Pretty funny coincidence here
This feels surreal, self checkout is insanely normal here and theres no scales and or other sensors besides normal cctv. Switzerland, for context.
This probably has a wide latitude of success depending on whether it’s a high trust or low trust society.
The article talks about time savings but it was always about labor costs and I have a hard time believing it didn’t deliver on that front.
I’m mixed.
I dislike peopling in person, and I hate lines with a passion, but I also hate putting cashiers out of business, running the register myself, and waiting for one person in charge of 17 registers to come over and figure out WTF just went wrong with the checkout process, which is also peopleing and lines.
Most of those who have one don’t plan to have an other one? Ok, but is that supposed to be weird?
In 2016 I used self checkout if I wanted to get through quickly.
In 2026 I look for a cashier.
I don’t like self checkout. Every time I feel I’m doing their cashier job for free.
Good. Just pay people, society is for people. All of these cost saving schemes from capitalists in service of infinite greed end up failing and wasting even more money than they would have made or saved simply by paying people for their labour. Also, wealth tax immediately, I mean now.
It certainly always saves me time. Especially when I cut out doing the part where I pay.
Now if they could just get people to put refrigerated/frozen food back where they found it instead of leaving it wherever they happen to be standing. I love finding some meat sitting on the cereal shelf. Lazy f’ers.
Is it? Not where I live.
The thing I hate the most about supermarket self-checkout is they put the bag dispensers right against the scale where you need to put your bagged stuff. This leaves so little room the bag will fall over, etc so I have to put it on the floor. Then the register complains that I have removed it without paying, etc. FFS.
At supermarkets in my country they have a system where they will semi-randomly check what you have in your bags the moment before you’d pay.
There’s random things that make it more likely like buying meat but there’s definitely a random element to it.
What i have noticed, however is that at times of financial strife (or just before them), the regularity of me getting checked can go through the roof (25% baseline chance up to 70-80% at peak).
And so I’m beginning to see these signs as a recession indicator. Especially as it’s a massive supermarket chain with access to a lot of customer and market data.
Probably someone smarter than me could use this to make money.
You still need employees to help hapless customers and flag tech problems, the security cameras from above to dissuade theft, and someone to man the monitors of said cameras. They were banking on full human replacement. Can’t wait for our AI future with a store devoid of employees where they drop a net from the ceiling and pepper spray me because I forgot my eggplant was the organic price.