Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Self-checkout would be better with some simple fixes.

- Improve the layout. Provide more input side workspace for the customer to unload their cart. Make the workflow more like cashier checkout - unload cart onto conveyor, pass items across scanner, deposit in bagging area. Don't cram so many self checkout stations into a small area that customers and carts are crowded together trying to use them. De-clutter the self-checkout area. Get rid of the high-margin impulse items. Remember Bed, Bath, and Beyond, with the most cluttered checkouts in retail? Remember what happened to them? As one retail consultant wrote, "Never put an obstacle in the way of the customer giving you money".

- Big screen with no distractions showing what you've scanned, without abbreviations but maybe with item pictures. Do not treat this as an advertising opportunity. It's a progress chart.

- Use multiple cameras and computer vision to watch what's happening. Provide good cues - "Didn't get a good look at that item - please show it to the scanner again." Use something with enough smarts to approximately recognize products. The system should be able to tell how many bags you used without user help. It should be able to resolve most minor problems without human assistance. This is not primarily an anti-theft measure, although it will help. It's an anti-confusion measure.

- Get the payment system properly synchronized with the checkout system. Never show a display that says to present a card until the system is ready to accept the card. Once a card has been read, say so. Get RFID readers with decent receivers so the customer isn't struggling to get the card read properly. (Looking at you, Toast.)

There's probably a YC24 in this for somebody. All the necessary hardware exists. The integration is terrible.

I'd add this to your list:

- optimize the system to run in true realtime - most self checkouts I used have perceptible latency of a few seconds between one scan and the next one - usually lagging behind of how fast a person can scan all their items, if they are positioned conveniently. Also, after all scanning is done, going to payment has its own delay. The system has to be very responsive...

That's usually "cloud POS", where every little event goes to some faraway shared server.

I recently tried to eat at Roam, on Union Street in San Francisco. But they could not sell me a burger. Their cloud POS system (from Toast, naturally) had failed. So they were out of business until Toast got around to fixing the server end. They couldn't even accept cash - the cloud controls the cash drawer.

That sounds horrible, none of the ones I tried (3 different stores, technically also Ikea, but that was several years ago, and I can’t remember how it worked) have that issue.

This lag is one of the most frustrating things of self checkouts. The manned checkouts don't have this. Its bleep, bleep, bleep, one item after the other. But the self checkouts have that damn refractory period after a scan to recover itself and be ready for the next scan. It's also true of any of the other actions like for payments needing sometimes five button presses each with long pauses. Like just have 'Pay Cash', 'Pay Debit/Credit' as two separate buttons and if you hit 'Pay Debit/Credit', the card reader is ready to go. Oh, even worse is when they give voice instructions, but you can't proceed until its finished talking.

Your comment seems to be based on the premise that self-checkout is failing because it's a poor user experience.

Self-checkout is failing because of theft. Therefore, all of your suggestions are unhelpful. Helpful suggestions would sound something like (for demonstrative purposes only):

Fully gate in the checkout area and ensure all items are scanned and paid for before opening the exit gate.

That sounds like a fire hazard. Human safety is still more important than preventing theft.

the article covered that.

> Another approach is adding a receipt-scanning gate at self-checkout areas, which Safeway has done at multiple locations in California, in addition to shutting down self-checkout entirely in some stores.

Checkout needs a clearly visible item path from cart to conveyor to scanner to bagging area to cart, and a moment when the cart is totally empty, so skipping a step is obvious. If the checkout can fill more than one bag, there needs to be more than one bagging area, with a scale for each bin.

We recently got self-checkout at our local supermarket (REWE). The system itself is mostly fine, no distractions, and a clear screen, payment also works just like at the normal register.

One Software issue is probably not one for most, but for kg-price or non-scannable items, I’d love text input for search, and the same instant numbers that the employees can use (e.g. 1056 = cauliflower (by weight), 1432 = cucumber (per piece)), as well as a "repeat" button. That would have to be behind an "advanced interface" switch to not confuse most people, so that will never happen. Still, it’s nice to dream.

Very much agree with the layout. I usually have a full shopping cart. That means, despite me technically preferring the self-checkout, I’ll only use it if my wife is with me because otherwise I’ll run out of space and can’t properly pack things away at a decent speed.

Whenever I have more than one item without a bar code, I don't even bother with the self-checkout. Looking items up is such a pain. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? Are the bananas the ones from country X, Y, Z? What's the name of the pastry?

Even buying drinks is a hassle, because of the pop-up asking you if you bought 1 or 24? Why not just let me input the number I bought? Or better yet, measure it automatically.

