171–180 of 621 posts
And don’t try to pass it off as a “convenience” for the customer. It was never about that. I would call it “automating” a job away but that would be too generous. No, it’s just asking the customer to do a job for free and selling it as more convenient. No thanks.
In Norway, the trend is that shops that have a mix of both, now remove more and more of the cashiers and increase the number of self-checkouts. This wouldn't happen if the shops lost money and the customers hated it, so it's strange that this is the opposite of the U.K. Population more tuned to automation, perhaps?
Norway has much less crime!
I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful, simply drop everything in! And wait, there's more: did I say drop everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything? just put it in that basket, in…
In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout.
The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful, simply drop everything in! And wait, there's more: did I say drop everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything? just put it in that basket, in…
It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.
I wouldn't mind these machine so much if they always accepted cash. The problem is that more often than not they don't. When I was on vacation in London about 5 years ago when Visa had an outage: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa... I was trying to pick up some food at the only grocery market that was within walking distance of where I was staying. The grocery store only had self-checkout m…
The fact that a credit card CAN have an outage is ridiculous. They were invented as an eventually-consistent system first! Just save up the credit card info, and charge the bank when the network connection is back up.
The original motivation for offline capabilities was that phone calls were expensive in Europe (early terminals worked via dialup modems, which were also slow to connect), and phone lines were not ubiquitous in all stores.
Now that that's been solved, just keeping everything online-only is much less of a headache for the card issuer, but it does suffer from greatly reduced availability in case of outages such as the one you mention: No overdrawn accounts, lost/stolen cards can instantly be blocked, PIN verification becomes much easier etc.
That said, merchants are still free to accept any card offline – they just bear the full risk of that card being overdrawn or lost/stolen. And in case of a publicly visible outage, you can absolutely expect fraudsters to start showing up at the checkout in large numbers and with full shopping cards bearing lost and stolen credit cards.
I really hope we'll see it make a return, if not for credit and debit cards then for the various upcoming CDBC projects. Not being able to purchase anything in case of a power outage or cyberattack is a huge risk to society and can even be actually dangerous in some cases (imagine e.g. a small unattended card-only gas station – not that uncommon in the US!)
I avoid self checkout if possible. If I’m paying for the groceries, why should I also do the work of scanning and bagging everything? I’ll let someone else handle it for me. And don’t try to pass it off as a “convenience” for the customer. It was never about that. I would call it “automating” a job away but that would be too generous. No, it’s just asking the customer to do a job for free and selling it as more conve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver. I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is thre…
> Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore? or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store... maybe ju…
We buy produce from the cheaper Aldi instead, or worst case, the overpriced Publix (if Aldi doesn't have it).
I avoid self checkout if possible. If I’m paying for the groceries, why should I also do the work of scanning and bagging everything? I’ll let someone else handle it for me. And don’t try to pass it off as a “convenience” for the customer. It was never about that. I would call it “automating” a job away but that would be too generous. No, it’s just asking the customer to do a job for free and selling it as more conve…
Obviously this sounds like such a US problem. Self checkout in the UK and Europe (Estonia and Barcelona) IME works perfectly: - No thefts - Many people with card payments - Working self checkout machines Also, recently I have been thinking how come the US is pioneering so many tech but fail to implement any, such as: - Payments: No SWIFT/IBAN, still lots of cash usage, no e-invoices (ie for utility bills), still usin…
To me, it seems like given the size, market maturity, but especially the legal and political environment of the US, any change requiring large-scale coordination between multiple actors, especially public and private, has become very hard.
Single-actor innovation requiring no cooperation of existing stakeholders has become the way to go: That (plus large existing car-based transport stakeholders) is why there is Uber instead of a working public transit system in most cities.
That's true for most systems you list: Anything payments related – the US has over 6000 banks; even given the population size, that's enormous! Identification cards – it's about immigration status at least as much as it's about people being skeptical of the federal government. E-government: Ok, that one is probably due to a lack of trust in the federal government's tech capabilities, which at this point has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>employees who get taken away from their other duties to help customers deal with the confusing and error prone kiosks. I have seen these customers. I do not understand. What are they doing at the self-checkout that is confusing? I have used dozens of different implementations and they are all simplicity incarnate. So I just lump them all in with the folks who don't know that cars need oil changes, take more than 45…