4 ms·

Is there a technical reason why the self-checkout experience is so poor? The barcode scanners seem slower and more finicky than what the staff use. Plus the ext

Is there a technical reason why the self-checkout experience is so poor? The barcode scanners seem slower and more finicky than what the staff use. Plus the extra delay while the machine wants to ensure I put an item into the receiving zone. Are the self-checkout isles busy taking pictures of me from every angle before they approve the swipe? I assumed that barcode scanners were solved technology and should be able to identify a smudged label in microseconds. If I were going to steal something, I am not sure what the slow experience does to deter that.

MBCook 2y ago
I’m always confused by these comments. Maybe the quality of scanners differs wildly between chains? The places I go regularly seem to have units that work fine for me. It’s very very rare I get a warning about bagging stuff. And I can scan at a pretty good speed. Not practiced checkout clerk high speed, but plenty fast to the point the limit is often me finding the barcode.
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  Maybe I have a low tolerance for delays. I know technology can do better. The lag is an explicit choice or technical incompetence. Maybe even the POS are running Electron these days.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    I think I have a pretty low tolerance as well. I can say I find the CVS machines slow the few times I’ve used them. Possibly Home Depot too but I have little experience. But at Target, Whole Foods, and two local grocery chains it just hasn’t been an issue. The UI is slow if you need to enter a code for a vegetable or when you hit pay, but for scanning it works fine if I ignore the slow prompts and just go at a comfortable speed.
  - Washuu 2y ago
    The technology can absolutely be better. When I worked retail over two decades ago those scanners were fast and I can scan back to back with no noticeable delay.
nicoburns 2y ago
I think some companies are cheaping out on the processors or some other component (could also be the software) because I've noticed that similar machines at high-end supermarkets are much faster.
o11c 2y ago
Some causes of poor self-checkout experience: * The switch to self-checkout overlapped with the push for reusable bags. Some sturdy reusable bags are significantly heavier than others, and at certain stores they choose to make this fail badly (this is by brand, not neighborhood). Sometimes this can be worked around by adding bags gradually when adding variable-weight items. "Skip bagging" is probably how it's supposed to be done though. * Self-checkout forcing serialization as each item is put into the bagging area. Traditional checkout allows each item to push the previous down the belt. * Self-checkout often has size limits, either employee-enforced or practical (e.g. by drastically shrinking the item pre-scan and bagging areas; I suppose bag-weight errors also count for this), even if this conflicts with the other major push that stores have ("spend more in one trip!") * Some items (mostly produce) lose their label and/or don't have one in the first place, and are hard to look up too. Admittedly, this is largely a matter of competence and I've had employees make errors on the same things. * Items with ad-hoc discounts may be handled badly in several ways ("x% off" stickers usually require employee assistance; full-blown price-replacement are more likely to work but can fail if the original barcode wasn't fully covered) * Sometimes the scanner beeps, but it's a rejection beep rather than an acceptance beep and those of us who don't spend all day doing this can't tell the difference. If you continue scanning and it keeps beeping, it can be difficult to resynchronize once you realize the problem. * If anything at all goes wrong with the price of an item the system does register, noticing and arranging for the fixing of it is entirely on you, while you're busy doing work. With traditional checkout, you both have another set of eyes and are not distracted during the process. IME this causes problems at least one per month, and some of the errors reek of at-least-borderline