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Comment by hn_user82179 | Hacker News Reader

Regular grocery stores have really gone downhill as well. Whenever I shop, there’s at most 1 cashier doing checkout and usually 0 (only self-checkout being open). I consider myself pretty proficient about knowing what sets off the machine but still set it off 60% of the time (about some weight imbalance etc) that requires an attendant to come fix manually. I’ve gotten to dread the grocery store trips as they require so much overhead time. I really wish the “just walk out” could’ve been popularized and caught on at more stores.

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I live in Western Europe and the self checkouts don’t have scales, except for weighing produce, and even for buying alcohol, they trust you to say you’re over 16. It’s always fast because you wait in one line for 4-8 self checkouts and take the first free one.

On the other hand, using the cashier is often frustrating. You have to self-bag anyway and the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff, had a chat about the weather and counted their change. The bagging area is always way too small, making all of this take a while. A few times I’ve even waited while one cashier counts their float, leaves, and a new one comes and counts their float.

I travel extensively, and I think attitudes towards self-checkout vary heavily depending on what preceded it where you are.

In some places, you had smoke-stained cashiers throwing your groceries to their side without so much as looking at you, except to complain you're not bagging fast enough. I think it's fair to say that in those places, self-checkout is a huge improvement.

In other places though, where cashiers have traditionally been more friendly and expected to bag your groceries, it feels like a less obvious improvement. Whereas before you had chipper high school kids working their first job bagging your groceries, now you have menacing terminals accusing you of being a criminal every time their scales misalign.

Self-checkout is a convergence on mediocrity: some places are going to get dragged up, and others down.

Great point, I’m from Canada and lived in Japan for a decade, in those two places I would say it’s a downgrade. Especially Canada where there is usually a scale.

> the cashier won’t start scanning your items until the person in front of you has bagged all of their stuff

What happens every now and then to me is that the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area, then they pay and fuck around with their purse (honestly idk what they’re doing) then take forever to pack, while the cashier starts scanning my stuff and mixes it into theirs.

I don’t love self-checkout, it can be annoying when something doesn’t scan and I don’t have the ability to manually input the bar code like a normal cashier does. And sometimes there can be errors (“place the item into the bagging area” - when I already did), but I’m overall glad to have the option for self-checkout.

> the person in front watches open mouthed as their shopping gets scanned and piles up in the bagging area

I feel this. It makes my blood boil. I wish I could flutter through life with such child like absent mindedness.

Honestly I think we’ve all been there at some point - just switching off for a few seconds when we’re stressed or distracted by other things in life. If not at the checkout then somewhere else.

But yeah when you’re the other person in this scenario it’s irritating as hell :-D

I've been to quite a few supermarkets where they have like a plank that separates the new shopping from the previous shoppers. Maybe advanced plank technology will spread and deal with this issue.

Damn I’m in Southern California and y’all have really bizarre checkout experiences to me

- I never have to weigh anything except produce

- I rarely have to wait on an attendant except for something like spray paint

- I rarely have been to a store with absolutely zero cashiers, especially for a grocery store

- Usually the cashier will bag for me

I’ve had similar experiences whether I’m in an urban part of LA or some rich Orange County suburb.

My only two complaints are (1) finding parking at like a Trader’s Joes or Tokyo Central and (2) when the store is super busy, there are a bunch of cashiers, and yet there are still long lines

FYI Austria and sometimes Italy have weighted self checkouts.

In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.

There is one grocery store near me that always has at least two staff members ready to work the checkout and no self checkout at all. There are virtually never lines more than two persons deep. The only time I ever go anywhere else is when I absolutely have to. Vote with your wallet.

Two of the main grocery stores in my area, one of which has sufficient cashiers, are trying to merge in order to make a worse shopping experience for everyone -- at least I assume that's the goal. The third, the only real alternative, is Walmart. Sucks.

Yeah, the "if anything goes wrong you now stand around with your thumb up your ass while one employee makes their way from broken kiosk to broken kiosk to manually resolve the problems" model has soured me on self-checkout. I find I have a very low "dealing with this bullshit" limit, to the point that if I have trouble I'm likely to just say fuck it and walk out of the store without completing my purchase.

It's really tunable and some stores are tuned to "Fort Knox" where even a fly landing UNKNOWN ITEM IN BAGGING AREA.

Others are so loose that you don't even have to take things out of your cart, scan and pay and go.

The Whole Foods location nearest to me has self-checkout stations that don't even have a scale under the bagging area. You just scan, put it in your bag and go. I assume they can afford to tank the shrinkage that results from this due to their high profit margins, or they just don't consider the costs associated with the scales to be worth it.

