8 ms·

I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stu

• underyx 3y ago
  See also the RFID tags Uniqlo and Decathlon use for self-checkout. You just place your shopping bag in a bin and it reads all the items within in a second.
  • f_allwein 3y ago
    used it only once, but it seemed neat.
  • noodlesUK 3y ago
    My guess is that right now this isn't viable for lower margin food products. Uniqlo and decathlon probably don't sell that much for less than £10. It's going to be a while before you can reasonably do that for a pint of milk.
    • skyyler 3y ago
      You're right - the cheapest thing uniqlo sells are $5 pairs of socks. Their $15 shirts are the next cheapest thing they sell, I'd imagine.
      • unscaled 3y ago
        These would be 290 yen ($1.90) 790 yen ($5.20) in Japan respectively. I still don't think an RFID will eat that much into their profit margin, but Uniqlo is in the unique position of having stricter control over their supply chain. All the products they sell are Uniqlo-branded products, manufactured specifically for Uniqlo, and they can just have RFID tags embedded in the price tags for all the products with little extra cost. Grocery stores sells cans, plastic jugs, glass bottles, shrink-wrapped fresh produce and even plain vegetable and fruit or grain and legumes by weight. All of these comes from a wide variety of manufacturers that don't produce directly for you (or even have any kind of direct relationship with you). The wide variety of form factors makes attaching RFID to everything unrealistic, and even for the stuff you could attach RFID to, it's not like manufacturers would do that for you.
• sircastor 3y ago
  It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you later. We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
  • cdchn 3y ago
    >I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway. Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries. Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
    • rootusrootus 3y ago
      Back in the days when we got plastic shopping bags, I considered it an art form to see if I could get an entire trunk load of groceries into the house in a single trip. Without squishing the bread. You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers are. It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
      • cdchn 3y ago
        Plastic bags were great, I could hook as many as I could lift on a padded carabiner. With mandatory paper bags they seem to have made them as flimsy as possible. I can't go grocery shopping when its raining any more, the bags just turn into mush at the slightest drizzle.
    • nottorp 3y ago
      Always did that. But I keep large, solid, reusable bags in the trunk.
• phh 3y ago
  We've had that in France for years, and noone uses that as far as I can tell. The main usage I see is mainly self checkout. Please note that I'm biased towards dense areas. We have on-the-go scanning in super stores as well, I feel it's not being used but I could be wrong
  • beardyw 3y ago
    Yes, same in the UK. Most stores have scan as you shop, but most people do self checkout. I get the impression scan as you shop is seen as being a bit prissy.
    • weinzierl 3y ago
      As a German it is always a culture shock to see how popular self checkout is in the UK, even though I see it used more often recently in Germany too. I think Germany is about a decade behind...
      • drusepth 3y ago
        Wait until you see how popular it is in the US! I can't remember the last time I saw someone use a manned checkout line; my local grocery store has 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty.
        • dxbydt 3y ago
          > 1 manned lane and 12 self checkout lanes, and the manned one is almost always empty its empty because it’s considered rude to burden the poorly paid checkout person when you can self-service. Once all of the self-service lanes are occupied, the sentiment shifts and customers uneasily queue up in the manned lane, frantically watching if the self-service lane clears up so they can jump out of the manned lane. One of those freak cases in behavioral econ where the causality is very straightforward and explicit.
          • hot_gril 3y ago
• lgfrbcsgo 3y ago
  What would prevent someone from lining their shopping bag with metal to shield the RF?
  • noodlesUK 3y ago
    Nothing, the same as current self-checkout systems. You can already easily just put stuff in your pocket or ring expensive items up as incorrect, cheaper things. I suspect shops have done a risk analysis and decided that they'd prefer to have more shoplifting and fewer staff.
    • kube-system 3y ago
      I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. Even before self-checkouts existed, people still shoplifted. And in some places, the honor system even works much of the time.
      • noodlesUK 3y ago
        > I doubt the relationship between the rate of shoplifting and ease of shoplifting is anywhere close to linear. I'm sure you're right. I suspect that there are massive variations from shop location to shop location, even within a region. I also suspect there are different kinds of shoplifting. I remember hearing a friend who is not the kind of person to just pocket an item and leave, bragging about ringing up protein powder from a bulk dispenser as flour to save money. That kind of behaviour is definitely going to be hard to model.
        • bombcar 3y ago
          There's a number of people who openly admit to "self checkout discounts" as part of the "payment" for doing the work for the store.
