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Comment by theelous3 | Hacker News Reader

The McMaster website always comes to mind: https://www.mcmaster.com/

Or the reason I walk two minutes farther to a different place for my shopping - they have self checkouts fueled by a single queue. Far more efficient than the closer and cheaper place.

Utility first, uncompromisingly always. This is why we still use terminals. This is why I drive a smaller less cool granny car. It's why people still ride old terrible singlespeed bikes in denmark, and it works. It's why messy desktop icons can be peak efficiency. It's why everything good is good.

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I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.

However, if you operate a webapp, Spotfiy, Gmail, Amazon, etc, settle on a "core UI" and don't change it. People don't want creativity in these kinds of sites, rather they want consistency.

I guess it all boils down to, it's all about the time and place.

I don't like this distinction much. The way you use the term website here is as a descriptor for splash pages nobody cares about beyond their use as a business card.

You can see it in the way you're talking about them like "they don't matter - so do whatever you want". And you're right.

But I find that unsatisfying. We should be able to have it both ways - interesting aesthetic alongside utility.

> I always make the "website" / "webapp" distinction. A website would be the landing page to a product, whereas a website would be like the site you posted. To the former i say go nuts, if I'm exploring a product and I land on your landing page, feel free to completely surprise me with web design.

The first occurrence of "website" in the second sentence was supposed to be "webapp", right?

I love the McMaster website. It is very much function over form. It's clear that the website is a modern adaptation of the gargantuan multi-thousand page catalogs we used to have.

The website is built first and foremost as a way to find what you need. Buying online is almost an afterthought, there's one link in the header, and the only other indication that there even is an online store is once you click the exact item you want. Exactly where it should be.

It does exactly what it needs to and not much more. It's beautifully functional.

I'll go out of my way to avoid all self checkout stores. People here love to pull up their full carts and scan every item as slowly as humanly possible. But maybe in Denmark you aren't buying as much. I thought you rode crappy bikes because otherwise they'd get liberated immediately.

I try to avoid them because they enable the store to replace humans with robots.

To replace paid employees with customers working for free, I'd say?

Yep.

It's the exact same amount of robot, just more dumbed down when it's customer facing.

I avoid them because it's not my job to scan and bag groceries.

This is hilarious to me. You would wait longer because nobody is paying you to do your shopping?

I am picturing the hand model from zoolander, with the glass protection orbs, making someone else do absolutely everything for them.

Absolutely. If they're not going to take the cost of the labor off my bill then I'm just doing them a favor by letting them hire one less cashier while shifting an unwanted burden onto myself.

The worker scanning and bagging my groceries is a service that makes my shopping experience more pleasant and less taxing on me. I'm not giving that up in exchange for nothing.

I avoid self-checkouts because it almost always takes longer; something always goes wrong.

The ones I will never use are those which have a voice you can't turn off. Having to listen to those as I queue nearby, all I want for xmas is a HIMARS.

Depending on the situation, I can sometimes operate the U-scan and bag faster than a traditional checkout lane (especially considering the longer wait time for the two open lanes). I worked for quite a few years as a cashier though.

I'm in Ireland, I just use the dutch and danes as funny examples because they are the more regular cyclists but also have the shittiest bikes of any western country, thanks entirely to their topology.

Also, you don't have self checkout "stores" here. Essentially every supermarket has a self checkout section. You can just make your judgement call in there on the fly. It's pretty much always faster though even if someone has a decent sized load due to the shared queue system.

Wow, here in the USA, I never have issues like this. Where I'm at, all the people with huge carts filled with food go to the checkout lines. The only people who use the self-checkout are people with 1-15 items. There usually are at least 6 self-checkout terminals. I look at the checkout counter with a live employee and the are without doubt, always always always so much slower, because they will have 3 people in line with 50+ items.

I think if someone brought 50 items to self-checkout area, they would get knifed in the back.

There are usually at least 6 terminals, so if you have a incompetent idiot on one of them, it doesn't make too much of a difference.

About 90% of the time, there's no line.

The self checkout spot is cheaper if you weigh items as bananas or weigh a produce item as a cheaper/similar produce item.

... not that I've done it or do it... but worked at a grocery store a long time ago in high school and maybe coworkers frequently did this?

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