9 ms·

I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it auto

by hackan 3y ago

I love self-checkout, honestly. Machines need to improve, but still. There's a store here where u simply DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything! I suspect it uses NFC or similar, but it works, and its wonderful, simply drop everything in! And wait, there's more: did I say drop everything in? I meant, the bag you are using to hold everything? just put it in that basket, insert your CC and it's done. You don't get easier than that... So yes, let's keep self-checkout, and focus on improving it!

JohnFen 3y ago
> I love self-checkout, honestly. Not me. I really loathe it a lot, unless I'm buying just a single item and I'm in a hurry. Increasingly, the self-checkout lines tend to be the really long ones anyway, so using them isn't even any faster. Just more work.
devilbunny 3y ago
I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver. I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big shopping day.
- filcuk 3y ago
  For larger shopping, I like to use the scanning gun. I get that it's used to track me, but the fact is I get to track the price, pack items as I go and just pay on the way out.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    You kind of need it for the big & heavy stuff. I hit somewhere without one and of course half my basket was 50lb this and 32ct that.
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Some of the UK supermarkets are bypassing the scanning gun now and just doing self-scan with an app. Works really well. Nice price checking feature in some of the apps too.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  When I started looking at RFID tech in 2004, the disposable tags cost maybe $.50-$1 but general consensus was the costs would follow a Moore’s law like trajectory, halving every 2-3 years until they were on even the cheapest items. And yet here we are 20 years later and I don’t see RFID checkout systems very often at all. Are the tags still really expensive? Or is it the extra cost of attaching them to packaging?
  - ky0ung 3y ago
    RFID tags are ~10c (Impinj) and are getting cheaper each year. they're widely used in apparel stores. think it'd be tough to justify attaching them to low value items in a grocery store. self checkout prob more effective using computer vision
  - manmal 3y ago
    Are you suggesting to put trillions of copper, silicon, and aluminum parts on disposable items like bananas, so people have a slightly better shopping experience?
    - nothercastle 3y ago
      Absolutely worth it
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      I am not suggesting it. It was widely presented as inevitable once the costs dropped enough. Retail inventory management and checkout is expensive.
      - manmal 3y ago
        Apologies for the strawman then. I just hope humanity can pass on that one, for once.
    - xboxnolifes 3y ago
      We kind of already do that, just with plastic, adhesive, and ink.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore? or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store... maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Produce is not a loss-leader. Pretty solid margins if you compare market prices on produce with what the supermarkets sell them for. And if you’ve been in any UK supermarket near closing time on a busy weekend day, you’ll see that they routinely sell out of many/most items before restocking overnight. Stuff that hits its best-before date gets marked down to sell. Generally speaking, there isn’t a huge amount being wasted.
    - klondike_klive 3y ago
      The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of tonnes of produce to rot. Check out getfairaboutfarming.com
      - Reason077 3y ago
        It is certainly unfair to growers if supermarkets are reneging on purchase agreements. But the link you sent has just a single anecdotal "case study", and the site seems to be a marketing site for an organic food box supplier. Hardly by itself evidence of a systemic problem. Besides, if a purchase agreement falls though with produce already grown, normally what happens is the produce is sold on the wholesale market instead. In that case, growers might receive a lower price, perhaps resulting in a loss, but that's not as bad as leaving it "to rot" and getting nothing at all. Produce would typically only be dumped in the case of a huge market glut (when prices are so low that it is not even worth harvesting/transporting them), or if there are labour shortages making it difficult or uneconomical to harvest.
- Shinchy 3y ago
  Not seen it on groceries, but I know Uniqlo use this same method and it's fantastic.
didntcheck 3y ago
I've used a few libraries that work like that, probably going back 10 or more years now. I was a little incredulous the first time - "You mean I really just plonk down a pile of books and press 'loan'? No individually placing each one spine-first in a tag-deactivator?" I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with disposable ones
- bombcar 3y ago
  Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still uses barcodes. No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
  - gmcharlt 3y ago
    That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much. Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory, not only do they want to verify the existence of the books, but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading" accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      So many of these "technological solutions" end up being "spherical cow" type things. RFID might speed up checkout at a library by a small fraction, but you still have the issue that most patrons check out a book or two, you still have to check that the DVD is in the case either way, and the self-checkouts aren't backing up anyway. (Similarly most libraries have given up on fines, at least around here - the overhead of dealing with them and "scaring" patrons away was much worse than the people actively "stealing" books.) Not to even get to barcodes (like CVS files) are quite interoperable, and you can relatively easily change one barcode system to another, just my importing the data. RFID readers often need specific RFID tags and it locks you to a vendor (who often promptly goes out of business). Over time things like that get noticed.