fraud (four common kinds: 1. advertised price only applies to packages of a particular shape/color/size despite literally all the writing being the same; 2. "selected varieties" arbitrary excluding certain flavors/varieties which is impossible to check unless you can make the buggy app/webpage navigate through the huge list; 3. advertising a product not actually sold in the store (or removed for just this week) but then putting a similar-looking item on the shelf; 4. arbitrary limiting a particular digital coupon to the specific store in town you have selected, even though the exact same coupon is also available to those who select the other store). With a real employee, you have someone who both prompts and knows how to simple handle things like "did you enter your rewards card correctly?" [which can be done in parallel - though on one rare occasion they actually finalized the checkout, changing it to card-reader mode before I could finish entering it!], and is always available to handle errors immediately rather than requiring you to queue for customer service. Because of how frequent errors are (and just how terrible many customer-service people are at math), on the rare occasion that a pricing error is in my favor at a grocery store, I do not feel at all guilty about just taking it (all other kinds of IRL store have thus far dealt with me honestly so I remain obligated to do the same).
tbrownaw 2y ago
> The barcode scanners seem slower and more finicky than what the staff use. Plus the extra delay while the machine wants to ensure I put an item into the receiving zone. The ones at my usual store have accent lights that turn green when it's willing to take the next scan. The machines register scans perfectly if I wait for the light and dont even try if I don't wait, which used to look like being flaky until I noticed what the lights did. > Are the self-checkout isles busy taking pictures of me from every angle before they approve the swipe? I'm pretty sure it recognized my bananas the second-most-recent time without me having to find them in the menus. But then the most recent time I had to look them up again... There was also a time that another customer whose station happened to be facing towards the waiting line needed staff assistance with something, and it made the (clearly impatient) staff person watch a video of the person scanning things before letting them do whatever it was they needed to do.
Nextgrid 2y ago
A lot of these are actually just thin clients connected to an (AS/400?) mainframe, despite technically being fairly powerful (i5, Windows 7 Embedded, etc) PCs. This means every action and button press on the UI is actually a network call to somewhere, potentially even off-site. That probably doesn't help.
grues-dinner 2y ago
What really annoys me is the slow hand scanners. It takes about 5 seconds to download the item data for each scan (name, picture, price). And there's no cache so scanning several identical items is painful. It would be so easy to cache the last few items for repeat scans (after all, the list is right there on the device, so it even has the data in memory). And I guarantee Tesco has a profile of my usually-bought goods tied to the Clubcard that I scanned to get the scanner. After all, that's why they want to railroad everyone into having Clubcards. So why not have the system pushing likely next scans based on what I just scanned, combined with where it is in the shop and what I usually buy. Even to a hype-weary AI sceptic, that's a textbook example of machine learning: overwhelming amounts of perfectly labelled data, a great feedback loop (cache hits and misses), and negligible penalty for mistakes (cache miss).
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  We are not even talking Amazon levels of inventory. A store has what, 10k, 20k items for sale? The entire store inventory prices could fit into <1MB of memory (without pictures).
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    Yeah, but you can shave a couple of pounds off the device cost by using a shitbox CPU with almost no RAM or flash! It also means that the embedded developers can't start writing web frameworks into the devices, so they might actually ship this decade.

