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> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced th

• ghshephard 10y ago
  That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing. About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
  • bsder 10y ago
    > That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US. It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
    • ghshephard 10y ago
      What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.
• averagewall 10y ago
  Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?
  • mantas 10y ago
    Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.
    • dazc 10y ago
      In Spain it's common that you have to weigh and label such items as you buy them, so you are just scanning a bar code when it comes to the checkout bit. The only snag is that below a certain price point some stores will intervene to check you really have just bought one croissant, which kind of defeats the whole purpose?
      • mantas 10y ago
        In Lithuania only 1 small supermarket chain do so. In the rest, this is done at checkout. I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(
    • ghshephard 10y ago
      Our stores with kiosks have hand bags of fruit, fruit/vegetables already bar coded, and, in the dozen or so cases where you have to buy-by-weight, they have hand scales/bar code printers. So, for about 10-20 items out of 10,000 in stock you need to worry. You are right - having 100% universal bar codes makes all the difference.
    • throwanem 10y ago
      If you're in the US, your fruits and veg almost certainly have little stickers on them. Those stickers contain four- or five-digit numbers which, if entered into a register or a kiosk, identify the produce and save the time of navigating an icon menu to do so. The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.
• syshum 10y ago
  Most Self Service Kiosks in stores are not designed for User Experience or Efficiency in mind, that is way the fail They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something. This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout. Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems
  • thenomad 10y ago
    The UK has had the "check out as you shop" systems for a while in most major supermarkets. They work very well.
    • aninhumer 10y ago
      Indeed. When I was living near one, I could walk in, fill my own backpack with stuff, pay in a few seconds and walk out. Another advantage is that I could see that discounts had processed properly, instead of having to check the receipt. But once I moved away, I started using home delivery and it's even better. My shopping now consists of ~15mins browsing a website, and ~15mins receiving and unpacking bags, and I only need to do it about once a fortnight.
  • ghshephard 10y ago
    I guess it depends on where the Self Service Kiosks have been deployed - I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket. Honestly, the hardest part is opening a hole in top of the bag that I can put stuff in. Concur - if I have a cart, probably would use a checkout person - but, when you get used to buying stuff from the store 1-2x a day, you rarely have a large load.
    • syshum 10y ago
      >- I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket. Yea if you only have 6 items sure... I never go to the store when I am only buying 6 items.... If I only need 6 things it can wait until I need more I go to the store 1 or 2 times a month, not everyday