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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

This is a very hard problem and thinking a product could do this without extremely high error rates is naive.

Any implementation should use this as a supplement only, not replacement for humans. For example a human watching 10 checkouts and quickly manually reviewing scenes flagged as suspicious. Any implementation should also account for the fact that loss will still occur and account for that in the RoI.

The fact that the technology is very error prone is not surprising (to anyone that actually builds AI tech). The issue here sounds like poor implementation and unrealistic expectations from management on what AI truly can and can’t do.

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Preventing scanning one item and placing two on the bag? It's an easy problem. Just have scanned items be placed on a scale. People will be bagging stuff to take home, so just have bags placed on a scale and observe the weight increase as items are placed in the bag.

You probably know the weight of one jug of milk, but even if you don't, it's easy to "learn" the weights of new SKUs statistically.

Early self-check kiosks did this very poorly. It was super frustrating as a customer to be constantly asked to "please place the item in the bagging area", even when I already had, not to mention the hassle it caused when buying something you don't want to bag. Eventually I'm assuming they gave up on that and turned it off.

Checkouts in the UK still do this. They just seem to have gotten better at it, so I rarely have problems anymore. Possibly they loosened the tolerances.

Still pisses me off endlessly though, I'm only scanning a couple items that are going right in to my backpack. Takes 3x the time because of those stupid scales.

It seems to be still on based on the fact that every self checkout has a scale and Walmart does have bag item prompts until you bag it. It isn't as annoying though.

My guess is that they have more tolerance for items not of the exact weight and/or more accurate scales.

I use the self-checkouts pretty much every time I go to walmart. I frequently do not put items on the scale after scanning them, either because they're too large to bag or because I've run out of room. I assumed the scale wasn't running.

Is this not standard everywhere self checkouts are used? All of the ones I've ever seen used scales and enforced the weight matching the scanned item. Of course, there are still possible cheats: not putting the item in the bagging area, for example, or telling the kiosk you are buying carrots and then weighing something more expensive.

I am thinking of the opening scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", where Indiana Jones is trying to replace the golden idol with a similarly-weighted bag of sand.

“Unexpected item in bagging area”

They tried this. Was a disaster.

This has already been tried. I, personally, hated it so much that I just stopped using the self-checkouts whenever possible, because employee checkout was faster, even with the wait for customers queued before me. The weight check always brought the checkout process to a screeching halt, requiring an employee to come along and restart it, even with the smallest baskets in the best of conditions.

This was exacerbated if I wanted to use my own bags instead of the provided ones.

Unrecognized item in bagging area!

a dog farts three counties away Machine: UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA

I did that weighing in a store and it was an absolute disaster. Cumbersome and error prone, especially when you have larger items etc. I think that has huge hidden losses in people choosing manual checkouts or worse - avoiding the store all together.

Self checkout without that works well in many supermarkets, IKEA etc. There are losses but with random checks they are lower than the staff costs - so It's a win.

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