectrum. And that’s the job.
“Expecting better does not mean you have to treat people badly.”
Of course not! But I have seen plenty of people do it. I’ve watched people who have worked in customer service type jobs turn around and be assholes to others when they are the customer and use the “I worked in ____ so I expect better” excuse for their bad behavior.
It’s sadly a common thing.
I don’t necessarily want to interact with the cashier. I do however want to get in and out of the grocery store with a minimum of fuss and wasted time. Cashiers enable this. Self checkouts are badly laid out, buggy and frequently require an employee to clear a system error like “unexpected item” or “attempting to spend over $100”.
So… make some real friends.
The person behind the counter probably doesn’t even like you anyway.
Think they do? Try that job for a while and see what YOU think of customers.
It’s all fake.
If you need people around who are paid to be nice when they interact with you… that’s kind of sad. It’s like being dependent on some very low level form of escort service.
Do you not think that everyone treating people with decency and kindness when they can makes the world a little bit better? Why shouldn’t the person behind the counter be held to the same standard you you hold the person in front of it?
I was talking about people who want us all to have to wait in line at a slow counter with a cashier chatting it up with customers rather than just check out at the machine and go just because they rely on such transactions for their social interaction needs.
WTF are you talking about?
Either way, cashiers should be nice to customers or they are working in the wrong field. I did it-support for few years and I was always polite, listened to their life stories if they were ready to pay the hourly rate for it and would even take them shopping if they wanted. And when I saw someone having a rough time and almost crying for the bill, I told them how to get the service for free. I never lost a single customer and most customers specifically asked if they could get me to come the next time.
But the boss didn’t have same humane values. The work environment was really toxic and the boss was a capitalist asshole who wanted just to get rich and didn’t care about the workers. I ended up quitting and taking the best customers with me. (the customers already had my personal number, because the company didn’t even provide us with work phones.) And now in couple of months I can finally start a competing business because it’s five years since I quit from there. If I manage to grow it, I will share the revenue fairly with everyone working for me. f.ex. if I open an office and hire someone to do cleaning they will also get a bonus if the company is profitable and the amount will be based on the amount they have worked. So if I have worked 8 hours a day and they have worked for one hour a day they would get an eight of what I get. I could not sleep well if I were profiting on someone else’s work.
Everywhere that has them here, they have as many helpers from the store standing around to help the shoppers checkout as they used to have cashiers.
1. The store still has to have as many cashier qualified workers as without self checkout.
2. There’s always something wrong with at least on self checkout station.
3. Ordinary people don’t have any practice in scanning items – they take longer than a cashier.
4. As already mentioned in the article, there’s more loss when the customers do the checkout – whether accidentally or on purpose, customers don’t always scan all items.
From my point of view, it looks like it costs the stores more than they save.
As a customer, I certainly don’t enjoy doing the store’s job (checkout) and then being stopped and the contents of the cart checked to see if I’m a thief.
The stores should do the checkout, then there’s no suspicion of the customers
My wife worked a lot of years as a cashier, but now they are not cashiers, they are “cashier auxiliaries” so they get paid even less than a cashier. That’s the purpose of the auto checking. Like when AI will do “programming work” and the now called programmers will be “programming auxiliaries” and fix all the mistakes the AI will do ;)
My local grocery chain has a ‘scan-as-you-go’ system. You scan a data tracking card, get a little hand held barcode reader, and can scan your stuff as you go. So you can amortize the scanning into the placing into your carts, and even prebag things. At one of the locations there are three handy kiosks to do this checkout, and since it is quick to pay there shouldn’t be a line. Except it doesn’t work that way. There are usually three kiosks, but usually only one is operational. Or sometimes none of them are. Which means waiting in line for the self checkout kiosk and finishing there. Petty gripe? Yes, yes it is. But half of the utility of using the scan-as-you-go is to relieve pressure on self checkout line.
I think you just hit the nail on the head. Stores moving to self checkout tend to be ones looking for dramatic cost cutting and which seem already to be circling the drain.
Thus they’re already short staffed, unriliably restocked, and the employees are already harried and surly (with good reason) and pushing people who don’t like self checkout to queue for the few functioning kiosks because there are no human checkout lines open just makes it worse.
Self checkout seems to work when it’s truly a choice and the rest of the customer experience is decent (Also, when it’s a choice the design feedback based on how many people use them is valid whereas when they’re the only option that metric becomes meaningless).
At the stop n shop about 10 years ago was a flawless system. On the way in you grab a scanner gun and scan everything as you put it in, all the while loading the groceries into bags in the cart as you went. You could see it in real time and edit it if you messed it up. At the “checkout” was a protected lane where you scanned one bar code, it finalized your cart, pay, and leave. I never once waited in line. About every 8 times or so I would get audited and about 1 minute later was free to go- itself still massively better.
I live in France and so far I never had issues with self checkout, I think it’s pretty popular and even the ones with scales don’t seem to cause issues. Sure sometimes a barcode won’t work, or scale gets it wrong, but it’s usually fixed quickly. It won’t replace regular checkout, it’s usually limited to 10 items. Most supermarkets also offer a portable scanner, you scan all the stuff you put in your cart and just pay at the end. Sometimes you get a random verification, but that’s just as slow as regular checkout.
Yeah, but I don’t want to work for the grocery store for free. I hate these things.
so do I !, the single occasion i tried it, the system blocked the payment for a security check! Imagine , i do all the work and get rewarded by distrust. Never again !
