6 ms·

I'm not opposed to interacting with robots but I hate how these are all pushed out the door WAY before they are even at parity with a human. Self-checkout, robo

• tanilama 8y ago
  What is the issue with self-checkout, I found it is actually faster.
  • r00fus 8y ago
    Fruit & veggies are a disaster unless you like shrinkwrapped everything or you know all the codes. Any peculiarities on how you handle the goods - e.g. repositioning something that fell over in the "checkout area"- results in an escalation. The implementations out there are untrusting and non-optimized and take significantly longer than a real clerk. I've used a lot of these and it's always the same.
    • mdorazio 8y ago
      Most of the fruit and vegetables I get at the store these days have tiny barcodes on them that make the self-checkout easy. And the occasional need for intervention from the one staff person handling 4-6 self checkouts is almost always far less than the time I would have spent waiting in line for someone who's still paying for groceries with a personal check in 2018. I almost always prefer a self-checkout.
      • ams6110 8y ago
        Depends how much I'm buying. If it will fit in one or two bags, self checkout is often faster. If I'm buying a cart load, the speed of the experienced cashier and separate person bagging in parallel is almost always faster.
        • mdorazio 8y ago
          That's true; for big shopping trips self-checkout is non-ideal. It helps that the cashiers don't have to wait for the items to be weighed in the bagging area. I think a CV implementation will eventually replace the weighing setup and speed things up since RFID tags for individual items never caught on due to cost.
        • amyjess 8y ago
          This is also one of the reasons I prefer Kroger whenever I go shopping. Most Krogers in my area don't have conveyor belts, and instead the cashier personally takes all the items from the cart directly to the scanner. At Tom Thumb, Albertsons, and Walmart, there's a conveyor belt and I'm expected to unload my whole cart onto the belt before the cashier touches anything.
          • loco5niner 8y ago
            > there's a conveyor belt and I'm expected to unload my whole cart onto the belt before the cashier touches anything I don't understand why this is a negative? I guess I usually optimize my shopping trips for getting out the door faster. Different people enjoy different things I guess.
            • amyjess 8y ago
              Shopping for me involves so much loading and unloading that I'm happy to cut out one of the steps. First, as you're shopping, you load everything into the cart. Then, you get to the cash register, and at most supermarkets you have to take everything out of the cart so the cashier can scan it (if you're at a Kroger, you can skip this step). After the cashier is done, you may or may not have to put the bags back in the cart yourself depending on whether or not there's a dedicated bagger. Then, you take your cart to the car and you load up the car. Now, the next step will probably be different if you own your own car; I don't, so I either go to the supermarket with someone I know or take Lyft. In either case, I take everything out of the trunk and put them in front of my front door. After everything's done and the driver has driven away, I unlock and open the door and take all the bags into my house. Then I sort through my bags and begin putting all the individual groceries wherever they're supposed to go. It's exhausting. If I can cut out even one of those steps, I'm happy. At Kroger, I'll just wheel my cart over to the cashier's station, swipe my Kroger Plus card, stick my credit card in the chip reader, and play with my phone until the machine starts beeping at me to take the card out.
      • smelendez 8y ago
        This is an aside, but I've never understood why people paying by check can't prefill everything but the dollar amount during the checkout process. It seems like people paying by check don't even take out their checkbooks and hunt for a pen until the total comes up.
        • Noumenon72 8y ago
          Certain stores have a printer at the register that puts the store name, date, and dollar amount all on your check so you just have to sign.
    • nsnick 8y ago
      You hit the nail on the head. Self checkouts are terrible because they treat every customer as a potential thief.
      • stephengillie 8y ago
        Self-checkout likely introduces greater opportunity for shoplifting. And the grocery unions like the UFCW have no reason to like self-checkout. Self-checkout is a perfect example of compromise - not what the workers want, not what the business wants, and not the shoppers want.
    • astura 8y ago
      Most stores I've been to in the past 10-15 years you can print out a scannable label/barcode for the produce right in the produce section. I didn't know this was uncommon.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
        I have never once seen that. Are you in the US?
        • astura 8y ago
          Yes, I am. It looks like this: http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5560d80cecad048a6f5f4829-1200/one-of-my-favorite-parts-of-grocery-shopping-as-a-kid-was-helping-my-parents-weigh-the-produce-we-wanted-to-buy-there-were-plenty-of-weigh-stations-scattered-throughout-the-aisles-at-wegmans.jpg http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5560d80cecad048a6f5... https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-woman-weighing-pineapple-on-scale-at-grocery-store-137620264.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-woman-weighing-pineapple-o... http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/1/17470/32_2008/mettler_toledo_scale.jpg http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/1/17470/32_2008/mettl... The one in my local grocery store is the best because its main screen is big buttons of the most common produce plus a "lookup" option. 90%+ of the time I only have to put my produce on the scale and hit one giant button.