All the local self-checkouts where I am in London are just scan and go, no scales.

Probably a nicer area.

Than what? Not the average.

That’s how the popular grocery chains in the Netherlands all work. You just scan a few things, put it in your bag, and leave. I almost never interact with anyone.

It uses your rewards card to determine your “risk”, I think. Just a theory. But whenever I’ve gotten a new card, they come check my bag a lot. Then after a dozen successes or so, they stop checking so often. Then hardly at all.

One of my friends forgot to scan an item once when they checked, and he had someone come to check his bag way more often for a while.

There was a news story a while back about how some chain stores were not going after most shoplifters directly but would keep the recordings on file and press felony charges once a certain total had been exceeded, so instead of getting a slap on the wrist for a few dollars of shrinkage here or there they'd drop the entire weight of the law on shoplifters once those few dollars added up to an amount that qualified for felony theft.

Given that "just walk out" apparently means "replace cashiers with offshore video analysts" I'd wager Whole Foods might do something similar and policing shrinkage in self-checkout is too expensive compared to just keeping track of cheats and throwing the book at them if they make a habit out of it.

Where I live most stores started off in fort Knox mode but had to tone it down. The bagging area was usually miniscule and trying to fit all the groceries of even a medium grocery list on there without locking the system was nigh impossible

Having used the UK/US type self checkout machines while travelling, I must say it is so nice to live in Northern Europe where the self checkout machines are largely just based on trust, with randomly sampling ~five items of every 100 shoppers. There is no weighing at any of the stores.

If you don't get randomly selected for inspection, there is nothing stopping you from just walking out with groceries you didn't pay for worth a hundred dollars easy. People just don't. Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.

A lot of the waiting is for age restricted items or machine errors rather than trust issues. I have never once been randomly sampled after self surface purchase in either the UK/US.

Without trust issues there would be no machine errors in my experience. Anytime there's an issue it's because I'm scanning too fast for the machine and it can't figure out how the weights work. Or I selected the wrong type of garlic and only the associate is allowed to remove items (why would you not let me remove items I personally added??).

Fair, the inability to remove your own items seems maybe a hang-up from an older view of privileged cashiers. The store I currently use doesn’t have weight checks except for weighed produce. You can leave your stuff in the cart and with the wireless scanner and a bit of forethought everything can stay in there. Different trust models makes things interesting. I have never been checked leaving the store and I don’t think social safety net or otherwise is the driving factor

Yeah, the not being able to remove items grinds my gears.

It's especially annoying when I am waving an item furiously, trying to get the poorly printed barcode to scan, and when it finally accepts it, it double scans the item.

Then when I have to stand there waiting for someone to remove the item is usually where I get disgusted with the process and give up on shopping, especially when it happens multiple times.

It’s definitely trust issues here in the Netherlands.

Buying something for under 5 euro bucks in a shop where middle school kids buy their lunches is almost guaranteed check. More than one in three times.

A different shop and a bigger amount — checks almost never

> Another benefit of having a proper social safety net I guess.

I doubt it's as simple as this. People don't only steal because they could technically afford things. Just as people don't only kill in self defence.

Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality. So even those that can afford it will still try to get more since it's everyone for themselves.

Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.

> Social safety net is more than just being able to afford it. It's a combination of not being able to afford it and general erosion of social values leading to "take what you can get away with" mentality.

There's a causal arrow in the other direction, IMHO: People like to believe in the 'law of the jungle' mentality and thus vote to cut the safety net. IME it's especially wealthy people for whom it's a kind of game, not trauma, deprivation (of education, health care, food, housing, safety) and survival, and who also get to pay lower taxes, Didn't Jamie Dimon talk about how he liked how 'animal spirits' have been awakened?

A lot of house cats walking around imagining themselves to be lions.

> Instead of cooperation under a system with a social safety net, we get a game theoretic weighting on defection without a social safety net.

There is a safety net. Here's how I'd describe the situation:

There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was good that they were helped.

There will be a number of people, fewer than the total who benefit from the safety net, who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped.

Most of politics around this topic is people's differing beliefs in the proportions of the above, and how bought in they are to minimising the latter count because they pay taxes.

> who almost everyone would say it was not good that they were helped

I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.

> I'm sorry, what? Only in the US helping someone can be sold as a bad thing. It's better to help a few more people that may not really need it than help a few fewer that actually did.

I think it's worth reading the complete comment and you'll see where what you said fits my wider point.

  I enjoy stealin', it's just as simple as that
  Oh well, it's just a simple fact
  When I want something, man, I don't wanna pay for it

https://genius.com/Janes-addiction-been-caught-stealing-lyri...