I’d put up with that sort of work and the resulting distrust if it wasn’t for free… say if there was a 5% discount. An actual 5% discount, not a five-finger discount, not a keep-self-checkout-prices-the-same-but-raise-prices-when-using-cashiers discount.
This is why I always use the cashiers and avoid the self checkouts. I have a job already, and it isn’t working in a supermarket for free.
Self checkouts are mostly a blessing, but sometimes a curse. Two occasions during COVID self-checkouts shorted me change; once twenty-odd cents and another .75. Amounted to about 1/2hr total waiting for reps to get my change . Was it worth my time? No. Was I going to let a gazillion dollar company short me? Hell no.
Another issue I have with these checkouts are those that just take plastic for payments and I don’t expose card data for pocket change purchases.
Lastly, at Walmart, those cashiers no longer working registers are usually at the end of the self-checkout lanes monitor feeds on their phones to make sure customers are not gaming the system.
I love the self-checkout. I always get the cutest checker in the store, lol.
No longer does my insulated bag get filled with cans, while cold goods get piled atop my chips and bread. Also I can dispose of all of my loose change without a service fee.
I think the problem with self-checkouts is that, like point of sale card readers, they all work differently and some of them are stone-cold lame. They do not work intuitively and there’s no Help button to tell you what it expects. There’s no way for customers to give feedback so that they get improved. Until you’ve used them a couple dozen times you don’t know half of your options. Walmart’s is one of the best i’ve used though. The ones that weigh your bag as you put items into it are the worst. Constantly complaining and sending for the attendant.
A store I frequent has a vision system that looks at what is being scanned. Tomatoes need to be round and red, cucumbers must be long and green. I recently found out that it also looks at the cart. I needed to make a purchase with my pre-tax healthcare card as well as a second grocery purchase. Flags went up everywhere because I was trying to check out the first order and there were still items in my cart. I don’t particularly care for machines calling me a thief.
I think I have been classified as an honest customer because I have never been randomly checked. It’s probably because in my country only drug addicts will steal and there is no point in making honest customers angry. At least I would take it as an accusation if they wanted to check my bags. I would tell (have done this one time, stopped going there for a year and have never been asked to show my bags after that) them that I will show them the contents if they really want to go this way, but in that case I’m not going to buy anything from there and won’t be paying for these either and they can go and put them back to the shelves.
I’ve read that some stores disallow checking customers carts; don’t know if it’s company or local jurisdiction policies. I know Home Depot used to “check” the receipts of those exiting, with a cursory glance at bags’ contents. Have not seen this done for some time now.
Here’s your fix. Anyone is free to take this and implement it, no need to pay me a license fee, this is free to humanity.
Take your brick and mortar. Have one of every item. (One of each model of air fryer, one pair of a style of jeans in each size, one of each model of table saw, etc.) The customer walks into the store, scans their items for purchase (like a bridal/baby shower registry), then pays either on their phone or at a checkout and walks out with nothing. Nothing to bring in, nothing walks out, customers can put their hands on items to feel, view, interrogate the size/fit, etc.
After the item is purchased, the shopping list is aggregated from a local warehouse, and delivered locally. Guarantee delivery by the end of the day, heck, a lot of people will get the product before they drive home. Returns are also not handled at the store but at a warehouse or other off-site location.
No shrinkage, same day delivery, local returns, easier validation of buying something you want vs. shopping online, more available number of products than a B&M can store today (b/c you only need one example piece), and the same required amount of retail space stays the same either b/c of use as warehouse, returns or shopping space. Should be similar number of employees too; some cashiers or stock people may become drivers, or work in the warehouse/returns facility.
As a benefit to the company, users don’t get second thoughts re: how much their buying walking out w/ huge shopping bags, or have to be concerned for their security walking out to their cars.
RE: ” no need to pay me a license fee, this is free to humanity.”
I don’t think you have to worry about that.
You have to clarify licensing around every idea since, “One click shopping”.
Don’t think you understand. I think the idea is lame enough to never be considered by anybody anywhere ever.
Except it’s already implemented. It’s how most furniture stores now work. There’s only the display items in each store, and everything is shipped from a central warehouse. Only the cheapest flat-pack items or some decorative pieces are sold off the shelf.
Last time I went to buy a bicycle, it was the same thing there as well. Only the display model was actually in the shop, the actual bike arrived a week later. It’s gone this way because keeping inventory is dead money – it binds up capital that could be used elsewhere.
This reminds me of a store (chain, I think) about 40 years ago in upstate NY. The front had display items of everything (household items too, not just electronics, like BestBuys). You put in your order, and 10 min later your item was delivered to the checkout desk via conveyor from the warehouse in the back. I think they’re gone. Anybody remember the name?
Anyway, When I need a Torx set, chances are I need it now. I think we can agree that a drive to a hardware store should be within 20 min. of most residences. So, in your scenario, these stores would not have my item to take along. But, somehow, there will be a huge distribution center able to deliver to my house before I get back. Seems to me, you then would need at least as many distribution centers as display stores. Would make more sense to have the display stores actually have the items available … like it’s been for Millennia.
Don’t start with drones …
“This reminds me of a store (chain, I think) about 40 years ago in upstate NY”
Consumer’s Distributing?
Not a horrible model, just slow. Only efficient for high value items. Nowadays…. Amazon.
DoubleFacePalm, in the northeast that store was probably Service Merchandise. Evidently we had a number of other stores operating similarly here in the Murder Mitten, such as Foland’s.