      • r00fus 8y ago
        Yes this is how they do it in France. It's self-service but monitored by an employee... learned the hard way the first time I showed up to the register and they gave me stinkeye because I didn't measure/label my produce. Have yet to see that in the US... instead we have shrinkwrapped everything (and barcoded stickers)
    • loco5niner 8y ago
      > Fruit & veggies are a disaster unless you like shrinkwrapped everything or you know all the codes. Not in my experience. The codes are all right there (on a sticker on the fruit or vegetables) or easily looked up by name/picture.
  • amyjess 8y ago
    > What is the issue with self-checkout, I found it is actually faster. Unexplained item in bagging area. I have had so many issues with the self-checkout's sensor not working properly. If it's not telling me there's something in the bagging area that's not supposed to be there, it's telling me that it can't detect the item I just put in the bag. It's especially common if the item is lightweight. Usually the sensor fails to pick up the item I just put in the bag and won't let me scan anything else unless I either do or press "I don't want to bag this item". And then I scan the next item and then it finally picks it up and whines about an unexplained item in the bagging area. Whenever I use the self-checkout, I usually end up having to call over the attendant multiple times to deal with these problems. And the attendant is busy with half a dozen other people, so the self-checkout ends up being slower than the regular one.
  • logfromblammo 8y ago
    Regardless of the multiple technical issues, there is also the base presumption that every customer is trying to cheat the store on every transaction. So every item you scan has to be placed on the giant scale that is the bagging area, and remain there until your entire order is processed. So the usage pattern goes: scan, bag, scan, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, enter code, weigh, bag, scan, stop and wait for employee, scan, bag, process payment, move all bags, leave. You can't scan the bread and eggs and the watermelon and leave the fragile crushable items on the belt until the heavy items are already in the bag. Everything must be moved immediately to the bagging area, human! So if you don't plan your scanning, you end up moving some things twice. Weight discrepancy noted. Return items to the bagging area and wait for the store employee to verify that you aren't cheating! For the regular checkouts, the usage pattern is often customer moves entire order to first conveyor belt, employee 1 scans all items and passes them onto the second conveyor belt. At this point, there may be an employee 2 that bags the scanned items and places the bags back into the empty cart as employee 1 processes payment, then both bag until the order is processed. That works fine. Not great, but it works well enough. At some stores, the bagger employee has been deprecated. The cashier bags items into a bag carousel. At some stores, the conveyors are not used. Cashier scans items directly from the cart. The most efficient stores, such as Aldi (Aldi Sud, in US), scan directly from one cart into another, and don't even bother with bags. The customer can keep Tyvek bags in their vehicle, and bag directly from the cart to their trunk, if they even care about bags at all. (Maybe they keep specialized containers for specific sizes of cans, instead?) Self-checkout doesn't work like that. It's almost designed to be annoying and frustrating. It could be so much better if they only designed the experience from the ground up instead of trying to make a drop-in replacement for the employee checkout lanes, which were designed for different criteria decades ago.
• flukus 8y ago
  Self checkouts aren't automation, it's just making the customer do something (worse) that the store employees used to take care of. Otherwise gas stations have been automated for decades.
  • Kurtz79 8y ago
    Barcodes were introduced to automate the process of having to insert he price manually in the register, payment by cards to eliminate the necessity of having to handle chash and change. The self-checkout in itself might not be considered as automation, but it leverages on innovations that made the contribute of the cashier really minimal. That said, as a customer, self-checkouts are a worse experience than having a cashier doing it (faster and more efficiently).
  • Glyptodon 8y ago
    The only thing I like about self checkout is that I don't have to interact with a human if I'm buying something that might provoke comment.
    • Freak_NL 8y ago
      Does that ever happen or is it just a fear of being judged for your purchases? Cashiers scan hundreds of items during their shift. They are not looking at the product like you do when you select it from the shelves amongst a number of alternatives; they are merely glancing at it to get the barcode oriented towards their scanner. Your curiosity tends to take a back seat with repetitive work like that (you would be mentally exhausted in an hour if you did actually 'look' at everything).
      • 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
        I've had grocery store cashiers comment on my purchases, usually asking if a new product is any good. Possibly related to the fact that I'm a regular customer with a pretty regular shopping list; their attention might be focused by disrupted expectations rather than any effort to recognize each product. Unrelated to product selection, I also had one cashier somehow steer the standard small-talk exchange into saying that I need to accept Jesus. That just shows that some cashiers have no idea what is or isn't appropriate to say to a customer.