I’ve never been nor seen anyone in the US get inspected at a self checkout. Not once.

That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item and any discrepancy leads to having to wait for a self-checkout attendant to manually override to let you continue. That manual override is equivalent to the inspection you're talking about not seeing. And I in the US get blocked needing an attendant 60%+ of the time at some point in the process. Usually up front with the bags I brought from home.

At the Target next to where I live, the self checkouts don't weigh anything at all. I just scan something and put it in my backpack on the floor most of the time. And this is a Target where the toothpaste is locked up! I've never needed help from an attendant, and I've never been inspected either.

Obviously it varies location by location.

That's happened maybe 4 or 5 times to me in the 200 trips or so (estimated, once a week for years) I've made since I started using the self-checkout every time. It's so reliable and fast for me (store: Jewel-Osco), I just don't have the problems others here are seeing. Usually while waiting in line I don't see anyone else have issues either.

Remove from basket, scan, put in bag. Remove from basket, scan, put in bag.

The scale is the entire bagging area, and it detects when things were removed or added without being scanned, as far as I know that's all it does here. No specific weights.

Literally not true. neither Whole Foods nor Gelsons weigh anything you scan.

>That's because all of the self checkouts in the US use the weight change to match against the scanned item

Objectively false. Some stores in some areas do that. Most don't.

At Walmart if I only have a few items (most of the time I go to Walmart) I'll just grab the scan gun and scan everything without taking anything out of my cart. I'll bag when I get to the car.

Might be your neighborhood -- stores with a low shrink rate might be more lax about inspections. I've only encountered it a few times myself but I'm also not the primary shopper in my household.

I know that Krogers has cameras that use some sort of intelligence. I held an object in my hand as I moved other items across the scanner, it set of an alarm and a bunch of still images of my checkout process came up with colored shapes highlighting different on screen items

They recently installed a little door at my self checkout. I cannot even walk out of my grocery store without scanning a receipt or flagging an employee to open the door. It’s frustrating.

The weighing thing seems to be an adjustable feature: in my /extremely/ low-trust Safeway in San Francisco, they started with narrow weight limits that were super-frustrating. Now that misfeature is turned off completely (but they have a little gate you need to wave your receipt at).

I imagine everyone is still playing around to get the optimum ease-of-use vs shoplifting ratio right.

Mandatory item weighting was standard procedure in many western europe self-checkout kiosks for years. The experience sucked and the solution felt over-engineered. They just dropped it recently and moved to a trust-based model overseen by a single employee. Now it's much faster.

Is it a social safety net or stronger legal protections for retailers? In the USA the store has no legal right to detain you and spot check your receipt. Membership stores can revoke your membership for noncompliance and then not let you in anymore without a membership, but that is the closest you’ll find here.

You can't makes broad, sweeping generalizations like "UK/US type self checkout." It varies so much.

I live in the US and the only place I ever go to where they weigh the items you scanned is Costco. Everywhere else I go (my local Walmart, Target, Aldi, two local grocery stores, and CVS) the self checkout is mostly based on trust with maybe one employee somewhat monitoring some machines. No random sampling.

The only issue I ever run into with the self checkouts is double scanning the product. You do need employee to void items.

I was disappointed when my Waitrose at Kings Cross London got rid of the non weighing machines and replaced them with regular ones. I think the non weighing ones end up costing the store more either through people nicking stuff or having to have staff watch them.

And it almost always DOES go wrong. Seriously 75% of the time when I'm done scanning and I press "pay now," it inexplicably says "calling for assistance" and refuses to do anything until an employee comes over. WHY?

And now assholes are intentionally taking alcohol through the self-checkout, deliberately taking up that one employee's time making him or her perform the workaround to check the items out.

And the 20+ years of "unexpected item in the bagging area" bullshit... just get rid of it.

Strangely that issue has almost vasnished for me in the last couple of years, here in New Zealand at least across the several supermarket chains I frequent (although they all seem to use the same self service POS supplier). Sure it was a big issue when these first came into stores but I think they've realised they need to increase the tolerances a bit (e.g. accept even if the weight is <1% off) and it all just works close to 100% of the time for me. I do however generally avoid adding bags to the weight area (as I've found these to trigger false warnings) and just load my shopping directly onto the weighted area and then once I've paid I'll just bag my shopping then. Works like a charm.

OK, I will admit the "unexpected item" nonsense has diminished... only to be replaced by the "calling for assistance" out of nowhere.

I do that, too (scan, pay then bag), but it's a tradeoff - you get smoother checkout experience in exchange for some speed. If everyone was throwing all their scanned stuff in a bag immediately, the checkout would be a lot faster.

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