Agreed. And in some cases the issues almost feel like they're on purpose in order to drive people away from using the self checkouts.
For example, when I use self checkout at my local grocery store, I have to hit a button to tell it I want to use my own bag, and then put the bag in the bagging area so it can presumably weigh it, and a moment later it allows me to start scanning items and placing them inside.
That's fine, but the problem that I run into _every_ week is that the first bag works fine, but after that, when I hit the button to say I'm using another bag, once I place the bag in the bagging area, it flags me for putting unscanned items in the bagging area. It "lets it go" after a moment, but when I need to move on to bag #3, it complains again, stops, and forces me to wait while a store worker comes over and has to watch overhead video of me placing my empty bag in the bagging area for both bags 2 AND 3!
I have tried so many ways of being extra careful about how I'm placing the bag, but no matter what I do, it complains about every bag after the first one. I've tried leaving previous bags in the bagging area, I've tried removing them after each bag is filled, I've tried standing or moving differently, being quicker or slower about placing my bags, and no matter what, every other bag after it starts complaining, it stops and I have to wait for the store worker to verify and let me keep going. I've even tried just putting my bag on the floor and bagging items there, but then it complains after every 10 "unbagged" items since they're not hitting the scale in the bagging area, even if I hit the "don't bag this item" button after the scan.
While the whole thing is a major inconvenience, it's STILL better than waiting in a line for an actual cashier (and sometimes an additional bagger) who will feel the need to chat me up just because I'm standing in front of them, and inevitably not pack things into the bags the way that I want.
When I've scanned the first item, I put it in the bag that's outside the scale and put the bag with the item on the scale.
I just scan everything and bag the stuff after payment
I have given up on using my big Patagonia bag at lidl, because it never works. Last time it required the cashier to override the warnings once after each item was placed in the bag.
this is insane to me and if a manager was involved they should be fired. I dont think its reasonable to review video of a customer without probable cause they were stealing. In this case, the machines are so buggy (as you illustrated with your case) that a machine complaining is NOT probable cause. How to alienate your customers 101...
No one checks the products. Occasional random checks happen but the checking frequency probably depends if past checks have found issues, so I get a bag check once a year max.
I use the mobile phone checkout for one of the stores I go to. Every time when leaving, they manually inspect every single item in my cart.
The biggest convenience for me is that I only have to handle the items twice: when I pick them from the shelves, and when I unpack the bags at home. Going to any other store that doesn't have this system now feels like there is a lot of redundant and unergonomic operations.
"Homogeneous" in what way?
Because in my experience the sort of "homogeneity" that leads to high trust is that of wealth/income, and it requires a generous social net.
And to be completely transparent about where I'm coming from: I'm the father of two mixed-race children and all this talk of "homogeneous societies" reeks to me of plain old racism that will hurt my kids. And I grew up in one of those European "homogeneous" countries that right-leaning racists love to talk about, too.
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.
What happened in those dense metropolitan cores was bad, and so the good people fled, happened over and over again and people didn't learn.
There's a reason Hong Kong can have extreme population density and low crime, and detroit and any where else filled with Obama's sons is simply a place where even progressives who say things like you do try to flee.
Also, as Denmark recently discovered, homogeneity is not simply dependent on a social safety net but exists within a symbiotic relationship with the latter.
It's a big part of why we've historically had such a hard time implementing any sort of reasonable social benefits, and why the much lauded Nordic countries started cutting down on theirs the second they got a significant (racially different) refugee population.
If you want open borders and are foolish enough to add "diversity" you cannot afford generous social safety systems.
People with genetic and cultural ties are more likely to sacrifice for one another, go figure, this has to be explained now to the progressive which is madenning. You cannot have nice things when you turn the social contract into a rental car.
Race matters, its why those nordic countries the left looks at longingly as example were made possible because they were homogenous, something they've been foolishly trying to undermine by following our example. Race matters, in homogenous countries a stranger is more related to their country men than the mixed race child. Why is Japan still functional, again, its homogenous, they are a cohesive people, and yes they do fat shame.
"Immigrants use more Welfare than Native populations: " https://twitter.com/AndrewQuackson/status/829594116929511424
"Asylum seekers and immigrants from Morocco and Horn of Africa costs the Dutch state €475,000-€625,000 per immigrant.
This can't be the best use of resources! Even if you are only interested in using the tax money to help non-Dutch people, you can save a life for ~€5,000." https://twitter.com/jonatanpallesen/status/17425869645769609...
