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Comment by nojito | Hacker News Reader

False Positives don't matter. It's all about mitigating False negatives enough to lower shrinkage and justify the costs of the software.

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In that case, just hardcode shoplifting = true

False positives may cost more than the items being protected in diverse costs.

Yep. It may only take one or two false positives to lose a customer worth potentially orders of magnitude more than any particular item (depending on the price of the item, of course).

It seems that the self service kiosk just stops functioning if it thinks something is wrong.

I'm not sure how many high intensity "you're stealing!" confrontations really occur.

It should really allow you to continue scanning but prevent you from paying until the associate confirms that you're not stealing. That's 90% of the issue with the weight sensors -- the sensor stops me from moving forward with other purchases because it's making me wait for someone to check my stuff. But if they left the notification on while I continued to scan that would eliminate my issues with it entirely. Then they wouldn't need to rely on flaky AI.

The other issue I have is that the barcode scanners are not activated until the weight sensor settles out, which can take several seconds up to a minute, so it's way slower than going to a checker. If the weight sensor didn't gate barcode scanner activation I would have a much better experience.

All they really need to do is verify the weight of the total transaction and have the associate check on any discrepancies. And they can probably use a very noisy weight signal with a low-pass filter. They don't need to blow a ton of money on an AI solution that is about the same level of inconvenient.

If I had 10 or 20 million dollars I'd build a better self-checkout.

The self checkouts at my local Walmarts already do this. When an error occurs it flags for help but lets me proceed up until it is time to pay. By then usually an associate has already made their way over to check the errors in batch vs 1 at a time as they come up.

It's so much nicer of an experience compared to machines that just stop functioning until an employee can "help" you.

True, and the big ticket stuff at Walmart has additional protections that lower the need to risk a false positive on things like a candy bar or a shirt.

Walmart's in-store revenue has been growing at a steady clip.

False positives leads to customer waiting and/or having to hire more staff to assist.

I know when the shops near me (UK) started rolling out automated checkouts I'd avoid the shops that had poorly calibrated systems that required frequent interventions because it was extremely annoying. False positives certainly had revenue implications for those shops.

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