a1o 3y ago
It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The items are also all high enough margin to cover the extra tag cost. Isn’t going to work for supermarkets.
  - hackan 3y ago
    Yup, tagging and all the related costs are only reasonable for high-margin/relative high value products, not food
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    It's not just for payment though, it also helps for theft, and I suppose inventory management is improved on many aspects as well.
Reason077 3y ago
> ”DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything!” Yeah, I’ve seen this in a few clothing stores (Uniqlo, H&M, Zara). UHF RFIDs embedded in the tags. It’s more for the store’s benefit than anything (makes stock takes very easy, for example!), but the neat self checkout is a nice side-benefit.
Gigachad 3y ago
It seems that in general, the US lags behind in retail technology. In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout. The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.
- govg 3y ago
  Data point of just 1, but even in a small college town in the Midwest US, 50% or more counters at the grocery stores I've visited have been self checkout. Some places are almost entirely self checkout, to the point where if you need assistance it's hard to find an actual person employed by the store.
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    Same experience in a _very_ small college town in Midwest US. Though, the walmart did just "upgrade" their self checkouts. They improved nothing! They added a bunch more cameras and apparently the thing now has some predictive visual algorithm that will not allow you to scan multiple identical items at a time. They still haven't added the tap to the card terminal! Just let me tap! Everyone else does, crazy they haven't figured that out yet. They also have started making their greeters check receipts, which is insane knowing the culture of the again incredibly small town. I just walk right past them. Check my receipt in hell, nice old lady or wheelchair bound man, i got places to be!
- shric 3y ago
  The ones in Australia aren't perfect though. I use Coles and Woolworths mostly in the Sydney CBD: - bad touch screens that lag. - even more lag when you're trying to pay. - frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging area, or some other reason - unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap and pay. I still use them most of the time because there is almost never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.
guappa 3y ago
Want to buy this vegetable? Now try to find it among these 300 icons of vegetables! Enjoy!
- krastanov 3y ago
  Or just type the name of the vegetable or just copy the 4-digit code on the sticker attached to the vegetable. At least in the US there is no problem with buying vegetables in self-checkout.
  - guappa 3y ago
    Vegetables don't have stickers. They are vegetables. Ah the name… but is it a golden extra apple or a yellow apple? Or perhaps a extra fresh guaranteed apple?
    - theamk 3y ago
      it's 4021 apple, because it has a sticker. So you try to scan tiny barcode (if one is present, you can see it on bananas) but if it's missing or dirty, you enter 4-digit PLU by hand. It's very simple and fast: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-on-fruits-and-vegetables-really-mean_l_64ca6c04e4b03d9b515f1c18 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-... but yeah, if your store has no number stickers and multiple types of apples I can imagine self-checkout being a major pain. (I can think of a few ways to make this easier -- like provide a roll of stickers next to each variety so customer can attach them to the bag themselves -- but I've never seen this implemented)
    - gosub100 3y ago
      at that point, is it really stealing to just make your best guess? are they going to detain you because you input an apple that is $0.04c cheaper than the real one?
      - iggldiggl 3y ago
        At least over here, differing varieties of the same fruit often cost the same, probably precisely to avoid this problem.
_heimdall 3y ago
That sure is a lot of single use NFC tags though. These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and helping lower our environmental impact.
- aceki 3y ago
  RFID tags are already used for inventory management for some items/retailers. A system like this can just piggyback on the existing tags.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    It would need to expand to every product though, right? From produce to packs of gum, they would all need tags that can be reliably scanned by the bag/cart.
    - tylerhou 3y ago
      I’ve seen it at stores where each item is relatively more expensive (e.g. a Uniqlo).
- imtringued 3y ago
  We nowadays have disposable smart labels with integrated screens. Look up ynvisible
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    Those seem really wasteful too IMO, why do we need them? Disposable is really in the eye of the beholder. Just because it can be single use, or even if its biodegradable, doesn't change all the resources that go into manufacturing them in the first place. Just toss a bunch of unlabeled apples in a bin and let a human cashier who has already learned all the product codes for produce just type them in. Or if we really want self checkout, put a barcode at the bin and no labels on the apples at all.
Symbiote 3y ago
Uniqlo's system was discussed here in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111

