News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recogniti... by rtkwe on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @09:44AM (#17959614)
As always it depends on what you want to measure. Comparing total checkout time including queuing though for 'speed (items/s)' is going to naturally favor the self-checkout because the choice between normal and self checkout is heavily weighted by the number of items a particular person has. Anecdotally I've never seen anyone go through self checkout with a full cart but see it all the time with the normal registers. Additionally there's rarely the same number of traditional registers actually staffed compared to the number of self checkouts.
Re:Dulles Airport Surprises Passengers with Facial-Recogniti... by mdorazio on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @11:14AM (#17960470)
I agree. I would say that a better measure than items/s would be customers/hr (closer to throughput rather than speed) averaged across an entire store with and without self-checkouts. As you said, the optimal setup will depend heavily on the mix of customer types ("express" vs. full cart) a particular store gets. There's probably a good ratio for most stores between the two and I think that's what they're all converging on now.