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Comment by webkike | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat unrelated, but dear God do I hate self checkout lines. When I was in college a grocery store replaced two regular checkout lines with four self checkout stations and my god it resulted in the largest slow down I've ever been a witness to that was caused by a single action. If your care about your customers, please don't go self checkout

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I love self-checkout, it's always the fastest line at the grocery store by a huge margin. I've counted a number of times while standing in line, and the bank of 4 self-checkout kiosks can usually clear 6 customers with no limit on the number of items in the same time the adjacent 15-item-or-less cashier can help one.

The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada but we get a lot of American tourists, and they always go to the self-checkout and then get confused about something and tie up a terminal for 5 minutes and then start loudly complaining about how terrible self checkouts are. There's some strange mentality among Americans where they know they hate self-checkout, they know they will fail to use them, but they still insist on skipping over all the staffed checkouts and using the self-checkout anyways.

> The bottleneck seems to be Americans. I live in Canada

This must be the case[1], I keep hearing self-checkout lines being slow but they are always the quickest way out of any store in almost every self-checkout store I've been to in southern Ontario.

[1] maybe a combination of the design of the local systems and the experience of the users, the penetration is quite large in the downtown city I live in, so people tend to be very quick

How could this possibly be true? Is nobody buying produce? How do you weigh your produce and find the proper product ID? More quickly than someone who does it for hours a day, every day?

You put the produce on the barcode scanner/scale, you type in the first three letters on the on-screen keyboard, and you tap the matching picture. Or else you read the 4-digit code on the sticker and type it in. Or else you pick from the pictures of the 16 most popular produce items displayed on the screen. 10 seconds, max.

And you don't have to be faster than the cashier to be faster, you just have to be faster than 1/4 as fast as a cashier before one bank of self-checkouts is faster than the cashier.

I dislike the ones where you take all your products to the checkout bay and scan them yourself while you bag them. But my local supermarket recently got a much better system with a portable scanner you take with you. As you choose products, you scan them and put them straight into the bags. When you're done you go to the checkout bay and put the scanner in a cradle, pay, and you're done.

In Sam's club, their self-checkout has a handheld scanner and doesn't require putting items in the "bagging area". So, while I'm shopping, I make sure to place the items in the cart such that their UPC labels are exposed. At the self-checkout station, I simply scan all the items in the cart without removing them. I suppose this works because they don't provide bags for one's purchases.

BJ's membership warehouse (not sure if they're still around) had a system which not only weighed the items, but also had a "gate" made of infrared LEDs your purchases had to go through (which presumably checked their height). If you bought a book or something else too thin to activate it, the belt would back up and force you to scan again. I hated it with a passion, and when Costco opened in town, I immediately moved my membership there.

I used to do exactly this. People make appreciative noises when you're beep-beep-beeping rapid-fire while they're waiting on their cashier.

However, to level up my game, though, I've switchted to their app (on iPhone, at least) where you scan things as they go into the cart, then pay directly from the app, and show the electronic receipt on the way out.

Only one line, (the one to get out.) minimal muss and/or fuss.

> However, to level up my game, though, I've switchted to their app

I guess you like being spied on.

Sam's Club Scan & Go permissions:

Location:

precise location (GPS and network-based)

Camera:

take pictures and videos

Wi-Fi connection information:

view Wi-Fi connections

Other:

receive data from Internet

view network connections

full network access

prevent device from sleeping

shrug Thanks to iOS, I've got full control to deny any/all of those things as-needed in the iPhone app, and only if/when I need them while it's running.

For what it's worth, joining any club store or rewards program is signing up for a certain amount of "being spied on", so I'm not that paranoid about it.

Or... point-by-point:

> Location:

> precise location (GPS and network-based)

So it knows which store I'm in. See also: scanning my member card before checking out.

> Camera:

> take pictures and videos

So it can scan barcodes.

> Wi-Fi connection information:

> view Wi-Fi connections

...but not control which ones to which you're connected. How often does your list of Wi-Fi connections matter when you're at the store?

>Other:

> receive data from Internet

Download item info?

> view network connections

Make sure it can get to the internet.

> full network access

Two-way communication about your purchases and payment to them.

> prevent device from sleeping

So that you don't have to wait for it to wake up between aisles.

These all seem reasonable for a self-scanning app. But then, a paranoid person could find reasons to be afraid of water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax

How would you scan a barcode without a camera? How do you identify the store you are scanning in to determine price without knowing location? How do you conduct a payment transaction without an internet connection? It’s not like the app is asking for gratuitous permissions like contacts, calendar, camera roll etc.

Regardless of the "app permissions", it also means everything you buy [0] gets backhauled into their [1] surveillance database permanently. Pay cash and rotate your surveillance card annually.

[0] or scan and decide not to buy!

[1] and whatever surveillance aggregators bid enough

Target has handscanners in their self-checkout lines too. It makes it so much easier to scan heavy stuff on your own without having to hold up a heavy case of water or huge sack of potatoes and hope the barcode gets read in the first try.

> As you choose products, you scan them and put them straight into the bags.

Isn't this the same as described in the article?

Yeah, but I think the parent comment was referring to the older system.