by hackan 3y ago

JohnFen 3y ago

> I love self-checkout, honestly. Not me. I really loathe it a lot, unless I'm buying just a single item and I'm in a hurry. Increasingly, the self-checkout lines tend to be the really long ones anyway, so using them isn't even any faster. Just more work.

devilbunny 3y ago

I'm sure that's great, but it's a bit impractical for groceries. Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). But groceries are one of the best examples of where this would be a big time-saver. I will say that I really do prefer self-check in convenience stores, where a big purchase is three or four items. But for groceries... it's too much if you're actually doing a big shopping day.

filcuk 3y ago
For larger shopping, I like to use the scanning gun. I get that it's used to track me, but the fact is I get to track the price, pack items as I go and just pay on the way out.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  You kind of need it for the big & heavy stuff. I hit somewhere without one and of course half my basket was 50lb this and 32ct that.
- Reason077 3y ago
  Some of the UK supermarkets are bypassing the scanning gun now and just doing self-scan with an app. Works really well. Nice price checking feature in some of the apps too.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
When I started looking at RFID tech in 2004, the disposable tags cost maybe $.50-$1 but general consensus was the costs would follow a Moore’s law like trajectory, halving every 2-3 years until they were on even the cheapest items. And yet here we are 20 years later and I don’t see RFID checkout systems very often at all. Are the tags still really expensive? Or is it the extra cost of attaching them to packaging?
- ky0ung 3y ago
  RFID tags are ~10c (Impinj) and are getting cheaper each year. they're widely used in apparel stores. think it'd be tough to justify attaching them to low value items in a grocery store. self checkout prob more effective using computer vision
- manmal 3y ago
  Are you suggesting to put trillions of copper, silicon, and aluminum parts on disposable items like bananas, so people have a slightly better shopping experience?
  - nothercastle 3y ago
    Absolutely worth it
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    I am not suggesting it. It was widely presented as inevitable once the costs dropped enough. Retail inventory management and checkout is expensive.
    - manmal 3y ago
      Apologies for the strawman then. I just hope humanity can pass on that one, for once.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    We kind of already do that, just with plastic, adhesive, and ink.
jareklupinski 3y ago
> Even the relatively small cost of an NFC tag is going to be a real problem given how thin most groceries' margins are (and how cheap small amounts of food can be, even now). something that's been worrying me: how long until grocery stores stop keeping fresh fruit and vegetables because it just isn't worth it anymore? or has produce always been a loss-leader to get people buying other things in the store... maybe just put NFC tags on the milk and butter, and let people walk out with as many oranges as they can carry?
- Reason077 3y ago
  Produce is not a loss-leader. Pretty solid margins if you compare market prices on produce with what the supermarkets sell them for. And if you’ve been in any UK supermarket near closing time on a busy weekend day, you’ll see that they routinely sell out of many/most items before restocking overnight. Stuff that hits its best-before date gets marked down to sell. Generally speaking, there isn’t a huge amount being wasted.
  - klondike_klive 3y ago
    The waste is externalised. Supermarkets regularly renege on their agreements with farmers, leaving millions of tonnes of produce to rot. Check out getfairaboutfarming.com
    - Reason077 3y ago
      It is certainly unfair to growers if supermarkets are reneging on purchase agreements. But the link you sent has just a single anecdotal "case study", and the site seems to be a marketing site for an organic food box supplier. Hardly by itself evidence of a systemic problem. Besides, if a purchase agreement falls though with produce already grown, normally what happens is the produce is sold on the wholesale market instead. In that case, growers might receive a lower price, perhaps resulting in a loss, but that's not as bad as leaving it "to rot" and getting nothing at all. Produce would typically only be dumped in the case of a huge market glut (when prices are so low that it is not even worth harvesting/transporting them), or if there are labour shortages making it difficult or uneconomical to harvest.
Shinchy 3y ago
Not seen it on groceries, but I know Uniqlo use this same method and it's fantastic.

didntcheck 3y ago

I've used a few libraries that work like that, probably going back 10 or more years now. I was a little incredulous the first time - "You mean I really just plonk down a pile of books and press 'loan'? No individually placing each one spine-first in a tag-deactivator?" I guess until recently it was only practical to implement with tags that were going to be reused, but is now feasible with disposable ones

bombcar 3y ago
Our library has self checkout and no anti-theft, but it still uses barcodes. No doubt if they were rolling out a system today they’d use RFID instead, but the absolute massive inertia from millions of barcodes books throughout the system must be huge.
- gmcharlt 3y ago
  That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much. Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory, not only do they want to verify the existence of the books, but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading" accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    So many of these "technological solutions" end up being "spherical cow" type things. RFID might speed up checkout at a library by a small fraction, but you still have the issue that most patrons check out a book or two, you still have to check that the DVD is in the case either way, and the self-checkouts aren't backing up anyway. (Similarly most libraries have given up on fines, at least around here - the overhead of dealing with them and "scaring" patrons away was much worse than the people actively "stealing" books.) Not to even get to barcodes (like CVS files) are quite interoperable, and you can relatively easily change one barcode system to another, just my importing the data. RFID readers often need specific RFID tags and it locks you to a vendor (who often promptly goes out of business). Over time things like that get noticed.

a1o 3y ago

It's Uniqlo and it works because clothes have no metal or body of water or something else that could interfere with the RFID.