    • Salgat 3y ago
      At least in Walmart I've had workers come over to me multiple times to verify I correctly scanned things. There's definitely more scrutiny involved when you have a centralized self-checkout (this only happens in the more sketchy Walmart, the nicer one seems to trust people more).
• saghm 3y ago
  > I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan anything. Isn't that basically what Amazon had claimed they were doing here, except apparently maybe they weren't?
  • throw1230 3y ago
    Nope, they were using camera technology and QR codes
    • timr 3y ago
      It always seemed so needlessly complex, relative to well-established RFID tech -- Uniqlo can count the number and type of garments in a pile in a big bucket, and compute an invoice from that. Even if you couldn't do this at the exit, seems like it would have been a far easier lift to incorporate the same idea into shopping carts or baskets all along.
      • jcrawfordor 3y ago
        The cost-per-unit on RFID product tags (EPCs) has tended to limit them to products with a relatively high margin and a relatively high theft potential---clothing being the most obvious example and the most common application of EPCs, with retailers all the way down to WalMart using them for apparel. You'll note that WalMart doesn't even use the EPCs at POS, which is telling: for most retailers, the main advantage of EPCs is far more actionable alarms at the exit. So they're limited to items where loss rates make the added cost worth it. The problem is that the grocery industry has notoriously low margins, and the unit price of EPC tags can be the entire margin on a lot of products. On the one hand, Amazon may have been trying to work around the need for higher-cost tags to roll out this kind of automation. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotally that Amazon Fresh pricing was relatively high, so maybe EPCs would have been a wiser use of their extra revenue.
        • 3y ago
• jeffwask 3y ago
  Stop and Shop (in New England) had hand scanners you could do this with 15 years ago. I have been shocked that the technology didn't spread. It was so easy to scan and bag then just plug the scanner in at checkout and pay.
  • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    Stop and Shop now has self-checkout where you have to scan and move your items one at a time into your bag, because it's doing continuous weight-based reconciliation. So if you have six of the same yoghurt, you have to scan them and then place them in your bag one at a time. And if you have a 24 pack of sodas, you need to haul it out of your cart onto the scales as you're checking out. And if anything goes wrong (item didn't weight what the system expected; you moved the item too fast onto the scales etc) then you get a "please wait while someone helps you", which involves an employee having to come and clear the error.
    • Workaccount2 3y ago
      There should be a hand scanner and a "skip bagging" option that allows you to keep heavy things on your cart. I'm pretty sure I have seen it at stop and shop before too.
    • Noumenon72 3y ago
      Scanning each yogurt individually is usually required for cashiers too because otherwise people scan similar items under the same barcode.
  • 4ndrewl 3y ago
    Most of the large chain supermarkets in the UK have this, but my anecdata is that it's relatively less used that self checkoit by a ratio of 3:1
• diggan 3y ago
  > I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. Scan-as-you-shop has been around for at least a decade at this point I think, at least in some parts of the world. ICA (supermarket in Sweden) been doing it for as long as I can remember, and I came across this image of the scanner being used at the store on Mediawiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_checkout_scanner_(Ica_Maxi).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Self_checkout_scanne... (Image uploaded 2011) Surely this exists elsewhere too, or been judged to only work in certain contexts (like a high-trust environment like Sweden) and won't be the next realistic step.
  • graemep 3y ago
    All the supermarkets where I live (English Midlands) have scan as you shop. I stopped using it after they required using their loyalty cards/apps to use it.
    • jhbadger 3y ago
      I'm not a fan of the data tracking that I know those loyalty programs are for, but at least in the US most stores overcharge you if you don't use them (they present it as giving a "discount" if you use them but really you are just getting the fair price denied to non-members) so you would need to have deep pockets to resist them out of principle.
      • graemep 3y ago
        Around here the main difference is lower pricing on some items, so I mostly just buy those items somewhere else. I also use one loyalty app only when I get an offer.
      • charlieflowers 3y ago
        Just yesterday I bought some steaks that were $55 with the loyalty card and $130 (no typo) without. I’ve never seen a difference that huge before.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
• PodgieTar 3y ago
  Albert Heijn does this in the Netherlands, tied to your loyalty card. You can even import your shopping list and show it on the little hand scanners. At the end, you scan your loyalty card and it shows up on the self checkout. I think it’s great, I get to go around the shop with a little laser gun.
  • t0mas88 3y ago
    Yes it's great. Put everything straight in your bag, no packing at the end. The only thing I don't like is that they have added the option to the machines to scan all your things there instead of using the portable scanner. Which in my area has resulted in queues at the self checkout... Which used to be very quick when it was only used for the portable scanners.
