I haven't had the same experience either as in this article, whether in France (where self-checkout has been a thing in most supermarkets for ten years or so I'

I haven't had the same experience either as in this article, whether in France (where self-checkout has been a thing in most supermarkets for ten years or so I'd say), Belgium where it has arrived more recently, or the UK from time to time. It works fine in most stores, and the queue is not infrequently longer than in manned tills because many people seem to prefer the convenience of self-checkout, that's my case too. The few stores I knew which had painful self-checkout machines (usually related to weighing items, and needing precise timing between putting the scanned item on the right-hand platform and scanning the next item) seem to have fixed their problems in the last few years. Many stores are moving to scan-as-you-go, you scan your customer card when entering, get a handheld scanner, and just hang it down and pay when leaving. With a random but infrequent check by personnel. This is by far the most convenient method and I see it in almost all supermarkets now (well, the French and Dutch chains that operate in Belgium at least, but now that I think of it, it seems the Belgian ones don't do it). There's also the Decathlon system where every item has an RFID tag and you just put everything down and it detects things without scanning, but I think it works because people generally don't buy lots of things at once at Decathlon (a large sports apparel and equipment store). I don't think this is viable for supermarkets. Also, being "caught" not having scanned something (just forgetting to scan before putting something in the cart must be rather common, it's human) never seems to be a problem, it triggers a full rescan and probably increases the chance of getting checked later one, but even that doesn't always seem the case. So from my point of view, it's clearly not a "spectacular failure", customers certainly don't hate it, and it's not going to be abandoned anytime soon.