Gigachad 3y ago
The items are also all high enough margin to cover the extra tag cost. Isn’t going to work for supermarkets.
- hackan 3y ago
  Yup, tagging and all the related costs are only reasonable for high-margin/relative high value products, not food
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  It's not just for payment though, it also helps for theft, and I suppose inventory management is improved on many aspects as well.

Reason077 3y ago

> ”DROP all items in the self-checkout basket, and it automatically computes everything!” Yeah, I’ve seen this in a few clothing stores (Uniqlo, H&M, Zara). UHF RFIDs embedded in the tags. It’s more for the store’s benefit than anything (makes stock takes very easy, for example!), but the neat self checkout is a nice side-benefit.

Gigachad 3y ago

It seems that in general, the US lags behind in retail technology. In Australia, close to all supermarkets are majority if not entirely self checkout. Even a lot of retail brands like hardware stores and clothing stores are self checkout. The ones like Uniqlo where you just drop the items in and it instantly scans them all are incredibly nice to use.

govg 3y ago
Data point of just 1, but even in a small college town in the Midwest US, 50% or more counters at the grocery stores I've visited have been self checkout. Some places are almost entirely self checkout, to the point where if you need assistance it's hard to find an actual person employed by the store.
- wholinator2 3y ago
  Same experience in a _very_ small college town in Midwest US. Though, the walmart did just "upgrade" their self checkouts. They improved nothing! They added a bunch more cameras and apparently the thing now has some predictive visual algorithm that will not allow you to scan multiple identical items at a time. They still haven't added the tap to the card terminal! Just let me tap! Everyone else does, crazy they haven't figured that out yet. They also have started making their greeters check receipts, which is insane knowing the culture of the again incredibly small town. I just walk right past them. Check my receipt in hell, nice old lady or wheelchair bound man, i got places to be!
shric 3y ago
The ones in Australia aren't perfect though. I use Coles and Woolworths mostly in the Sydney CBD: - bad touch screens that lag. - even more lag when you're trying to pay. - frequent (about 60% of visits) requirement for staff because it disagrees that I've put something in the bagging area, or some other reason - unnecessary and slow modal dialogs about rewards programmes, receipt etc. I wish there was just a "leave me alone and let me pay by card" button that just lets me tap and pay. I still use them most of the time because there is almost never a queue, but if the human checkout lines are empty or almost empty I'll use them instead, it's much faster.

guappa 3y ago

Want to buy this vegetable? Now try to find it among these 300 icons of vegetables! Enjoy!

krastanov 3y ago
Or just type the name of the vegetable or just copy the 4-digit code on the sticker attached to the vegetable. At least in the US there is no problem with buying vegetables in self-checkout.
- guappa 3y ago
  Vegetables don't have stickers. They are vegetables. Ah the name… but is it a golden extra apple or a yellow apple? Or perhaps a extra fresh guaranteed apple?
  - theamk 3y ago
    it's 4021 apple, because it has a sticker. So you try to scan tiny barcode (if one is present, you can see it on bananas) but if it's missing or dirty, you enter 4-digit PLU by hand. It's very simple and fast: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-on-fruits-and-vegetables-really-mean_l_64ca6c04e4b03d9b515f1c18 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-thats-what-those-stickers-... but yeah, if your store has no number stickers and multiple types of apples I can imagine self-checkout being a major pain. (I can think of a few ways to make this easier -- like provide a roll of stickers next to each variety so customer can attach them to the bag themselves -- but I've never seen this implemented)
  - gosub100 3y ago
    at that point, is it really stealing to just make your best guess? are they going to detain you because you input an apple that is $0.04c cheaper than the real one?
    - iggldiggl 3y ago
      At least over here, differing varieties of the same fruit often cost the same, probably precisely to avoid this problem.

_heimdall 3y ago

That sure is a lot of single use NFC tags though. These kinds of convenience features are almost never aligned with the strong passion many today have for reducing waste and helping lower our environmental impact.

aceki 3y ago
RFID tags are already used for inventory management for some items/retailers. A system like this can just piggyback on the existing tags.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  It would need to expand to every product though, right? From produce to packs of gum, they would all need tags that can be reliably scanned by the bag/cart.
  - tylerhou 3y ago
    I’ve seen it at stores where each item is relatively more expensive (e.g. a Uniqlo).
imtringued 3y ago
We nowadays have disposable smart labels with integrated screens. Look up ynvisible
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Those seem really wasteful too IMO, why do we need them? Disposable is really in the eye of the beholder. Just because it can be single use, or even if its biodegradable, doesn't change all the resources that go into manufacturing them in the first place. Just toss a bunch of unlabeled apples in a bin and let a human cashier who has already learned all the product codes for produce just type them in. Or if we really want self checkout, put a barcode at the bin and no labels on the apples at all.

Symbiote 3y ago

Uniqlo's system was discussed here in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111