351–360 of 769 posts
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Self checkout is a better customer experience for me personally.
I've never experienced one reliable enough for this to be true (for me).
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A lot of the waiting is for age restricted items or machine errors rather than trust issues. I have never once been randomly sampled after self surface purchase in either the UK/US.
Without trust issues there would be no machine errors in my experience. Anytime there's an issue it's because I'm scanning too fast for the machine and it can't figure out how the weights work. Or I selected the wrong type of garlic and only the associate is allowed to remove items (why would you not let me remove items I personally added??).
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Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
It's really tunable and some stores are tuned to "Fort Knox" where even a fly landing UNKNOWN ITEM IN BAGGING AREA. Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.
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are larger image/video models unable to catch things like Christmas branding?
a big problem in the space is that products that look very similar will be clustered in the same section. large models are very good at generalizing, so they may be more attuned to "this is a Christmas thing", but they won't know that it should be classified as the same UPC as the thing that was in that spot yesterday without you specifically telling it to. how would it know it's not a misplaced product or a random p…
This is pretty sad to read. Before Covid, the Amazon Go store experience was phenomenal. All the convenience of a 7-Eleven but with the pricing of a normal grocery store. The food options were really good and the BlueApron style meal-kits were amazing. The Alexa integration was also nice for being able to just verbally ask what's the next step on a recipe while you're busy stirring or chopping things. When it rolled…
What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.
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Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores. If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay…
I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.
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> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
This is like learning that there actually 1000 tiny elves inside of your television drawing the pictures. This a real-life, genuine Flintstones-esque cartoon gag.
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Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require…
Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.
And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.
And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.
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> Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess. I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.
Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality. So even those that can afford it will still try to get more since it's everyone for themselves. Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a…
There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?
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> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
I wonder if the same "tech" could be used for "self-driving" cars.