[kevinr]

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service.

On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

[syshum]

Most Self Service Kiosks in stores are not designed for User Experience or Efficiency in mind, that is way the fail

They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.

This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.

Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems

[ghshephard]

I guess it depends on where the Self Service Kiosks have been deployed - I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket. Honestly, the hardest part is opening a hole in top of the bag that I can put stuff in.

Concur - if I have a cart, probably would use a checkout person - but, when you get used to buying stuff from the store 1-2x a day, you rarely have a large load.

[syshum]

>- I can Scan, Bag, Pay, leave in < 60 seconds with 6 items in my basket.

Yea if you only have 6 items sure... I never go to the store when I am only buying 6 items.... If I only need 6 things it can wait until I need more

I go to the store 1 or 2 times a month, not everyday

[thenomad]

The UK has had the "check out as you shop" systems for a while in most major supermarkets. They work very well.

[aninhumer]

Indeed. When I was living near one, I could walk in, fill my own backpack with stuff, pay in a few seconds and walk out. Another advantage is that I could see that discounts had processed properly, instead of having to check the receipt.

But once I moved away, I started using home delivery and it's even better. My shopping now consists of ~15mins browsing a website, and ~15mins receiving and unpacking bags, and I only need to do it about once a fortnight.

[terryf]

Yes, 100% yes - I now only shop at the supermarket that gives you scanners. The system is genius, works like this:

  - swipe loyalty card, get a hand-held scanner
  - walk around the shop, scan items as you put them in your bag
  - when walking out, stick the scanner back into the holder
  - swipe your loyalty card, pay with card, leave

It's unbelievably convenient, mostly because you only have to put items in your bag once, when you're picking them up from the shelf, not twice when you have the usual self-serve kiosks.

Obviously it's trivial to steal items and they randomly sometimes check the bag contents on checkout, but this is extremely rare.

Basically, they're assuming their customers are not aholes. And it works beautifully.

[ghshephard]

That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing.

About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)

[bsder]

> That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction.

You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US.

It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.

[ghshephard]

What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.

[averagewall]

Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?

[mantas]

Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.

[throwanem]

If you're in the US, your fruits and veg almost certainly have little stickers on them. Those stickers contain four- or five-digit numbers which, if entered into a register or a kiosk, identify the produce and save the time of navigating an icon menu to do so.

The kiosks at all the grocery stores where I've used them have offered the option of entering item codes, so it's a fair bet yours do too; if so, give it a try, and see if it doesn't save you considerable time.

[mantas]

Late reply, but just in case if someone finds this helpful...

Over there fresh fruits/vegs/bakery don't have any stickers/packaging/etc. You pick them, put in a bag and cashier rings them up along with barcoded items. They got a fatass book with pictures for newbies/self checkout and all experienced staff have muscle memory...

[dazc]

In Spain it's common that you have to weigh and label such items as you buy them, so you are just scanning a bar code when it comes to the checkout bit. The only snag is that below a certain price point some stores will intervene to check you really have just bought one croissant, which kind of defeats the whole purpose?

[mantas]

In Lithuania only 1 small supermarket chain do so. In the rest, this is done at checkout.

I still remember when I encountered this workflow for the first time. I didn't speak local language, cashier didn't speak english and I had no clue why cashier is so banana while ringing up my bananas :(

[ghshephard]

Our stores with kiosks have hand bags of fruit, fruit/vegetables already bar coded, and, in the dozen or so cases where you have to buy-by-weight, they have hand scales/bar code printers. So, for about 10-20 items out of 10,000 in stock you need to worry. You are right - having 100% universal bar codes makes all the difference.

[kevinr]

I don't have data, only anecdote. I've used two of the same supermarket chain which both had the machines, one in a mixed-use area next to a mid-sized research university, and one in a very residential area in an inner-ring suburb.

Around the university, the supermarket drew primarily from the adjacent neighborhoods, and got a lot of college students and local residents who were shopping on average weekly, so we quickly got skilled at using the machines. In the residential suburb, the supermarket draws from a much larger area, and there are more customers who shop there infrequently, so they never get skilled at using the machines. Even just as a skilled user, not as a professional checker, I would regularly stand in line behind people where I knew that I could have shaved minutes off their time merely if I had checked them out.

A lot of the skill involved was just in general operation: how to find barcodes, how to scan items reliably, how to identify produce and enter it correctly, how to use coupons, how to flag down help if the machine entered an unexpected state or required human assistance, how to use the payment terminal with cash, credit, and debit, how to bag items correctly and so that the machine would recognize them, what the various prompts mean and how to respond to them. There's a lot of complexity in operations which we denigrate as "unskilled" or "menial labor" which is only evident when you take the time to observe closely and see what people are actually doing in them.