GetOffMyLawn
“…Service Merchandise…”
Yes, That’s it! Thank You!
Interesting. Drop the end-of-day guarantee though. And maybe limit this to just the stuff people really enjoy or benefit from shopping in person for. Is it really that bad to wait until tomorrow?
I felt guilty a bit ordering stuff I normally go to the store for during the pandemic. Then I looked out my window. The truck was going from house to house. I thought about that, it is so much more efficient than each of us driving out separately. That’s the way we should be doing it.
If we drive out to this brick and mortar try-it-shop, buy something AND it is guaranteed to arrive the same day not only are we driving to the shop and back but the delivery people can’t really run an organized route. Every purchase changes things. This would generate so much more traffic and fuel use!
>Is it really that bad to wait until tomorrow?
If I want to make dinner tonight, it might be a bit inconvenient if the frying pan arrives the next day. The point of a physical store is that you can have the item right now – otherwise you wouldn’t even bother to go there and just order it online.
So you actually do acknowledge the value-add of retail.
Oh SNAP!
I suppose… if you find yourself magically dropped into a situation where there is an empty kitchen devoid of all but a stove and something that gets cooked in a pan. You just kind of appear there with no forewarning and there is no such thing as eating out in your society.
Maybe it depends on the area. I live in a city in northern Europe and if I go to a store it’s because I want that item immediately. Maybe it wouldn’t work in an American suburb where deliveries have to be made with cars, but it could work here where most deliveries are already done with cargo bikes, robots, e-bikes and electric unicycles. But I think the stores should still have somewhat local warehouses for the delivery areas to stay small. But they could combine warehouses and staff between stores. Instead of everyone having one a shopping centre could have one delivery warehouse with its own staff and shops would pay for the service. And it could even have a pick-up robot for those who want to handle the delivery or just get the item to go. That part could could work in suburbia too. Just register your car with the shopping center and have a robot deliver your shopping straight to your car.
This already works with restaurants here. They have opened kitchens where chefs from several different restaurants only make food for delivery and you can even order food from different restaurants in the same delivery. And the normal restaurants are left for customers who want to eat there. I don’t know how much they collaborate, but it could be that the chefs are even trained to make food for all of the restaurants in that kitchen.
I don’t know about you but I *must* try on jeans, shirts, shoes before purchase. Even in the same store, one brand’s 36×32 is another brand’s 38×33. One brand’s regular shirt fits okay, for another brand I really need a tall size. I try on shoes between 9 1/2 and 11 because that’s ‘murica.
For women it’s worse because “size 8” seems to be an undefined quantity. If you’re supposedly a size 8 you (almost always) try on 6s and 10s along with the 8s.
If US sizes were *actually* standardized such that size 8 jeans or men’s 36×32 had the same dimensions from coast to coast…nope, not any time in the next eleventeen years.
Perishable items will be constantly thrown out without a chance at being bought. That’s doesn’t sound very good. What about when you need something right now, like medicine or sanitary products?
The base idea is ok… You’ve just got to work on the unexpected situations. That’s where the current tech fails miserably.
The biggest advantage of the self-checkout in the stores that I go to is that there is one line for all of the kiosks vs a line per human checkout. If the stores had one line for all the human checkouts that would greatly improve the experience.
The Dollarama (Canadian fancyish dollar store chain) by me has that. It works well. (Other locations I’ve been to seem to never have enough people ready to check out at once to need anywhere for them to line up, even though they’re at similar or larger malls.) I think they do it for reasons of space. There are six or so stations sharing a counter (though there are usually only two cashiers working, at least at the times I tend to go there), with a single line where you get to walk by about 5 meters of candy bars and such before you arrive at one end of the counter. Other stores with a conventional layout have to split up their impulse-buy racks between lanes, so I guess that’s another advantage to this system.
The biggest problem with this is that high-shrink products are placed in that same area, where it’s hard to steal them but also hard to shop for them. Alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and batteries are located along the route of the line, with only batteries being obvious as you pass them, and the cleaning solutions being located where you have to grab them in the 30 seconds or so between arriving at the end of the line and being called by a cashier. They moved all of the electronic products (flashlights, clocks, headphones, USB cables, etc.—nothing very advanced, because this is a dollar store) from one of the aisles to low shelving opposite the counter where it’s really inconvenient if you want shop for those items (to yourself because you have to do it either on your way into the store or quickly while the cashier is scanning your other items, and to others trying to reach a cashier because you’re in their way), and where you might not even realize they carry those items because you can’t find them anywhere in the store until you go to pay, at which point you’re facing away from them, distracted by putting your items on the counter and getting out money, and no longer in choosing-items-from-the-shelves mode. I bet their electronics sales dropped by over 50% as a result of that relocation.
I prefer these in both the grocery and a large hardware store chain. This is the only way to have the leisure to pack my own load, not in a bazillion little garbage bags. Backpack and extra cloth bags or a pizza carton usually available at the regular store, there’s always boxes at Aldi’s. Oddly they have only just installed user checkouts but credit card only and they don’t seem to weigh each item after it’s scan.
With the recent wave of mob thefts stores may have to go the way it was done before 1913 at a Piggly Wiggly. A photo of that event shows the near prison or military checkpoint like confining checkout isles that you had to go through. Back then you spoke your needs or gave a list to the clerk at a front counter and they came back with a basket full of goods. Then a transaction then concurred with the cashier. No hurry then, it was a gossip spot in the front of a store. Now online for home delivery or pickup will take on this role. This “clerk” will know what you want and loads more about you than your favorite toothpaste.
