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The failure of self-checkout technology

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Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#481

Post by mjbeswick »

CM30 wrote: post #276
ddmf wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly my thoughts - and they seem to use lower spec hardware leading to a perceivable delay between scanning -> putting on to weighing station -> able to scan next product. Unless this is as designed too, for whatever reason, but this is what stops me from using them as I get frustrated. The other thing that stops me from using them specifically in Lidl is that you cannot put a hazelnut croissant and an almond…

That's another good point. Self checkout machines are likely designed with lower specs in mind due to shops needing to either needing to have more of them (since there are often only 1 or 2 regular checkouts compared to 10+ self checkouts) or because they feel the expense of a better touch screen/recognition system is better justified if it's for a system the staff are using rather than the general public.

I work for a big UK supermarket as a developer working on their self checkout software. The tills have better specs than you would expect, as they are running 30 or so containers using Docker. They are not cheap!

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#482

Post by anticensor »

workfromspace wrote: post #227
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SWIFT/IBAN You might be thinking about SEPA. SWIFT is slow, expensive and also available in the US. One reason is that credit card fees are much higher than in Europe (up to 3% or so) due to lack of regulation (of course a significant proportion of those fees are returned to the card users as cashback, so it’s not like American companies are much more greedy, it’s still not a very efficient system of course..)

You're probably right about SWIFT/SEPA part. My bad, apologies. And it's just not the credit cards. Many people here (including high school students) are provided and using debit cards for virtually everything.

The US has debit cards as well, the security assumptions regarding bank accounts are very different and there is also a culture of building a credit score that reduces debit card use.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#483

Post by arp242 »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #293
Freak_NL wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, don't worry. Theft at self checkouts is turning into a national hobby¹. 1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-stij...

Every time I read one of these articles the naivety and tone-deafness from supermarkets over these self-checkouts amazes me. "In order to make more money we made customers self-report their purchases during a cost-of-living crisis while we were booking record high profits and now these customers are _under reporting_ their purchases, how dare they!!" They should've seen this coming from miles away.

> booking record high profits

According to the opening paragraph of that article that's doesn't seem to be the case. €80 million in profit (with €100 million theft) is not all that much.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#484

Post by arp242 »

dahfizz wrote: post #266
radarsat1 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.

Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#485

Post by bee_rider »

alpaca128 wrote: post #467
bee_rider wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day Lots of people have at some point worked as cashiers, it isn’t some completely rare skill. Average person, sure they’ll be worse, but go up like one standard deviation in scanning skill and you can probably win. The cashier has also been there all day and can’t leave, so they aren’t in as much of a rush.

> The cashier has also been there all day and can’t leave, so they aren’t in as much of a rush Some chains track the speed. Afaik Aldi sets 1 scanned item per second as the goal on average, and that's so fast some people literally complain that they can't keep up with putting the scanned items into their cart/bag. No, there is no way a random person can match that if they don't have a lot of practice.

Maybe Aldi has unusually high professional standards. When I worked in retail as a teenager there was an obvious split between the adults who had been working there for ages (and were exceptionally skilled and quick), and the high school/college students who were there for summer jobs.

The majority of the employees were in the latter group and we didn’t have any special skill. I mean, lots of people work in retail when they are teenagers, so on average the people who have done that in the past are more experienced that those who are currently doing it, right? Unless there’s a skew that is causing people to stick around longer in retail jobs as time goes by.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#486

Post by adhesive_wombat »

coderjames wrote: post #158
snakeyjake wrote: post #146

>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…

> >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. One applicable scenario I have observed at my local super market is people for whom English (or the otherwise locally-dominant language) is not their first language. The machine may have a 'clear' error message displaying and speaking "return las…

Indeed. Could you understand "unexpected item in bagging area" in, say, Russian or Arabic? Hell, I have no idea how to translate "bagging area" from/to my second-best language and I've been learning it for over 10 years.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#487

Post by gilbertbw »

camgunz wrote: post #463
Mo3 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annoying? A person comes and scans a few of the items on the counter, then leaves again. If that is already annoying to you, you must live a very stressed life

It's super annoying. We'll often have groceries for the next few days, which includes a lot of baby food. So yeah, they're scanning like 40 items, and we have to repack the bag to not squash produce/bread and such. Another related problem is that you physically can't leave the store unless you buy something and get a receipt to scan. You have to tailgate someone with a receipt, or hop the turnstyle, etc. Hope you're…

In Waitrose (UK) stores at least this is not the case. When you are spot checked the staff member spot checks that a few things in your trolley have been scanned. They tend to check some higher value goods like alcohol.

Also those stores, at least where I live, have no physical barrier to exit.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#488

Post by oftenwrong »

Eventually these stores will fix the user experience issues (and I don't just mean the interface), and it will be much better. I tried a newer self-checkout kiosk at a store recently, and it was an improvement over the old system, but there were still a number of very obvious usability issues, unclear aspects, and annoyances that should have been fixed before the release. I expect they are planning to correct them in a software update.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#489

Post by gilbertbw »

Tor3 wrote: post #300
petergrace wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But having 1-2 cashiers is only the norm now because of self checkout. Prior to self checkout there used to be nearly all lanes staffed at our local grocery and wait times to checkout were low.

Well, not at my local Coop. They have three cashier stations, nowadays one or two of them are manned (and the third person is free to assist customers where needed). In my other living place, Japan, the MaxValu supermarket has, I think, around ten cashiers - not only that, those cashiers are super fast and use double-buffering for payment: You can pay while they're already busy with the next customer. But still - the…

My coop has the worst of all worlds. There used to be four self checkouts, but they removed two during covid, and another one after it developed a fault. So you have one self checkout, with a member of staff that has to juggle baby sitting it and manning a basket checkout. It would be much quicker if they just removed the last self checkout and had the staff member man the checkout full time.

Re: The failure of self-checkout technology

#490

Post by alexanderchr »

arp242 wrote: post #484
dahfizz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy your homogenous, high trust society. We are all jealous.

Except it's neither homogenous nor high trust.

It's not exactly Japan-level high trust, but it is compared to most other countries in the world.
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