The biggest shortcoming of the self-checkouts are the fact that you can't edit an order. Oh, the system scanned the item twice? Good luck getting a cashier to help you remove it again. I've walked over to another self-checkout before, because that was quicker than waiting for someone come over and edit the order.

Living in country where you add bar code to items like that yourself when you pick them up, these problems always feel strange. As with produce you have a sign of price and number there. You put items in plastic bag or not, then go to scale put item there and press button. Prints out barcode. Solves the whole remembering which item thing.

For multiple items, there is separate bar code on larger packaging. Ofc, this does not solve the issue of some large number of individual items...

We used to have those in Germany, but most stores abandoned that approach in favor of registers weighing the produce. I think the only ones I know that still do it with customer scales are CITTI and Real.

Theft is a big enough issue that if its switching back to people, the theft was likely greater than the cost of the salaries.

One approach I've thought about is if the shopping cart coul be the POS.

whats to stop people from tampering with the cart, then?

Mostly... don't have non-tech people lead the initiative and it has a greate chance of being secure. Ensuring it's a product manager who has enough deep tech experience would further de-risk it.

There's often a tradeoff between security and convenience. Maybe it's a drop bin once something goes in it.

Retail has a large set of known problems with theft, re-labeling, etc. Not sure how many of them could be solved vs how much theft retailers are willing to tolerate.

At Walmart I don’t unload my cart. I leave stuff in the buggy and use the hand scanner. Except Fuji apples and other produce sold by weight.

It’s fast and convenient.

Which means some human has to be watching for people not scanning stuff.

The idea is to replicate the item handling at human checkout.

For big stuff in the bottom of the cart, there's an existing object recognition system, LaneHawk.[1] So you don't have to take out the case of beer or the bag of seed; the system will recognize big stuff automatically.

[1] https://www.datalogic.com/eng/retail/fixed-retail-scanners/l...

Hand checkout also requires employees and I don’t steal.

I don't understand why you need to wait to the end to checkout. It should happen via mobile app while you add things to the cart. At the end scan a qr code to pay or something when you leave.

Walmart serves all kinds of income levels of people, some of whom do not have a mobile phone (the poor, the homeless) and others who would have trouble using one (elderly). Requiring an app to track things going into and out of your cart is just not workable there.

Ultimately, it's cheaper to hire minimum wage workers to just deal with stuff. There's always going to be people so desperate for a job that they'll work there and get public assistance to cover what their paycheck doesn't.

Sams offers this actually, it's great

Yes, this is one of the self-checkout offerings at Stop & Shop (US east coast) Bonus: You immediately know about pricing errors.

What's how it works at Walmart if you have a Walmart+ subscription.

I scan things with my phone as I put them into my cart. As I approach the self-checkout area I press "checkout" in the app, and it tells me how many items it thinks I have and I tell it that is right.

At the self-checkout terminals on the home screen there is a QR code. I scan that from the Walmart app, tell it how many store-provided bags I'm using, and click the "pay" button. A second or two later it thanks me on the screen, the green "this terminal is available light" above the terminal comes on, and a receipt appears on my phone.

I push my cart out to my car, holding up the phone so the person at the Walmart exit can see the receipt. At my car I unload the cart into my bags.

If it is cold or rainy out so I don't want to be standing behind my car unloading my shopping cart I'll bring my bags into the store and load them as I shop.

The only real annoyance was weighed produce, but they recently fixed that. The way it had worked was when scanning the item in the app it would tell you it needed to be weighed and that would done at checkout. At checkout it would go through the items that needed weighing and ask you to put them on the scale. Then it would update your cart with the calculated prices for those items and you could continue checkout.

The problems were that (1) if you put an item on the scale too early it could get confused, and (2) the communications between the scale, terminal, back end, and phone was sometimes flakey. The result was that sometimes checkout would hang at the weighing and an associate would have to come and reset things or transfer your cart to a human operated register and complete checkout there.

It was annoying enough that I'd sometimes not scan the items that would need weighing from the app, and then when I got to the self-checkout terminal I'd first scan (with the terminal's scanner, not the app) and weigh the items that need them, pay with my physical credit card, and then do another checkout for the app scanned items.

A month or so ago they put in new digital scales in the produce section. Now if I add an item that will need weighing from the app it tells me it will need weighing and tells me I can do it at one of the scales or at checkout. The scales in the produce section give the weight in both human friendly form and as a QR code. From the app I pick an item that needs weighing and point the phone at that QR code, and the app updates the item with the weight and price.

You forgot "give customer a meaningful discount for doing the labor of checkout."

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