My concerns about this were theft, mistakes, cost to operate, and opportunity costs. Theft is an obvious one. It happens in self checkouts in many ways. We had

My concerns about this were theft, mistakes, cost to operate, and opportunity costs. Theft is an obvious one. It happens in self checkouts in many ways. We had people come into our store to just leave with baskets of stuff, load their pockets, take stuff from one box to put in a cheaper one they bought, or even put raw eggs and meat in their pockets. That was with a ton of workers in the store looking out for thieves. Errors could result in us being charged for what we didn’t buy. The amount could be lower or higher. Some people go through their whole receipt double checking it. Many of us just watch it as they ring it up, deal with it there, and stop thinking about it once we leave. Could this impact peace of mind? Cost to operate seemed like it might be high. Aldi and Costco show a traditional self-checkout can be cheap to operate on top of serving high-end customers. (See theft/shrink, though.) I figured the machine learning alternatives would cost thousands to tens of thousands a unit for combinations of cameras, servers, and licensed software. They’d also need to be monitored and/or trained by humans which this article just confirmed. I was also worried about fraud. My company bought a solution that monitored customers with infrared cameras, monitored checkouts, and predicted how many registers we needed. That was a terrible system that hurt us more than it helped. We were required to act like it worked to please those who spent hundreds of millions on it. I wondered how often such dishonest referrals helped the supplier sell them. Made me skeptical about more AI. Finally, the human touch that comes with good cashiers increases customer satisfaction. Our customers often looked forward to seeing us. For some, we were the only or best social contact they got that week. Others liked getting out of the house for a long period of time. Sometimes they’d have us push products and services which, normally a negative for all, is largely how they drove up credit card use and feedback on the customer tracker. For those reasons, I advised against using AI for anything other than helping employees do their jobs more easily. If for that, that it would be a support tool instead of trying to replace skilled, decision makers. Then, simply invest those millions to hundreds of millions in the employees. Worked for Costco and Publix. :)