My local grocery store (Giant) has a system like this. The hardware is IBM branded, I believe. I used it quite a bit when it was first offered, and saw a numb

My local grocery store (Giant) has a system like this. The hardware is IBM branded, I believe. I used it quite a bit when it was first offered, and saw a number of other customers use it as well, but now I rarely use it and I rarely see others using it either. The scanner guns are still there near the entrance to the store, but now there are carts piled in front of them so they'd be hard to get to even if you wanted to get one. Nobody cares, and I suspect they'll disappear at some point soon. Honestly the whole system was just not reliable enough, IMO. The scan-it-yourself guns are not as fast as the laser barcode readers used on the actual POS systems; there's a noticeable and extremely irritating 1-2 second delay per item, which doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty annoying when you are trying to scan a dozen cans of cat food or something. Oh, and you can't do a [scan x quantity] entry, you have to scan each individual item, so for e.g. those cans of cat food, there's a disincentive to buying too many. The real killer was the integration with the POS payment system though. When you get up to the front of the store, you go to a self-checkout line -- so right there, you might still have to wait in line, because there's no dedicated self-scan payment kiosk. One supposes they could have one if there was demand, though. When you do make it up to the register, there's a complex dance that you have to go through to link the scangun you used to scan your items to your account, and then to the register you're paying at, so that the items will flow through and total up correctly. You have to scan a barcode on the self-checkout system, and then scan your "Giant card" (loyalty card), except sometimes this doesn't work, or sometimes it works but only if you scan them in the opposite order. And of course if anything isn't working correctly, which happened way too often, you end up just having to re-scan all your groceries again, manually, at the self-checkout. I don't know about anyone else, but once I had that happen a couple of times, that was the end of using the scangun system for me. If I might just end up having to do the work twice, forget it -- I'll do the way that I know is just going to result in me doing it once. I hate lines, but what I hate even more is rework. So I hope Kroger has worked out some of the kinks from the Giant system. It was a promising scheme, and I really wanted it to work, but it seemed like a 90% solution and what they really need is a 99.9% solution. Having the system fall flat on its face and force me to re-scan all my groceries even a few percent of the time is a non-starter IMO. That needs to be an outcome right up there with having the whole thing just catch on fucking fire, in terms of never being allowed to happen.