"In the 18-24 age group, immigrants commit 90% of pimping crimes, 56% of **es, and 53% of robberies despite being only a small percentage of the population. The Italian government refuses to release data showing the percentage of these crimes committed specifically by Africans." https://archive.is/20230914033526/https://twitter.com/monito...
High grade human capital for import dried up after ww2, we are no longer importing Einstein, even worse in europe to be sure.
1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/de-diefstalcijfers-stij...
"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.
I'd say stealing is always a net negative effect for the whole.
But if you're saying that the entire context explains a lot of the behaviour, and could possibly be predicted, then yes I agree.
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.
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36933489
I used to live in Indonesia and things are much more "high trust" in many aspects. On the other hand Indonesia also has a lot of problems with corruption and that sort of thing. "High trust/low trust" is too simplistic.
I don't have 200 other countries to compare it to, but by and large, Western countries are much less high-trust in many areas than people assume. This often becomes painfully obvious once you stray outside of the "standard happy path".
Meanwhile Netherlands elected an anti-immigration right-wing government in their last elections: https://time.com/6339173/dutch-election-results-geert-wilder...
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 not in a wheelchair and change your mind / the store's out of what you were looking for!
Also those stores, at least where I live, have no physical barrier to exit.
I posted about this on Linkedin too and got a few comments about the complexity in the UK, USA, France and elsewhere. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samcritchley_it-hasnt-deliver...
Also, the 'bagging area' is on different sides in different shops. Also annoying.
It even occurs with human checkers but it’s quite rare (barcodes are fixed now, or the stickers destroy themselves if you try to remove them like at Goodwill).
The attack apparently would have you swap a barcode but still on camera scan it which I guess theoretically makes it harder to prosecute but I kinda doubt it.
It also helps catch misscans which is probably much much more common (someone scans an item, they thought it scanned, they put it in bagging area).
If you don't scan it and you put/keep it in your backpack, that's not different from doing the same but going through the cashier checkout right? They already had that problem, so if they keep that as it was but reduce the amount of personnel, that's a net positive?
The supermarkets in Sweden work like this, the only thing some of they do is random checks. In some chains you do need to sign up with your ID ahead of time though so they keep track if you get caught in a random check.
You then just go to the self-checkout and pay for what you scanned.
They do spot checks at the checkout, especially for "new" customers. It's tied to your identity (need to scan a store card to unlock the scanner).
I think it's a timesaver... even though it takes a bit of time to scan each item with the portable scanner, you get to skip the "unload from trolley -> scan -> load into bags" at the checkout.
I think it is not as popular in some areas of the US because some parts of the country have very low trust.
By comparison, the other day I was at Tesco and they had introduced these new large self-checkouts for trolleys (aka carts in US), but about halfway through my trolley, I started getting an error for every item I scanned. Turns out, the max weight for the scale was 20kg.
Despite many claims that people don't like them it is surprising how they are almost always in full use.
How would it be more efficient than a traditional checkout? There's no way the average person can match the speed of a cashier who does that every day, and at least the supermarkets I've visited don't have enough self checkout machines to balance that out.
Maybe it's just me but I genuinely don't get the point of self checkout. Are some shops so slow at reacting to long queues that it makes self checkout actually faster?
Most of the time I use self checkout at the grocery store but when I don't the human takes longer than me, sometimes wants to have an annoying conversation, doesn't group things in bags, and uses way too many bags. Quicker and easier to just do it myself.
Supermarkets are now grudgingly admitting that self checkout systems cause a significant increase in loss due to theft, but that it is still cheaper than hiring actual staff for the registers.
In the Netherlands the current state of affairs in supermarkets with self checkout registers is that theft is on the up. People justify 'forgetting to scan an item' by the (perceived or actual) greed shown by supermarkets in terms of shrinkflation and the rising cost-of-living. Supermarkets did really well during the Covid-years, but customers didn't benefit from that in the slightest.
An additional problem is that the staff attending the self checkout registers are often young (because it is a position which would waste the skills of the more experienced employees), and they get bullied and berated by customers pissed off for getting selected for random (either actual or directed by the staff watching the cameras) checks.
Unfortunately I don't know any numbers re theft, but it's still running 5 years later. Of course being in a suburban area helps.
I think this is how all Alberstons-owned stores work, because I’ve seen it an Randall’s and other places, but until now could avoid shopping there. I always wondered why Walmart said “everyday low prices”, because isn’t that normal? Well, apparently not.
JC Penny famously tried to get out of that and it almost killed them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...
Walmart (and Costco, and Trader Joe's, and a few others) are so large that instead of making you dance around with coupons and such, they just tell the company to give them a discount and pass it on to the customer. An item at another store that needs a store app, coupon, etc, will just be dropped the same price at Walmart I've noticed.
