> In Switzerland, a store can trust customers to scan everything they place in their carts.

You flatter us, but I'm not convinced the Swiss are particularly honest. And I'm not convinced that anything the US register does is particularly helpful to catch cheating.

I can take you to stores where the self-checkout is as good or better in the US as you describe. How many different corporate entities and how many different communities did you visit in the US?

I am by no means trying to claim to have a comprehensive perspective on the stores on both countries, but the two machines I describe were both located in middle class grocery stores (Migros and Safeway, respectively) located in prosperous areas of the respective countries.

There is usually one to two persons supervising a row of self checkout machines and they claim to randomly sample people, though I've never seen them doing that. Though I think these two things act as a deterent to stealing.

Personally, I love self checkout in switzerland. 20 checkout stations vs. 5 is faster, tell me what you want.

The US is a massive administrative area with some cities the size of Switzerland and very different demographics and qualities of life in different regions.

Walk into an Apple Store in Berkeley and you can self check out expensive items using only your iPhone.

The generalization you are trying to make doesn't work.

I'm guessing stores realize theft and even unintentional mis scanning due to 'amateurs', will happen, and have decided that the cost savings of using self scanning is still worth it.