  • gsa 3y ago
    An even nicer thing about the Albert Heijn self checkout is that I can use my own phone from start to finish. Connect to store wifi, scan items using their app (using the phone camera), pay with my phone (contactless payments) on the self checkout and use my phone to scan an exit barcode at the turnstile. My visits to the store usually last only a few minutes and I don't mind popping in multiple times a week.
• sarchertech 3y ago
  When I worked there back in 2005, Best Buy had an RFID test setup in the basement of their HQ that could tell what you had in your cart without scanning. Walmart was also working on similar technology, but from what I heard they couldn’t convince suppliers to include RFID tags on all of their products.
• skywhopper 3y ago
  The problem with your second suggestion is that it gives the customer no recourse for improperly tagged/scanned items. Interaction with a human or checkout system before leaving the store is necessary, given how ripe for abuse a totally automated checkout system would be.
  • noodlesUK 3y ago
    Agreed - I think there's also the issue of people needing to be pre-registered with such a system, and not being able to accept cash. I would expect that in the future, systems like that will be an "express lane" for the particularly prepared, but not necessarily the default.
• michaelt 3y ago
  > I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech Unfortunately I doubt you'll ever see this happen. Sure, it's supposedly possible to buy an RFID chip for 1p - but you can buy a can of beans for 23p so that 1p is probably their entire profit margin. I've also worked with a variety of RFID readers; none of them can provide reliable reading, even in favourable conditions.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    I think there's another technical issue with using RFID. If you have a basket of a few dozen different RFID chips, there's going to be a lot of collisions in the data they transmit, further reducing reliability.
  • vkou 3y ago
    Exactly how many beans does this 23p 'can' contain? Is it more than a dozen?
    • wrboyce 3y ago
      https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/258290127 https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/258290127 If my Business Studies teacher ~20 years ago was, and still is, correct then they are a loss leader.
• michaelmrose 3y ago
  Scanning with your phone camera sucks its very slow and scanning as you pass the anti theft barriers normalizes running the barriers which will make catching thieves basically impossible. It also runs contra to shoppers expectations. Raises the question of charging the wrong person when multiple phones are nearby as when multiple people are shopping together or just adjacent to one another or when carts are just too close to the barriers. It also assumes that reading is instant and faultless when its not and fails to support anyone who wanders in from the street without an account set up expecting normal payment options. This makes it suitable for a membership club which expects to set up payment as part of setting up membership and useless for the 99% of stores that don't work like that. Why not wait a few years until even a can of beans has an rfid tag, put a rfid tag in 4 corners of the cart. You should be able to compute which tags are within the bounds of the cart and allow you to pay. The hardware to read the tags is still too expensive to put in the carts and not liable to be available as part of everyone's phones that soon so the easiest thing to do is retain the existing self checkouts and just skip the part where you scan anything. Roll up to the front. Tap your prominently displayed cart number or numbers tap your card done. Reducing checkout to 6 seconds from multiple minutes will obviate the new loathsome situation where you actually wait in line to self checkout and will be close enough to normal procedures that it should be easy to transition to.
  • noodlesUK 3y ago
    The scan as you shop systems that I am referring to are where you are given a little barcode scanner with a display, and you go around the shop scanning your items as you pack them. At the end of the shopping trip, you still go to the self checkout machine, but you just transfer your scan list from the portable barcode scanner to the till. At no point are you using a phone camera to scan items. Usually the trolleys have a little mount point for the scanner so you don't even need to touch anything. I agree that having to scan out via the anti theft barriers is idiotic.
    • michaelmrose 3y ago
      Walmart is demoing a scan as you shop system that I think relies on user cameras and the app. At least that was my impression. With American hardware at SCO the scanners are just peripherals like a keyboard and a person walking around the store with them would tie up an entire POS computer while items were being scanned with it. If the portable scanner were itself a portable device this would be tractable however how do you keep people from stealing or destroying them?
• kjellsbells 3y ago
  In the US (mid-Atlantic states) the supermarkets have tried this for years with very little success. Giant (Ahold) in particular persists with this, perhaps because they have a unionized workforce and would like nothing more than to slash their employee count.
  • throwanem 3y ago
    Is that why they're pushing it so hard? That's good to know.
    • CaptainFever 3y ago
      It's a piece of speculation on HN, not fact.