This is how it worked at Lee Valley the last time I was there (admittedly several years ago). They used paper order forms. The counter was at floor level, not high up like I’ve seen in old pictures of grocery stores. The rest of the store was just a showroom with a couple of computers you could use to look up items in the catalog (which would end your session for a minute of inactivity or something like that, and which I think ran Windows 98 or so—maybe this was longer ago than I thought).
I think there were a few items you could choose yourself and bring to the counter (like lumps of wood for carving, which you might want to select yourself).
I personally love it; the only caveat is the delay in weighting fruits and vegerables, its a pain. Also of course the theft rate is higher than with human cashiers, so I can see the point of the article.
“Weighing,” danmit.
You weigh the fruit to find its weight.
“Weighting” would be adding weight to your fruit to make it heavier.
I was “weighting” for someone to point this out. To Hair is Human.
I live in Israel. Self checkout works well here. I haven’t seen most of the issues mentioned. It’s card only, so no need to deal with cash. You get the receipt to your phone, so only a barcoded pass for the exit gate is printed. There are random checks that I’m selected for, rarely. Then, some employee goes over my bag and bill to verify they match.
I bet there’s still theft but it just gets absorbed into the purchase price so stores probably dont care unless it gets out of hand which it doesnt seem to.
Self checkouts haven’t replaced traditional checkouts and are nowhere close to it and it’s probably a part of what makes it work. The tech-savvier proportion of clients self selects into self checkouts while the clients that are uncomfortable or have difficult items such as alcohol use manned checkouts. It’s a win-win
FTFY. But I guess (hope) the humans still accept cash?
So they detain you if you don’t buy anything?
Also, Hackaday, please fix your blockquote styling so the closing quotation mark doesn’t obscure the text. It seems to happen regardless of the length of the quoted text, and in both Chrome and Firefox.
Wishing you great luck in your quest…
Maybe add a blank line yourself, in an effort to force it down a row?
A few days ago I managed to crash the SCO. I was using shop and scan app to gather stuff and when I got to the available checkout and scanned the QR to connect my phone to the specific SCO, it popped up a notification needing attendant for help. When she came in, it was displaying error message “Item not found” with option to cancel or continue. Continue didn’t work and cancel got a message about clearing the basket but neither option worked, the attendant was stuck in infinite loop of not getting anywhere with the error message.
She called for another to come and check, the other person couldn’t get anything out of it either and had to force a reboot of the machine to get out of the loop. Lastly, the attendant had to help me re-scan everything on a different machine because my phone no longer had the basket as it was transferred to the faulty machine. So, unexplained machine error ate my shopping basket. I’ve already sent message to the store HQ with the exact time and detail should their IT department want to look at log and see what screwed up.
My brother had it worse. Walmart, very busy evenings, just 2 person handling some 20 SCO and no manned checkout. He had a sizeable shopping done and the machine stopped to get ID check for the beer. He waited… and waited… and waited. The cashier assigned to the set of SCO he was at was busy dealing with 47 different machine issues like expired coupon not scanning, ID check for beer or R-rated movies, etc (what my brother said but I think he exagrated some things) so the cashier didn’t get to my brother for quite a long time.
Since he’s deaf, he never heard the warning from the machine asking if he was still there or not, and emptied the whole basket! Over $200 worth all already bagged. So he ended up having to waste cashier’s time un-bagging everything and scanning everything again because the dumb machine didn’t know sign language and had uselessly short 5-minutes time out.
Machine error, too many customer needing assistance and not enough employee to help, the occasional entitled Karen demanding the 3 months past expired coupon from a different store be used, and the theft are all good reason to restrict SCO to small order and open more manned lanes for larger orders.
When a local store replaced a small fraction of their non-self-checkouts with several times as many self-checkouts, the lines got a lot faster. No surprise here, after all, there are now more lines in total.
The majority of the lines are still manned by humans. If you want to use them, you can.
They are failing as they are utter junk.
Firstly the store expects me to serve myself instead of hiring staff to do it and yet what do I get out of this deal, do I get lower grocery prices, of course not!
Secondly they should at the very least have someone supervising that is quick to respond. Several times in stores where I have been forced to use them as they have no checkout operators, I have had issues such as as the wrong price, the machine complaining about the item not being the correct weight, or simply made a mistake like accidentally double scanning an item. There are often no staff around to help, and even when there are they can’t be bothered. These days, if something goes wrong I just dump everything I was trying to buy and walk out. I don’t care if it is refrigerated or frozen, it can sit there melting on the machine until one of those clueless staff finally notice that there is a pile of groceries going bad on the machine, that they now have to dispose of because it might be spoiled.
So their attempts to save money by forcing me into self checkout has cost them in lost sales and wasted food.
I am glad to see them go. I dislike giving my labor to the store for free. The concept of machines replacing people for tedious work is something I love. But I have yet to see an auto scan that replaces a person. These just swap the paid employee for the unpaid customer. These are the wrong way to do automation.
That’s the same argument people once made for self-service at the petrol station. Yet, manned petrol stations hardly exist (at least in Western Europe). You can scream all you want, but if capitalism can save on costs, they will.
This is true. However, I think there is actually a great opportunity here. I know there is a huge segment of the population that would gladly pay a couple bucks more to not have to handle a dirty, smelly, disease-laden nozzle. What about in crappy weather, or the chance of spilling gasoline on oneself before a date or important meeting? If a chain where known to have both self and attended pumps, I’m sure they could easily increase customers. Charging, say $2 a fill would not be unreasonable, but I bet even $5 or more would be tolerated by many.
