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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

> I wouldn't mind these machine so much if they always accepted cash. The problem is that more often than not they don't.

Ooof. I haven't seen a SCO with no cash capability. I know cash-handling equip costs but if they don't want pay for that, they might need a cashier.

Walmart may have a couple SCO that won't do cash temporarily - but there will be 10 more fully working.

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Here a lot of places have these auto-cash-counting machines you just throw the money in and it counts it and feeds back to the PoS; MASSIVE noisy machines that are stuck half of the time. So while stores must accept cash & cards, cash is often simply broken and the employee cannot really help anything as they are not allowed to process manually, so they can only throw their hands up.

I'm seeing mixed responses, so it may be a locality thing as to whether machines generally accept cash. For example I remember almost all machines in Japan accepting cash.

The machines at the Whole Foods near my house, for example, only accept cards, phones, or palm prints. Only half the machines at a Safeway near my house accept cash. The machines at another grocery market (Haggen's) are card- or phone-only, and they furthermore show a video feed of you on the screen with a "You're Being Watched by AI" warning to try to cut down on thefts.

The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with the sandwich I bought.

> The last time I tried checking out at one of those machine it flagged me as trying to steal something because the system didn't know that a container of chips I had were free with the sandwich I bought.

I hit that a couple of times but I scan stuff quickly. I also live in a house of 6 adult guys. It's lots of buying & lots of scanning.

Cashiers had it sorted before I figured out something was up.

This may be regional or brand-specific. As a data point, the Winco I frequent has seven SCO stations - three accept cash, four are card-only. There is a single cashier monitoring all seven stations.

Every machine I've seen can be built and configured to accept cash, but they're always "broken down" and "can't accept cash"

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