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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one living in a country where most stores have self-checkout already? The comments here make it sound like it's either Amazon Go or having to pay through a cashier.

Jobs and social interaction have already been elminated by self-checkout. The revolution with Amazon Go is that you don't need to scan anything yourself, not that it removes the cashier.

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I'll note that many Whole Foods stores, which Amazon now owns, got rid of all of their self checkout lanes about a year or so ago.

My guess is that there was a much larger amount of loss at self-checkouts, especially given the amount of produce WF sells (e.g. I bet you would see the ratio of organic to conventional sales much lower at self-checkout lanes)

Many stores in the USA already have self checkout, and have had it for a decade or so. Go just eliminates the checkout process all together.

Maybe I'm weird, but I enjoy self checkout line. Picking up each item, looking for barcode, scanning it, and bagging, is kind of fun activity to do every once in awhile. The only lame part is, "please place the item in the bag" mechanism.

I kind of agree, I try to even make a mini game out of seeing how fast I can checkout.

I agree. I strongly prefer it to the regular checkout counter, even when the latter is completely free. I've even memorized that bananas are 4011.

Switching bags, finding barcodes and placing the goods at right angle so it can be scanned, all of these makes me feel like being trained for unnecessary skills, it's repetitive and time consuming, thus incredibly annoying. Sometimes things went wrong, I had to ask for assistance (yeah, more interactions please.) I just stood there like I'm a 70-year-old man who isn't good at interacting with computers (well hello?), watching the assistant guy input the barcode number manually. After all that, I had to do the whole card payment process myself, while people stared at me waiting for free self checkout slot. Ugh!

> finding barcodes and placing the goods at right angle so it can be scanned

You should do that anyway to help out the cashier. It's common courtesy. Amazon Go obviously gets rid of it though.

> You should do that anyway to help out the cashier. It's common courtesy.

O_O

To be honest, I've never done that, and I'm surprised that It's common courtesy. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I had a chance to help the cashier to find the barcode. What I do myself is placing items on the conveyor belt, putting items into the bags after checkout. Was I being impolite? What's the cashier's job then? Pressing the scan button...?

It might be courtesy, but it's certainly not "common." Times like these are where I feel like half of HN must be from a totally different planet. Searching out barcodes is fun and common? What?

In my country there are signs in every store at the conveyor belt saying "turn the bar code toward you", i.e. so that the it lines up with the scanner.

Plus Amazon Go eliminates the payment process. When you think how much time you lost by scanning every item and paying via cash or credit card. Amazon Go is much more easier and quicker.

Contactless payments take less than 5 seconds. For 5-10 items, I can scan and pay in less than a minute. And that without being registered for that store.

It's not about self checkout, its about no checkout. I get really irritated when stores try to outsource their work to me. If I'm going to be scanning items myself, they better pay me for it. Ditto with restaurants expecting me to clean their table up after eating.

My point was that most of the comments focus on stuff that is already a "problem" with self-checkout (jobs, social interaction) and is not exclusive to Amazon Go.

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