(I hate the Kohl's style, as even when I stack coupons and get to 75% off on clearance, I still feel I missed something and got cheated. But apparently lots of shoppers really love that kind of "bargain hunt".)
So it'd have to be twice as fast to break even in terms of "time spent".
Absolutely true, and not only that - the cashier has a conveyor belt while the self-checkout counter has a slightly inconvenient and much slower system.
But that's totally offset by the fact that there's typically only one or two cashiers while there may be ten or twenty self-service counters. I don't have to stand in line.
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 - they have also introduced self-service. They still have nearly the same number of inhumanely fast human cashiers but they now also have lots of self-service desks (and a person there to assist anyone needing it).
So my experience is the polar opposite of yours, self-checkout is just superior.
What the vendors didn't say was that shrinkage would increase.
They still to have someone around, though, to satisfy the machine when it thinks that my newspaper is 25g too light, or I'm not old enough to buy alcohol-free beer (still haven't worked out the rationale for that one)
Is this Walmart being cheap? Kinda, but I think the recent surge in living costs has made being a Walmart cashier an unattractive job. I think they have trouble keeping and retaining people who want to do the job and do it well. $15/hr. is nothing now, and the young people who are cashiers know that.
> $15/hr. is nothing now
I think you answered your own question. They are failing to hire cashiers because they aren't willing to pay enough. So yes, they are being cheap.
There is a huge potential market for cashiers. There is no shortage. There is only a shortage for the price that Walmart has decided is worth paying.
If I'm only buying a few items, I find it faster to use the self checkout.
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.
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.
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.
Where I live, the speed of a cashier is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is waiting in the line after 3-4 people, especially if one of them has some issue "eh, I didn't want Foo, I wanted bar, let me run for it real quick".
Self-checkout parallizes the process, and if a single "Exception" is thrown, the other threads still run just fine.
The local grocery store screams for an attendant if a fruit fly farts on the scale.
One has a self checkout that lets you bag your items however you want, has a wireless scanner for scanning at your convenience, and just has one polite attendant monitoring to help with issues or enter birthdate for alcohol.
The other has one that screams at you about unidentified items in the bagging area if you so much as look in its direction, and cameras jammed in your face with a screen wrapped in white LEDs to make it obvious you're being recorded.
Guess where I prefer to shop :-)
People are saying the same can be done with an app, but I don't want to install another app.
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 croissant in the same paper bag unless you take one out before you put it to weigh.
I think coop/365discount has that. You scan the items with a mobile phone app while taking them of the shelf. You just show the digital receipt to the cashier while jumping the queue.
My local Walmart allows this. Not sure what the impact on their 'shrink' is, but they must've decided it was worth it to keep lines moving. It's a very busy store.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they could change it based on time of day. And changing it based on rewards card or loyalty would also seem to be possible.
So it works in Norway or Japan, but put this in Indonesia or Honduras or even in small city USA and it’ll run into problems. It can work in areas of larger cities where most of the clientele are high income, but it’s bound to fail in most other areas.
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: at least with alcohol I know it’s coming. But it feels like every time I try to use self-checkout I’m foiled by surprise rules about particular items.
In my nearby Walmart they have a dozen or more self-checkout stations which only require a few staff in total. Most people don't need assistance.
Obviously there is a risk of illegally selling items to minors with fake documents, but I think that's fixable too. Already, in my local UK supermarket there are cameras on each checkout station, which I guess go to some bored reviewer; so you could just alert the guy "hey, customer X gave us a valid license" and assume that he'll react if he can't see a realistic amount of wrinkles.
On PI, I agree that there is a qualitative difference between a cashier and a machine if you assume, as most people do, that the cashier will not remember private details. This can be fixed with industry-wide agreements to not store such data, in the same way as merchants don't store your full credit card details. You could even allow people to bypass the check if a valid identity is registered against their store-issued fidelity card.
Honestly, the only hard problem is localization. At the moment you can sell more or less the same automated till to UK supermarkets, US supermarkets, or EU supermarkets; but document-checking code will have to be heavily localized. Still, EU driving licenses are already similar on the entire continent, and that's quite a critical mass one could hit. I would be surprised if manufacturers weren't already developing this feature.
Although I'm way beyond the point of caring about demographic profiling, I still don't want my home address to be available to everybody dealing with a simple purchase (although this perspective is probably greatly atypical on account of being a survivor of CSA).
For the most part, in practice there's little or no advantage for me, the consumer with a cart full of groceries.
