The self-checkout even the haters will love

I bought apparel from Uniqlo a couple months ago and was pleasantly surprised at how well the system worked. It felt like magic. It took me a moment to double check, be amazed, and realize that checking out was really as simple as throwing all the clothes into the designated area, pay, and put them into a bag.

Sadly the system is probably not going to work for supermarkets that sells cheap items since presumably there's a non-trivial cost for the RFID tags and they'd eat into the margins too much.

This link seems to load

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uniqlos-parent-company-bets-big...

My tl;dr: their products have RFID tags that can be read in-basket by a checkout scanner. This is in contrast to other checkout systems (e.g. Target and friends) that require each barcode to be scanned which 1) increases checkout time and 2) may permit barcode swapping attacks.

I'm all for this as long as it doesn't introduce a bunch of extra plastic and garbage into the ecosystem. Imagine rolling up with your cart, a machine scans it, and your total is presented. Now THAT is an efficient checkout. It just needs to be extremely tested and bug-free, otherwise employees will have to step in and make the whole thing much worse.