MBCook 2y ago

I’m always confused by these comments. Maybe the quality of scanners differs wildly between chains? The places I go regularly seem to have units that work fine for me. It’s very very rare I get a warning about bagging stuff. And I can scan at a pretty good speed. Not practiced checkout clerk high speed, but plenty fast to the point the limit is often me finding the barcode.

3eb7988a1663 2y ago
Maybe I have a low tolerance for delays. I know technology can do better. The lag is an explicit choice or technical incompetence. Maybe even the POS are running Electron these days.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I think I have a pretty low tolerance as well. I can say I find the CVS machines slow the few times I’ve used them. Possibly Home Depot too but I have little experience. But at Target, Whole Foods, and two local grocery chains it just hasn’t been an issue. The UI is slow if you need to enter a code for a vegetable or when you hit pay, but for scanning it works fine if I ignore the slow prompts and just go at a comfortable speed.
- Washuu 2y ago
  The technology can absolutely be better. When I worked retail over two decades ago those scanners were fast and I can scan back to back with no noticeable delay.

nicoburns 2y ago

I think some companies are cheaping out on the processors or some other component (could also be the software) because I've noticed that similar machines at high-end supermarkets are much faster.

o11c 2y ago

Some causes of poor self-checkout experience: * The switch to self-checkout overlapped with the push for reusable bags. Some sturdy reusable bags are significantly heavier than others, and at certain stores they choose to make this fail badly (this is by brand, not neighborhood). Sometimes this can be worked around by adding bags gradually when adding variable-weight items. "Skip bagging" is probably how it's supposed to be done though. * Self-checkout forcing serialization as each item is put into the bagging area. Traditional checkout allows each item to push the previous down the belt. * Self-checkout often has size limits, either employee-enforced or practical (e.g. by drastically shrinking the item pre-scan and bagging areas; I suppose bag-weight errors also count for this), even if this conflicts with the other major push that stores have ("spend more in one trip!") * Some items (mostly produce) lose their label and/or don't have one in the first place, and are hard to look up too. Admittedly, this is largely a matter of competence and I've had employees make errors on the same things. * Items with ad-hoc discounts may be handled badly in several ways ("x% off" stickers usually require employee assistance; full-blown price-replacement are more likely to work but can fail if the original barcode wasn't fully covered) * Sometimes the scanner beeps, but it's a rejection beep rather than an acceptance beep and those of us who don't spend all day doing this can't tell the difference. If you continue scanning and it keeps beeping, it can be difficult to resynchronize once you realize the problem. * If anything at all goes wrong with the price of an item the system does register, noticing and arranging for the fixing of it is entirely on you, while you're busy doing work. With traditional checkout, you both have another set of eyes and are not distracted during the process. IME this causes problems at least one per month, and some of the errors reek of at-least-borderline fraud (four common kinds: 1. advertised price only applies to packages of a particular shape/color/size despite literally all the writing being the same; 2. "selected varieties" arbitrary excluding certain flavors/varieties which is impossible to check unless you can make the buggy app/webpage navigate through the huge list; 3. advertising a product not actually sold in the store (or removed for just this week) but then putting a similar-looking item on the shelf; 4. arbitrary limiting a particular digital coupon to the specific store in town you have selected, even though the exact same coupon is also available to those who select the other store). With a real employee, you have someone who both prompts and knows how to simple handle things like "did you enter your rewards card correctly?" [which can be done in parallel - though on one rare occasion they actually finalized the checkout, changing it to card-reader mode before I could finish entering it!], and is always available to handle errors immediately rather than requiring you to queue for customer service. Because of how frequent errors are (and just how terrible many customer-service people are at math), on the rare occasion that a pricing error is in my favor at a grocery store, I do not feel at all guilty about just taking it (all other kinds of IRL store have thus far dealt with me honestly so I remain obligated to do the same).

tbrownaw 2y ago

> The barcode scanners seem slower and more finicky than what the staff use. Plus the extra delay while the machine wants to ensure I put an item into the receiving zone. The ones at my usual store have accent lights that turn green when it's willing to take the next scan. The machines register scans perfectly if I wait for the light and dont even try if I don't wait, which used to look like being flaky until I noticed what the lights did. > Are the self-checkout isles busy taking pictures of me from every angle before they approve the swipe? I'm pretty sure it recognized my bananas the second-most-recent time without me having to find them in the menus. But then the most recent time I had to look them up again... There was also a time that another customer whose station happened to be facing towards the waiting line needed staff assistance with something, and it made the (clearly impatient) staff person watch a video of the person scanning things before letting them do whatever it was they needed to do.

Nextgrid 2y ago

A lot of these are actually just thin clients connected to an (AS/400?) mainframe, despite technically being fairly powerful (i5, Windows 7 Embedded, etc) PCs. This means every action and button press on the UI is actually a network call to somewhere, potentially even off-site. That probably doesn't help.

grues-dinner 2y ago

What really annoys me is the slow hand scanners. It takes about 5 seconds to download the item data for each scan (name, picture, price). And there's no cache so scanning several identical items is painful. It would be so easy to cache the last few items for repeat scans (after all, the list is right there on the device, so it even has the data in memory). And I guarantee Tesco has a profile of my usually-bought goods tied to the Clubcard that I scanned to get the scanner. After all, that's why they want to railroad everyone into having Clubcards. So why not have the system pushing likely next scans based on what I just scanned, combined with where it is in the shop and what I usually buy. Even to a hype-weary AI sceptic, that's a textbook example of machine learning: overwhelming amounts of perfectly labelled data, a great feedback loop (cache hits and misses), and negligible penalty for mistakes (cache miss).

3eb7988a1663 2y ago
We are not even talking Amazon levels of inventory. A store has what, 10k, 20k items for sale? The entire store inventory prices could fit into <1MB of memory (without pictures).
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Yeah, but you can shave a couple of pounds off the device cost by using a shitbox CPU with almost no RAM or flash! It also means that the embedded developers can't start writing web frameworks into the devices, so they might actually ship this decade.