One exception was 2003-era Martins in Virginia - Walk in, grab a cart that had bags attached to the front, grab a portable scan gun from it's charging dock. Scan and bag as you shop, dock the gun to the checkout register, show the attendant my id if needed, pay, and I'm done. No unloading and reloading the cart, no fiddling with plu lookups, fumbling with bags, etc. It was actually glorious, but relies on trusting your customers. Corporate stores seem to trust me even less than I trust them.
I'm somewhat ok with these things as a secondary 10-items-or-less option. But for the love of god staff enough cashiers to handle the grocery-shopping-Sunday crowds.
They were doing this in a few Michigan Krogers within the last few years. I think they ended the program though.
I was a fast cashier as a teenager but its no longer a job for teenagers in many places, its broken people barely there.
The fast check out is far more than 8 machines in half decent areas, maybe double that and I can get out of there in record time.
I'd rather handle it myself than stand in line.
High trust scan and bag won't work in a low trust diverse society, let alone one where some groups are now entitled to theft.
Like wtf. At the very least let me continue scanning the rest of my groceries so I can be done once this person helps me instead of still just 2 scans in..
For some reason though, some idiot designer who never actually thought about how these would be used in reality, decided to make it so that the other half of the time it immediately stops all scanning until someone comes to fix it.
In the first case, basically I waste no time. In the second, I lose however long it takes for the cashier to come.
It is always optimal to scan these first. You have two cases:
Blocking: scan 1 + wait for attendant + scan rest
Non-blocking: scan 1 + max( wait for attendant, scan rest)
The first case is never shorter than the second case.
If you've brought your own bag and it weighs more than the mass of a few protons, the system assumes you're trying to steal something, and a human has to intervene before you can even get started.
And then they have to come back almost immediately to deal with age-restricted items or other glitches.
And security: You only need a single person standing there to scary away 95% of shoplifters.
I watched a YouTube video from the channel "Not Just Bikes" about grocery shopping in Amsterdam, Netherlands showed a supermarket where you carry the "pricing gun/lazer" with you and "beep" each item as it enters your basket. I have no idea how they reduce shoplifting. Can anyone comment?
These hand held scanners have been a thing for over 10 years, way before the current iteration of self checkout stations. They continue to exist side by side with self checkout stations at supermarkets mainly.
It also should be noted that I have not seen a single self checkout station in the Netherlands that puts restrictions on how you scan your items. It doesn't care about weight and in what order you scan and put items into your bag or if you just keep holding the items, and I never have any issues with this system breaking or complaining about anything.
Further, my contact in the Target data center says the scales are disable (too many problems) and the camera showing you on the little screen over the kiosk, doesn't go anywhere but that screen.
So it's working for them, so far. You'd expect maybe more shoplifting in a college town, lots of poor students under strain and so on. Still the place is thriving.
Most data on the issue of shoplifting in the industry show that the people who shoplift are not ones doing it out of necessity (e.g. they're poor and can't afford those items), most shoplifting is done out of intention and not necessity. This includes categories like underaged people stealing items that are age-restricted, or people stealing items that cause shame to purchase (like condoms, pregnancy tests, et al), as well as the now commonplace problem of shoplifting gangs in the US who steal en masse to list items via Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other online markets. People who are productive adults in society very very rarely shoplift, and in the cases that they do it because of mental issues, like kleptomania.
The loss prevention person at the door is more likely to find items you left behind than to stop a shoplifter, but insurance demands it.
And the false positives on those little loss control tags is so high that most of the time workers aren't even going to look your direction if something sets it off. Once again, this is all crap required by insurance.
Shoplifters don't care about any of this. They just grab what they want and leave.
In fact, we use RFID tracking to know when goods are stolen, not to save money, not to catch shoplifters, but to improve inventory management and ensure that we get a replacement item on the shelf to avoid losing sales.
A lot of them literally do work this way and just accept the risk of shrink,.
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.
Our local supermarket has this. A phone app you scan things as you go, and when leaving you scan a QR code, swipe to pay, then you get a code to open the gate out and you leave. It's incredibly smooth. Also, this means you can just put your bags in your cart and bag while you shop, so you just completely skip checkout, it's a breeze.
I don't understand your point about scanning multiple times though. If I'm buying 5 of something I scan one of them, and just increase the count to five.
The problem is that companies don't want that, because they're worried they'd get robbed blind if they did. In a sense it reminds me of the problems with our travel systems; if there were no gates, no security checks, etc, then they'd probably be a joy to use. But people suck so they're not.