591–600 of 621 posts
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I just pile my junk on the scale and bag it up after I'm done with the transaction.
I do this too, but most stores have plastic bag holders on the scale that clutter things put and make it harder to stack items before bagging.
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I see no mention of whether they adjusted for age and urban vs rural settings. Dense metropolitan cores, where most economic activity happens, tend to be both younger and highly diverse ethnically as the jobs there attract migrant flows. It is unsurprising that younger people in dense metropolitan "the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects". That's…
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Thank you for supporting my thesis that praise for "homogeneous" societies is nothing but a dog whistle for plain old racism. I hope my children won't have to suffer people like you IRL.
Edit: It is hilarious that people like you praise places like the country where I was born and the country where my wife was born, but when we marry and have mixed-race children then suddenly you label our family as a menace to society.
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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.
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…
The screen threw up a message asking me to check on what I had put in the bagging area. Below it was a video of me shot from the ceiling, with bounding boxes drawn around the two boxes of right (basically identifying that the thing I had scanned was not what I had put in the bagging area).
I was actually pretty impressed... at my work we do some computer vision work, and we're dealing with fairly high-resolution, static images. This managed to draw perfect bounding boxes on a video, and the whole thing processed in less than a couple of seconds.
Seems like if you can do that, there ought to be other ways you can speed things up. Currently for produce with no bar code, I have to type in the name of the produce and then weigh it. They ought to be able to identify it as a zucchini via computer vision and skip the first step, at least.
I really like those that you can find in Switzerland (either in Coop or Migros). The basic assumption is "trust the customer". Thus, the self-checkout devices don't have the annoying "you must weight the article you just scanned". You just scan them one by one, add them to your bag, pay at the end, and that's it. Sometimes (it happens to me around 1/year) you get a random search, which is not that bad as they just ra…
I scan everything beforehand with their device, then head to the self-checkout with a shopping cart full of items (already put into bags), I scan the QR code there and I pay. Done.
The whole operation is like 20 seconds max, and it's how it should be.
Using self checkout in the UK, US or in Italy is a nightmare. First of all, they don't trust you by default so you have to weight everything (this operation takes on average 10s per item). Half of the time the systems are broken (in terms of UX) and you need to do things in a specific order (e.g: you can't scan a rewards card with the other items - you have to do it BEFORE even starting to scan the products).
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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.
It no longer works that way in Europe (or basically anywhere outside the US): most customers and banks insist that they see payments in real-time (in the name of fraud prevention (user-controlled credit card locks are a thing here) and convenience).
Totally off-topic, but I challenge you to try writing without using any parentheses. They generally don't contribute positively toward either the legibility or impact of your prose.
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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…
Definitely a yes-and scenario here. I was a cashier, I'm good at finding and scanning bar codes and PLU lookups. I was a damn fast cashier. That's impossible in a self checkout. And then you get carded for a can of spray paint, and the one attendant for 8 machines has three people with blinking lights. On top of that, most of these self-checkouts are not designed to handle a full cart of groceries, but also why do I…
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…
Source?
"Shop thefts have more than doubled in the past three years, and the boss of M&S says the reduction of service plays a crucial part"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/21/middle-class...