If I remember right, a lot of gas stations used to have attended pumps. You don’t see them anymore; they’re replaced by self-serves with “press the button” buttons that you can’t reach, and there’s only one person in the store anyway, usually busy with the checkout. I’m not either disabled, rude, or entitled enough to do that.
My understanding of attended pumps is that they were there largely to reduce people driving off without paying for their gas. This was in the era before pre-authorization on credit/debit cards and you would have to pay in cash or cheque after the gas was dispensed. Nowadays, the machine takes your card, authorizes the purchase, dispenses the fuel, and then charges you the correct amount.
I’ve self pumped gas my entire life, and never once spilled on myself. A little bit drips on the ground or splashes around the gas gap, but I suspect anyone with the dexterity to pour milk into a bowl could handle dispensing their own gas. There are rare instances where the self stop mechanism fails, or someone absentmindedly drives off with the nozel still in the tank. Also the array of buttons can be intimidating if no one has explained the process before, but where I’m from this is all part of driver’s education before you can be licensed, although it is not part of the drivers test.
Self checkout works fine, as long as you ban people you catch cheating. I would rather self-checkout correctly than walk another 300m to the next supermarket.
Here in Russia, in big supermarkets, it’s usually like 15-20 regular oldie cashiers and 10-20 self-checkout kiosks (like those in a picture in this article). And yeah, I hate these devices because they measure weight and require you to drop every item on the right plate.
But smaller grocery stores/chains have started to gravitate towards a better format of 1-2 actual cashiers and 5-7 self-checkout kiosks. The kiosks are better. They have a tall screen where you can clearly read everything without your glasses, and they don’t weigh anything. Scales sit nearby; you weigh your fruits yourself, print and stick a barcode, and then scan it at the kiosk. Usually, a dedicated person does age verification, tends to your problems, etc.
Of course, everything around is peppered with cameras, but I’ve never seen any exit checks or anything like that. It’s dehumanizing and spooks customers to other places in droves.
Theft? Absolutely yes, but generally, people don’t steal here. Once, I witnessed a drunk guy just grabbed a bottle of brandy and ran outside. There was nothing they could do. And everybody knows that if you steal something, the store just gets that money from staff salaries, punishing them. So, you’re stealing from common folk. Not cool.
When I was younger grocery stores were much smaller and the selection was more limited. Cashiers had numeric keypads, good memories and incredibly nimble fingers. We did not have multiple sizes, varieties, brands, organic vs. non-organic, vegan vs. vegetarian vs. omnivores, color choice … Perhaps the produce and bulk goods that require weighing could have a cashier as you leave that area to precheckout those goods. The deli area and butcher already have precheckout to weigh and barcode. Having employees in key areas would make the checkout process more efficient.
The current model leads to an annoyingly high amount of plastic waste for packaging. Why do my carrots, potatoes and onions , apples, oranges, etc. have to go in separate plastic bags for the fifteen minute ride home? Let’s get back to wax paper and oyster pails (that is what Chinese take-out boxes are actually called) for damp goods and paper for dry bulk goods with most produce going into reusable carry-home bags.
In AU there seems to be a move to the SCO models without the scales checking every item. I guess they decided that the shrinkage was worth less than paying someone to run madly between terminals as every fifth item for every customer would complain about incorrect weight and require staff intervention.
They’ve also started making sure there is only one narrow exit from the SCO area so they can pay a single worker to watch it. Problem is, some idiot almost always stops and stands exactly in the exit to check their phone or trolley, rather than walking an additional 2m to a larger area to avoid blocking everyone else.
I find going the a manned cash register works best when grocery shopping for the house. But it’s a black-hole timewise to get in that line if I am just there to buy my weekly lunch stuff for the office. It’s way faster to go through the self checkout even than the old manned so-called express lanes were.
I don’t use the ‘Fire A Cashier’ line unless I literally have just one or two items to purchase.
Faster? I doubt most people would claim they are faster than a full time cashier (excluding trainees), but where it is undoubtedly faster is when you have to wait for the 10 people in line ahead of you to get scanned because the penny pinching business only has 2 lanes open.
I can say for certain, the fastest checkouts I’ve been in have been ones where there is a cashier and a bagger working together, but, most stores don’t want to spend that money on labor. If they are going to skimp on the labor costs anyways, then, I’d rather have the system that has the least time waiting in line.
Ours work just fine and we don’t mind using self checkouts. They do work great here. We do use the cashiers if we have a lot of items which is what they are there for. That said its the cheaters (ok, thieves) that cause the problems. Like any good thing its the bad apples that ruin the barrel. I hear rumors of stores scaling back on self checkouts because of these idiots. Next up (happening in a lot of places) items will be under lock and key. Already have that in the tool section of stores. It boggles my mind there are that many thieves out there that we actually have to lock stuff down. Where do they learn that this is ‘ok’? No morals?
BTW, the plastic bags are reused here as garbage bags. And when we get to many of them, they are taken to the recycle area at a store. Not a big deal.
The problem with shoplifting is that many stores have small margins. If profit margin is 1% you need to sell 99 items to compensate for one theft.
And if 1% of products get stolen you make 0 profit. This leads to price increase which leads to more people going to your competitor and more people feeling entitled to steal which also reduces profits.
Part of it is morals. Very few, if any, people steal out of necessity. Most steal out of entitlement, or for the thrill.