      • throwanem 3y ago
        I would credit it much less if it corresponded less well with my observations over more than 20 years shopping weekly at grocery stores, mostly Giant and its predecessors, in Maryland. My current local grocery store has been my local grocery store for most of those 20-plus years. I remember when it was still a Super Fresh. It was a better place to shop then, and had about twice the current staff, despite at that time being quite a bit smaller. That Giant has hollowed out the workforce is not in question. The question has been why; I didn't know grocery workers here were unionized, but if the union here is as effective as the one I hoped to join in my own high-school summer job days bagging groceries, then this frankly makes a lot of sense as a reason.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  The hardest things are produce and by-weight items. Even self-checkout doesn't handle that well a lot of the time.
  • jcotton42 3y ago
    The Wegmans I shopped at in Rochester had scales that would produce a special barcode you could scan into the app that would record both the item and the weight.
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      If customers are willing to use an app, that makes things a lot easier to implement. Safeway/Vons in the US only have self-checkout machines. Seems like it's shifted towards per-item produce pricing, but the stickers often fall off.
  • ssl-3 3y ago
    At Meijer stores I've shopped at, there are fancy scales in the produce section. They work like this: Scan the barcode on the produce if it has one (or pick it from a picture-list, or search by name, or just key in the 4-digit PLU if you're cool like that), put it on the scale, and it spits out a barcode label that identifies the product and the weight. At self-checkout, one just scans the generated barcode label and puts the produce in the bagging area like any other item. Unlike the self-checkout kiosks themselves: There's never any wait to use these machines, so it's an easy process that doesn't involve making other people wait. This process would work the same, I think, for applications where portable scanners are in-use.
    • CharlieDigital 3y ago
      They have the same at my local Wegman's but there's really no incentive to use it. I'm not any faster than the cashier so there's no time savings. And it has several problems as well with respect to loss (e.g. adding more items to the bag). To deal with that, you'd have to weigh it or count again to verify.
• hot_gril 3y ago
  Weigh each customer/cart going in and going out. Make sure the weight of each item is a prime number. And... remove any restrooms from the store.
  • lern_too_spel 3y ago
    2+3=5. In general, the weight idea is impossible. For any two items, you can find the LCM in units of the precision of the scale, and then you won't know if they got LCM/a of one or LCM/b of the other.
    • hot_gril 3y ago
      Oh yeah, I mixed up addition and multiplication.
• signal11 3y ago
  Scan as you shop is already mainstream in a bunch of British supermarkets (exception: Costco UK). Definitely makes big shops easier.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I refuse to use those (although I will probably need to use it, eventually), because they do this annoying "BING!" when I pass whatever item they are trying to push.
• SkyPuncher 3y ago
  Sam’s club offers this. I’ve stopped using it because it’s too easy to forget to scan something. I just scan everything at the end. Not really any different than going to self checkout. I also use checkout as a time to organize my groceries for unloading at home.
• asdff 3y ago
  I can't wait for food to be expensive and the ewaste from supplying an rfid chip with every tomato and potato
  • whyenot 3y ago
    peel off the RFID tags from the expensive vine ripened tomatoes and replace them with tags from the really cheap ones (people already do this with the plastic stickers)
    • financypants 3y ago
      Even easier to scan organic tomatoes as regular ones, similarly with other fruit/vegetables. The “self check out discount”
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        A buddy of mine would scan meat as bananas in college. Probably saved hundreds.
    • seattle_spring 3y ago
      Another word for this is "theft"
      • worried4future 3y ago
        Oh no. Jeff will have to make his next yacht 1 foot shorter. Seriously, I have a hard time caring about this.
        • Noumenon72 3y ago
          Try adding to your "worried4future" list "Decay of the moral norms that make society work."
• whyenot 3y ago
  How would this cheap RFID system work for produce and other items sold without packaging or by weight? (for example fruit/veg)
  • Iulioh 3y ago
    I don't see the problem, you just need a machine that prints a custom tag with the information. My city use it for public transit tickets
• AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  I use this regularly at the local stop & shop -- it's been in place for easily 10 years. You scan your loyalty card (in my case a picture of it on my phone) and it releases a wireless barcode scanner with an android touchscreen phone-like thing in it. Walk around the store, scan things and put them directly in my bags. My favorite part is checking out without scanning anything and getting bemused looks (and occasional challenges) from other customers -- sometimes even from store staff. Definitely saves time in my opinion over any other option. I only need to touch things twice vs 3 or 4 times and the wireless barcode scanner is much more reliable than the cacophony of things yelling at me with the self checkout. Weights don't always match, vision sensors think i'm doing the wrong thing.