Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free • Hacker News Board

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#411

Post by hakfoo » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

etiam wrote: post #300

slt2021 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are prepaid visa/mc cards which can give you anonymity while still using card. accepting cash, means a store has to be staffed with people and it makes it more expensive to run business=>higher prices for products

> there are prepaid visa/mc cards which can give you anonymity while still using card. There kind of isn't, at least in Sweden. The option that does exist is a seedy borderline scam with exorbitant overhead and hidden usury fees, which will effectively confiscate your remaining money a few months in. Also, in stark contrast to real cash, it still results in a log of all the transactions and ties them up to one weakly…

Exactly like in the US except that the target market here isn't the privacy-conscious, it's the people banks don't want to service (poor and/or poor credit history)

If you have the means to tally an order and a card terminal, though, you could have a kiosk with a note acceptor attached.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#412

Post by kqr » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #405

kqr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One implicit benefit of the self-service checkouts is that there's often one line for multiple machines. Any student of queuing theory will know how much this reduces waiting time compared to the one queue per cashier that's otherwise common.

> [one que for multiple cashiers] reduces waiting time compared to the one queue per cashier Is this really correct? Shouldn't one grand queue just decrease variance, not average?

I Think the intuition is that queuing time is asymmetric around the median, so when you increase variance you also increase the mean.

Put another way: if the median is 1 minute, then half the time you'll wait less than 1 minute. The other half you might wait not just for 2 minutes, but significantly more. They won't "cancel out" to preserve the mean.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#413

Post by hashmush » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:25 AM UTC

opayen wrote: post #303

tpmx wrote: post #202

The BankID service seems to trip up many people here. Swedish residents have a personal identity number issued at birth or immigration. Format: YYYYMMDD-NNNN. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed... BankID is a service run by the Swedish banks that interfaces with the banks, individuals and third parties (like this chain of unmanned stores). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID T…

It's also worth noting that BankID requires access location permission access (at least on Android).

I never have location services turned on and use bankid all the time.

On Android.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#414

Post by azpotufi » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

nivenkos wrote: post #325

azpotufi wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data will invariably be sold to health insurance companies who will use any excuse to make you pay a premium. Bought four bottles of olive oil? You're going to get very fat, better make you pay a premium! Who cares if you actually used it to make soap?

Good thing Sweden has decent public insurance then... Don't hold back technology and society just because of a few other issues - those other issues can be better resolved directly. In this case, with single-payer public healthcare.

The country you live in does not matter. If the data you emit is recorded, it will be used against you. Cambdrige Analytica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica ) might have closed down but there still are a lot of company that do the same things and are still in business.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#415

Post by fjfaase » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 6:56 AM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #374

fjfaase wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, you are probably happy if some criminals are caught with the help of surveillance camera footage. In the past when there were shops in every neighbourhood, the owners of these shops knew all their customers. They exactly knew who they could trust and who not. It has happened to me that when I went to an open air market, where you stil have to make an order, they people behind the stall after some time just r…

That sounds all nice and small-town rosy, but I would pick anonymity any day. Road to totality and 1984-esque society only takes 1 step at a time to build, and this is definitely one of those steps. Although coming form smallish town, this familiarity with shop owners ain't something high on my list of priorities, in contrary. The strongest reason for it would probably be the old 'power corrupts', as we can see just…

I wonder if my reply was down-voted because people did not agree with it or because they thought it was not relevant or besides the point? Probably, you are not among those, because you did take time to reply to it.

You did not reply to my first and main statement. Probably because you agreed with it. In the past shops had other methods of preventing shoplifting. Some of these methods also involved keeping track of what people did. Not information stored in databases, but in the heads of people. What I just wanted to say is that we are happy if some kind of system is used to catch the bad people, but not us, because we think of ourselves as being good. Many shoplifters also think of themselves as good, because they beat the system or have the right to do it because society treated them unfair. Or maybe just because of the fun of doing it. I understand that a high percentage of people did some shoplifting at some point in their lives. And many would do more if there would be no chance of being caught.

I simply wanted to point out that safety (as in preventing crimes) and privacy are in opposition with eachother and that each society has to find a way to balance them. It is also expected that your opinion on that balance is influenced on your position in that society.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#416

Post by vages » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #281

vages wrote: post #162

There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future. Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers. In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing. Although locating stuff _could_ be solved by looking it up with an app, I would…

> There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future. I don't think there will be. In countries like the Nordic countries with very high costs of labor, specialty physical retail locations of all sorts have been closing left and right, with people now ordering those things online. Certainly some consumers enjoy shopping in a shops with social interaction, but not enough to keep those sh…

As I said, many people are pressed for time when they shop for groceries. If physical staff could help reduce the stress of shopping, I still see a market for physical stores the next 20 years (longer than that is anybody’s guess).

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#417

Post by devoutsalsa » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

winthrowe wrote: post #240

the-dude wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do mean theft. I am not a native speaker and thought shrinkage applied to both.

My understanding is shrinkage typically refers to the sum total of all product received but unsellable, whether from theft, spoilage, or or breakage.

Shrinkage is.. "an allowance made for reduction in the earnings of a business due to wastage or theft."

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#418

Post by jinglebells » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #216

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never experienced that "Unexpected item in bagging area" here in Sweden, the UX failures are not universal. Most stores I visited don't even have scales and just trust you to put in the correct items. Especially the ones where you get a handheld device to scan while you walk trough the store. I would guess that fraud levels are much lower here so the stores don't need to do that.

>I never experienced that "Unexpected item in bagging area" here in Sweden, the UX failures are not universal. the automated føtex near my house has this, or also put your item in the bag, you need to put an item in the bag etc. crash because you didn't put item in bag fast enough, or you took bag off scale to put new one on. >the UX failures are not universal. yes, because they do not have a universal interface whic…

> By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff

Even this is not universal. In Sweden the checkouts have that divider so the checkout clerk can start scanning the next customer's products while you're packing.

In the UK, you can't move on until the other person has bagged and removed which you're expected to do before paying, which makes self-checkout considerably faster because you're already bagged.

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#419

Post by _flux » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 10:16 AM UTC

zurn wrote: post #93

dagw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Nordic countries it's over 90% https://www2.deloitte.com/se/sv/pages/technology-media-and-t...

That percentage is of "consumers", might not include the entire population.

Hmm, so who might be excluded?

Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free

#420

Post by bspammer » Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #248

chrisseaton wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But much less efficient for the customers. I don't know what your experience is, but I always find self-checkout massively more efficient for me and I'd always prefer it and would choose shops that offer it over those that don't. I can just breeze through with my AirPods still in listening to my podcast, not having to wait for anyone else or have anyone else wait for me, not having to say anything, and just get on…

Is it really more efficient (faster, lower effort, etc), or are you just busy (as opposed to idle)?

It’s faster because there’s 20 open machines and I don’t have to wait in a queue.

It’s lower effort because talking is a bigger cognitive burden for me than scanning a few items. Over time with experience, you get as fast as an employee would be anyway.