I used to recycle plastic bags too, but I now use only the heavy reusable ones since free plastic bags are banned here.
We have a duopoly in supermarkets and their margin on goods is around 50%.
I can report my experience with a few stores. I’m in Calgary. Generally, when I’ve used self checkout machines, they’ve worked well, apart from the bagging scales on those that have them. On the other hand, while I generally prefer self-service everything whenever possible so I don’t have to interact with other humans to get business done, I don’t mind human cashiers, because their function is very clearly defined and they tend to be very efficient and straightforward in doing it. I guess I don’t mind them because, apart from pleasantries and the occasional above-and-beyond help, they act like machines. Hmm… anyway:
Safeway (a grocery store) used to have self checkout (at mine, four of those in a cluster and maybe eight lanes with humans), but must have gotten rid of the machines years ago (along with the in-store Starbucks next to them), because I don’t recall seeing them there anytime in recent memory. I think they might’ve been gone already by 2018. I did use them when they had them, but I don’t remember anything particular about them.
Walmart still has self checkout, AFAIK. I haven’t been there in the last year or two to see, but it was always 10 or more of those machines and maybe four to six human cashiers. When I used it, I had consistent issues with the bagging scale not accepting the initial weight of my backpack, which I wanted to put my items in. Instead I had to put my items on the scale without a bag, and move them to my backpack (on the floor) after paying, after the light turned green again. When they introduced it, the machines accepted cash, and the bill and coin acceptors and the change dispensers worked fine every time I used them. Later, they stopped accepting cash; you have to go to a human now if you want to pay that way. I stopped paying by any method other than cash not long after that, so I couldn’t use them anymore. Fortunately, I don’t have to go to Walmart often.
Home Depot (a hardware store) introduced it around the same time Safeway and Walmart did, but using what looked like homemade units based on office furniture and regular computers bolted together. (I have no idea if these were ever used in the US. The US and Canadian Home Depots don’t seem to share their ecommerce software, so they might not have shared these either.) Uniquely among the stores I have experience with, they offered optional emailed receipts, where you’d just type in your email address onscreen. (This was the source of a big data breach a few years ago, IIRC. Fortunately, there were no passwords involved.) They never accepted cash as far as I remember, so I switched to going to humans when I started using only cash. Just recently, though, the Home Depot near me (and presumably the other locations) switched to self checkout only! You can now use the self checkouts and pay with cash, but only by calling the attendant over to take your money, visit the cash register, and bring back change. Very inconvenient. Actually, this was about a month and a half ago, and I’d visited only a few days earlier and they hadn’t made the change yet then, so they might’ve switched back already.
Canadian Tire (a big-box store with no groceries and much more hardware, automotive, sports, etc. stuff than Walmart) announced maybe a year or so ago that it was eliminating self checkout at all locations, because apparently their customers like humans better. I never happened to shop there while they had it, so I have no experience with theirs.
There are imho at least 2 failures, the software implementation is buggy, so that’s always going to lead to complaints.
Then there’s the store specific implementation of how it’s all supposed to work too.
For instance, the simple act of taking your own bag really screws up their machines, even though you’re instructed to put your own bag on the bagging tray and start scanning.
Before you can even start scanning, the unit is flashing its red light, indicating that it needs human intervention, store human arrives, possibly muttering, clears the red light, approving your bag to allow you to continue.
User starts scanning, places item in bag that’s been ‘approved’, unit flashes red light again, not 100% certain why but human intervention is needed again, store human arrives, approves whatever is in your bag, user scans a new item… This repeats up to 5 or 6 times (maybe more, maybe less, it’s all a bit random) but store human has had enough of doing their job and now suggests that you take all of the bagged stuff out of your bag or the machine is just going to keep doing the red light flashing thing (this does not always happen), user declines to take bagged items out of the bag and carries on because why should the user be expected to bag their own stuff twice? Store human is not exactly happy but has to comply because… it’s their job!
Now that I know how expensive 4-station self-checkout systems are, I’m not as sympathetic to the companies that make them. Yes, UX design is hard, but it seems like at least some of the usability issues are due to system integration choices made by management. My biggest gripe: most kiosk manufacturers think it’s okay to use standard credit card readers. And these “terminals” don’t work so well even when there is a human cashier. Sometimes that “gling” sound of success is doesn’t mean your payment went through.
Ask yourself, how often do you have to seek guidance from a human cashier while you interact with the credit card reader? Sometimes cashiers have to tell each customer, say, to press the green button before they slide their card in, and too often customers need to ask the cashier if their card or phone payment “took.”
And as commenters have commented already, the UIs of these kiosks are too “stateful.” But don’t worry, with any luck AI will make user interfaces more natural, a lot like a real cashier. Then it won’t be “self checkout anymore.” And grandma will be able to cope with a trip to the store again.
[P.S. Wow! This is possibly the most commented-on article I have, well, commented on.]
I begin by asking for a sorry to fellow brazilians, but in Brazil many people tend to be dishonest.
That said, of course a system like that MUST be well implemented to work.
Here it goes like this: you scan the product, and then put it over an automatic scale.
The weight must be close to the registered in the system, or it’ll pop an error and the store guy will need to verify.
If you try to put another one without scan it first, error…
Bananas and anything weighted will pass by the same guy to create the barcode for it.
It’ll only accept payment by credit or debit card or wire transfer (a system created by brazilian government called Pix, very fast and for sure very suspicious, since the Central Bank can keep an eye on all transactions).