It depends on the type. I like the ones where I can scan the item and put it directly in the bag. (Harris Teeter, Arlington, VA, USA) I dislike the ones where you scan the item and then have to put it on the belt. (Giant Foods, Arlington, VA, USA) Not only does the belt version take longer, people tend to start scanning their items before you finish bagging yours.

two other options (not mutually exclusive)

1. get better self-checkout systems. our target just upgraded theirs and... it's so much cleaner/faster/easier. I was OK before, but it's cut out so much apparent bloat that i can be in and out in under a minute if the payment system is fast.

2. mark some self-checkouts as "express" (or maybe "experienced"). Having to wait behind someone using the last self-checkout station who is going to do 40 items, and who apparently has never used self-checkout (or, to be fair, this store's version) is excruciating when you're standing there with 2 items. Marking a station as "for experienced users only" (or marking others as "for beginners") - would rub people the wrong way, but would probably help if adhered to.

I would also add "do some market research" because let me tell you, right now, the biggest issues I have with self checkout machines are:

* Scanning multiples of the same item. One retailer has this down: You scan one yogurt, and it shows "(+) 1 (-) yogurt". You press (+) five times, you get billed for 6 yogurts. The second biggest retailed just doesn't have this, so you stand there swiping the same yogurt six times, praying that the hard-coded delay between consecutive scans is small enough that you don't swipe too quickly.

* Consistency & Internal vs. external definitions: When scanning loose bread and cakes, the interface is quite clearly copied 1:1 from the existing cashier system. How do I know? Because it isn't ordered in any reasonable fashion. The available categories are something like "Bread" (makes sense), "confections" (Makes sense, I guess?) and "small baked goods" (???). I'm sure that makes sense to someone working there, but if buying a cinnamon bun stumps the user, there's something wrong.

i don't disagree with those criticisms, i just haven't experienced those issues with our local stores. possibly combination of what I buy as well as the tech. most 'confusing' issue to me in the last year was buying a self-assembled salad from the salad bar. There are 2 options "small" and "large", but they're all sold on weight anyway, so it took me a few times to determine my 'go to' size to choose ('small')

> the hard-coded delay between consecutive scans is small enough that you don't swipe too quickly.

The Kroger where I shop currently has self-checkout systems where they only let you scan the next item after the previous one has been placed in the "bagging area". That addresses the scan more than intended issue you mention, but it makes scanning individual items of the same type even slower.

How long ago was that? I used to hate self checkout, because they were always slow (often taken a lot of effort to get them to recognize things), and would frequently stop and complain that you had not put an item in the bagging area (or would complain if you lifted an item from the bagging are to readjust the packing of your bags).

But a while back the nearby Walmart put in a bunch of new self checkout terminals, and they are great. Excellent bar code recognition, and I've never had any problems with the bagging area.

I am puzzled by one thing. Sometimes when I hit the "pay now" button it puts up a reminder to make sure to scan items still in the cart (they have a hand scanner for scanning things like big bags of pet food, or heavy packs of drinks, and similar that you aren't going to try to bag). I've not been able to discern any pattern to how it decides when to put up this reminder. In particular, I have not noticed any connection to total price of the items I've scanned, or number of items I've scanned, or to any particular items that might tend to be purchased with items that are generally not bagged.

The only issue I've had with them is that once I thought I might have double scanned something. I was buying 12 packs of frozen vegetables, and somewhere near the end I thought I might have double scanned one of them. The display only showed the last 6 items scanned, but there were page forward/back buttons. However, there was no apparent way to tell if page back went back 6 items, or if it kept some context, so I was not able to figure out how many items I had actually scanned [1].

I could not figure it out, and neither could the attendant. We decided I probably had not double scanned. Alas, at the end when I got the receipt I saw that I had double scanned. Rather than try to fix it, I suggested that I just go and grab a 13th pack of frozen vegetables, and the attendant agreed that would simplest.

About a week later (surely just a coincidence), there was a software update on the terminals that improved the UI, including making the scrolling more sensible.

[1] In retrospect, I could have went by the prices. I could have added up all the items other than frozen vegetables, and from that and the current total figured out the number of vegetables.

The self checkout systems I see locally are rather slow and unfriendly. First, there's a slow and loud voice prompting you for every step. The volume is high enough to be painful at times. Next, some tend to scan some items twice, but there's no way to remove an item without waiting for an employee to come over and help. If a price is incorrect, plan on an even longer delay.

Current self checkout systems appear to only move the work of a cashier onto the customer, then force them to wait longer for anything that needs correction.

You just need to add even more self checkout stations.

The problem with self checkout stations is that it's simply slower per unit compared to a human, period.

If you add even more self checkout stations, it would decrease efficiency, not increase it.

No, it would increase throughout because there are more stations.

It’s much cheaper than paying for human labour though.

When I was a sacker in highschool and the grocery store got self-checkout booths, the staffing did not change. We still had 2 human lanes open during work week hours but now with +4 self-checkout booths. So of course that's going to increase throughput.

Also, not to mention all the times the few human lanes are clogged by people with 200 items that are holding up all the people just trying to buy a bag of cat food.

Now my hometown grocery store has 8 self-checkout booths managed by a single person. Since those 8 self-checkout booths did not replace 8 human lanes, I'm not sure how you can argue that it did not increase throughput.

The self checkout stations are open 24x7, while there's typically one a few human cashiers on duty while most of the staffed stations empty (even during peak after-work shopping times, I've seen unstaffed checkout lines, I guess the store doesn't want to pay to stay them all for a 90 minute peak).

But self-checkout lines are always open.

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