> You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in th

> You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that. Sounds like most of those issues are self-inflicted by cheaping out on all the hardware. Reliable scales, scanners, etc. aren't hard to figure out, if you bother paying enough for it. In the half-decade or we've had self-checkouts in Austria, they've been mostly reliable – I've only ever had real trouble in the first six months of their deployment (teething issues), and in the first half of 2023, when producers were shrinkflating their packagings so often that the inventory databases couldn't keep up and scales were regularly expecting the wrong values. That seems to have quieted down again too, thankfully.