The so called “island” with 8 automatic checkout stations is easily operated by one person, and there’s also some cameras around that help getting rid of swipers.
I don’t know out there, but here these systems works just fine, people learn fast and a line is very rare, and with some training the camera guy sure catch anything wrong on the spot.
Automation that takes away jobs?
No thank you!
I refuse to use self-checkout on principal, with a very short list of exceptions. Every store has decided self-checkout is a great way to have one employee cover 8 checkout lanes and not pay for cashiers. Every self check is loaded up with such poorly thought out / implemented anti-theft logic that it doesn’t save you any time (please put the item in the bagging area and give me 18 seconds to register the weight. Don’t you dare pick up the next item yet.).
So at the end of the day, no, I’m not standing in the same length of line to scan my own crap so that the store can save 0.4% of their budget by not having staff they need to pay.
Complex technology has diminishing returns, particularly for tasks involving the physical movement of arbitrarily-shaped objects. This is also why we don’t have robots loading and unloading trucks, for the most part. That said, I’m neutral on the topic. Stores that rely primarily on self-checkout (e.g. Walmart) usually have gross cashiers who shouldn’t be touching my food anyways, so I’ll deal with the half-broken machines. The nicer places (e.g. Publix) still have mostly human cashiers, and they tend to be pleasant to deal with.
I used to work on the scale/scanners used in the NCR self checkouts and was a state certified scale technician with the the authority to out of service scales that were out of spec. Even though the NCR scale/scanners would auto-zero I still found out of linear load cells and would shut the scanner down until it was repaired and re-certified. While you are weighing small products, you could be losing money by an out of spec scale. Also they do not clean the scale platter very often which can also skew the weight in their favor costing you more. I am trying to get my hands on a set of NIST weights and smuggle them in and run a scale test.
The Amazon Fresh store is a little too far away for me to use all the time, but I stop on the way home from work every couple months or so, and I absolutely love the Just Walk Out experience. You don’t even scan in anymore, you just walk in, grab whatever, stuff it in the pockets of your trench coat, or your backpack or whatever like a common criminal, scan your code on the way out, and your receipt shows up on your phone a while later.
I couldn’t say if it’s working out economically for Amazon, but I think it’s weird that we’re still talking about self checkout so many years after the technology to do dramatically better was introduced.
And I get the privacy concerns, but you’re in someone else’s store, it makes sense for them to keep an eye on you. At least this way you’re getting some value out of the surveillance.
Outsourcing work to the customer IS NOT AUTOMATION! “Automation” I would call a device that scans your purchase without human intervention.
Cashiers are highly experienced professionals and they are at least ten times as fast at the register as you will ever be. Under full load you’ll need 10 checkout kiosks to replace one professional cashier.
Apart from edge cases, like people checking out just one or two items, self checkout has worsened the shopping experience dramatically.
I respectfully disagree. We are usually in the store for just a few items and usually there is always an open self check-out station. So makes a quick checkout/exit of the grocery store or, say, Walmart. Otherwise you are usually waiting behind someone(s) at the checker based stations because the gal in front has a mountain of stuff in her cart. Plus usually get some cash for the wallet too with a click of a button.
The other thing is to try to ‘hire’ cashiers. The old story of can’t pay them enough to get them to work. And when you do, you have down-size and put in machines or raise prices to cover. Can’t win. We see that all over the state. Lots of ‘help wanted’ but not many willing to work to fill the positions (for several reasons that probably shouldn’t be discussed on hack-a-day).
In fact … we have a ‘Highway 55’ fast food that can’t open because it can’t find workers to fill the positions. Brand new building just sitting there.
I use the self-checkouts because the cashiers are snobby and rude, they trash my frozen goods tossing them along. My frozen perogies- smashed!
When I worked in telecom we made British voice prompts for auto-attendant/voicemail and received massive complaints over the woman’s voice was snobby b_tch Queen’s accent and people hated it. We had to redo them all with someone less royal. Very sensitive to local accents.
Self-checkout’s have funny voice prompts – they use a louder, aggressive voice if you pause for a moment or the weigh scale seems off what it expects. They double-scan a lot and what a hassle to do a void.
Wal-mart has several levels of ads including asking if you need financing on your purchase lol. My $10 worth of groceries needs financing!? Beyond stupid and annoying.
No voices here thank goodness, just follow the prompts (if you can read I guess). I certainly like this better than voice…
Manual self checkout systems have been defeated by human nature. Basically theft. Shoplifting.
The systems I have seen that have been shutdown have not been to system malfunction.
Only user malfunction. Some people only scan some of their items, and steal the others.
It’s an honor system, and given human nature, what did we expect? End of story.
Maybe the Amazon systems will work that is a store full of cameras that watch everything you
touch and do. So no checkout system at all. Just pervasive surveillance.
” given human nature, what did we expect?” I would like to think my fellow man is mostly honest and has a conscious…. But I guess not…. Especially when you see the mobs that do smash and grab in certain places… And laws that say if under $100 it is ok to shoplift (Kalifornia) greenlighting the activity…. Interesting world we live in…
Why would you be honest with a megacorp? Want them to pat you on your head and say “good boy” ?
> if under $100 it is ok to shoplift
Apparently that’s a cumulative limit, so if they think that you grabbed that much total over several visits, they can have you taken away.
OK, how many times have you wheeled your groceries out to your car, and as you pull the bags out of the cart and put them in your back seat, you look through to the bottom rack, and you see that case of sodas you forgot to scan. Or that other thing that you forgot was on the bottom rack. When THEY scan the items, the accuracy of the scan is on THEM. When YOU scan the items, the accuracy is on YOU. You may drive home after using the self checkout and find the cops waiting for you to arrest you for shoplifting. Not good.
