471–480 of 621 posts
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…
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I disagree. The majority of the problems that I run into with self-checkout are related to not being able to buy items I picked up off the shelf like Mucinex or children's cough syrup or alcohol without getting an employee to check me out... at self checkout. What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required —not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process? Edit: a…
This seems easily fixed: just ask the consumer to show a driver license or other accepted ID, with some software validating whether it is legit. It will still be slower than a regular cashier judging your full beard and receding earline, but it would remove most human oversight. Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK…
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Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.
> Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society "Homogeneous" in what way? Because in my experience the sort of "homogeneity" that leads to high trust is that of wealth/income, and it requires a generous social net.
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Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.
Dubai also has self-checkout machines that don't require you to weigh anything, just scan and go, and it's an extremely heterogeneous, low-trust society. People are just very afraid of the police and being deported.
It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple time…
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Where are you and which store is this (general terms)? I use the mobile phone checkout for one of the stores I go to. Every time when leaving, they manually inspect every single item in my cart.
The chain "Meijer" has this option. It slows down the process while you're actually finding the items in the store, but drastically speeds up the checkout process as the cashier only has to "verify" between 3-7 items. They just randomly grab them from whatever is on top of the cart, scan them, and away you go!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. The majority of the problems that I run into with self-checkout are related to not being able to buy items I picked up off the shelf like Mucinex or children's cough syrup or alcohol without getting an employee to check me out... at self checkout. What's the point of "self" checkout if somebody is required —not by failure of the system but by rules—to come help me several times during the process? Edit: a…
This seems easily fixed: just ask the consumer to show a driver license or other accepted ID, with some software validating whether it is legit. It will still be slower than a regular cashier judging your full beard and receding earline, but it would remove most human oversight. Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK…
It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple time…
IMO it's exactly this. Back when I was a teenager I worked at a supermarket and was able to scan a basket of shopping incredibly quickly. But the self checkout machines have so many pauses and errors that it's impossible to do anything at speed.
It feels like almost all the issues with self-checkout technology come from the attempts to minimise shoplifting, which don't even seem that effective at doing that. In theory, a system that let you scan products the same way checkout staff do without any weight checks or bagging area rules or other interruptions would be incredibly efficient. Especially if you could do things like scan the same product multiple time…
That's exactly how it works in the Netherlands, you just scan your items and go. There are no weight checks and you can scan items more than once and edit and remove things from the list. Apart from getting a poorly executed random check sometimes (which is far from effective for the purpose of avoiding theft imho) it actually works really well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems easily fixed: just ask the consumer to show a driver license or other accepted ID, with some software validating whether it is legit. It will still be slower than a regular cashier judging your full beard and receding earline, but it would remove most human oversight. Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK…
Because people will then bitch and moan about how they're being recorded and their PI is being captured. The former is likely already happening, but people would still complain since it would be apparent. Both issues would be ephemeral if it's a human checking it.
On PI, I agree that there is a qualitative difference between a cashier and a machine if you assume, as most people do, that the cashier will not remember private details. This can be fixed with industry-wide agreements to not store such data, in the same way as merchants don't store your full credit card details. You could even allow people to bypass the check if a valid identity is registered against their store-issued fidelity card.
Honestly, the only hard problem is localization. At the moment you can sell more or less the same automated till to UK supermarkets, US supermarkets, or EU supermarkets; but document-checking code will have to be heavily localized. Still, EU driving licenses are already similar on the entire continent, and that's quite a critical mass one could hit. I would be surprised if manufacturers weren't already developing this feature.