When I find that I forgot to scan something, I go back and pay for it.
Wal-mart appreciates your honesty. Good boy.
1. Honesty is honesty, whether you’re dealing with a megacorporation or an individual person.
2. Wal-Mart doesn’t care if you are honest, but if you aren’t honest they may send the fuzz to arrest your dishonest ass.
>1. Honesty is honesty, whether you’re dealing with a megacorporation or an individual person.
Lying to bad people is good. Helping bad people is bad. Do not turn the other cheek.
“You may drive home after using the self checkout and find the cops waiting for you to arrest you for shoplifting.”
How do the police know where I live? What if I’m not going directly home? How long will they wait? How did the police find out about the soda?
Here’s one that froze (Zurich / Switzerland). It was running SUSE.
https://i.imgur.com/1bwFLki.jpg
Misleading title – these things are not failing they’re proliferating and honestly I like them, nearly as much as I’m liking the “scan while you shop” thing where I just bip a QR code at the checkout, pay, and walk out.
I can check out my stuff faster than the disinterested minimum wage employee on the checkout, and one employee can (usually) keep on top of 6 or more self-checkouts even with the necessary age verifications and things they have to intervene for. There’s less queueing, I get out of the shop faster, the store saves money.
Maybe the author sees more problems because the US uses more cash? Because here in the UK where almost everyone taps-to-pay these things are far from problematic or unreliable.
We have stores with a different self checkout system.
The customer takes a scanner at the entry (authorized by his customer card) and scans his things as he puts them from the shelves. Things you get at counters or you have to weigh come with a scannable lable.
At checkout the customer scans his card and pays. There are randomized checks of your items where a few of them are verified.
If you get age restricted items like alcohol, an assistant has to verify that and activates payment.
The “scan all your things at checkout” approach is total BS. Maybe for a limited item count, but surely not for a whole cart full of stuff…
Works super for me in Norway as well.
*No mandadtory weighing (so you can directly put it in your back that does not need to stand a specific place)
*No cash/change (There is basically no cash here anyway)
*easy deletion of double scans
*enter number if you need more
*searchable for all products
*random controls
Negatives/To be solved better:
*age check needs to be done, alternatively you can register your fingerprint once
*items that have no barcode (fruits, etc) have to be searched / found in a menu. i feel this could benefit from a camera detecting the most likely items and suggestiung them
*the receipt(?) is printed everytime and you need its barcode to open the gate after the checkout to leave, then it gets usually thrown away, creating waste. i feel this should be solved by reusable tokens and only a print on demand
Let me start by saying that as a Dutchman, I have a hard time relating to the things mentioned in the original posting, but I also have to admit that real self-checkout kiosks are nowhere to be found in my nearest supermarket (Jumbo, 10 minutes walk away) and the real SCO’s I know, do not accept cash anywhere.
If you want some form of self-control in my supermarket, you grab a scanner before you enter the store, scanning items as you go through the supermarket. Stuff that has to be put on a scale is done so in the supermarket itself (you use the scales at the fruits & vegetables section, where a barcode is printed, which you than stick to the item and scan).
At checkout, you go to a member of staff behind a small cashier and hand over the scanner. He/she asks if everything went okay: if not (sometimes an item refuses to be scanned by the scanner) you either are sent to a normal cashier-line, or they will try to scan the item again. (this personally has never happened to me). If the item that refused to get scanned scans fine when the member of staff gives it a try, you can proceed with paying. If everything went okay, you hand over the scanner and than two things can happen: you either get to check out immediately, or the member of staff will tell you that he or she needs to do a random verification of a number of items (this is probably a randomized check thought of by computer, based on the items that get stolen the most).
If a check needs to happen, he or she will scan a number of items and if things check out okay, you can proceed by paying by cash or card/phone. If the check indicates that you have overlooked an item (even if by mistake) you are sent to the normal cashier line.
The only real SCO’s I know are the ones I know at Lidl stores and Albert Heijn, where I usually try to avoid them. The ones where I really reluctantly use them (as there’s no other option anymore at those stores) are the SCO’s at Albert Heijn ‘To go’ stores found at Dutch trainstations. I dislike them as there are so many (too many in my opinion) kiosks close to eachother and the members of staff have basically been ‘declassified’ as ‘just-some-store-worker’ instead of working the shelves or registers. As the layout of the stores is a total nightmare as well, with no real entrance and exit anymore, this makes that everyone, and especially travellers who are usually already in a hurry, interfere with eachother constantly.
To get back on your comment about the receipt: the Lidl and Albert Heijn stores here give you the option to print a full receipt with all your purchased items on it + the barcode to open the gate, or just a small receipt with only the barcode to open the gate. Ofcourse, the trainstation stores do not have a gate at all, so there your option is limited to a receipt or no receipt at all.
Handing over a fingerprint for age verification is a real no-no to me: it’s a commercial entity and they have NOTHING to do with my fingerprint. I already object to the fingerprint required to get a new passport or drivers’ license here in The Netherlands. There’s no reason for it, it won’t make anything any safer and if they really think it will stop criminals, they should think again.
It always bothers me when people take unnecessarily long at the self check out when I go to publix, where some people check out each item, going from cart to area, scanning every item and paying before bagging, taking twice as long as they have to move each individual item then into a bag and then back into their cart.