[throwway390]

The vast majority of the problems with self-checkout machines are caused by the item weight check. Try shopping in the better part of town.

In the UK, self-checkouts in Tesco and Sainsbury's (where the poor do their shopping) will have this up to 11, whereas Waitrose (for affluent people) turn it off. So you can steal as much as you want, too, since there's only 1 person looking after 6 machines (when there's anyone at all).

Only time I've been happy to pay the premium to shop there.

[narrowrail]

>Try shopping in the better part of town.

I alluded to this in my other comment in this thread. Switzerland is 'the better part of town' in its entirety. Europeans only hear about the lowest common denominator in the US. I'm not saying it's not a tragedy, but I didn't create this system and I don't know how to fix it.

[zkms]

> The vast majority of the problems with self-checkout machines are caused by the item weight check.

I understand the purpose of the weight check; it's to make sure that an item is in the bagging area iff it has been scanned. I don't get why it needs to be run after each item and can't be run just once -- after all items have been scanned and the payment process begins.

[dTal]

I imagine there's considerable variance in the weight of products, such that any attempted calculation of the final weight of a long list would be unacceptably vague. Also, if there's a single item whose weight is out of tolerance, it needs to be clear which one so that the issue can be resolved.

[tostitos1979]

Your comment is spot on about the tech (won't comment on the social points). The weight check is broken. If you have to pay for bags, you want to use the least bags possible. This is incompatible with the operation of all the check out machines I've seen. Get rid of the weight check OR allow all you can use bags for free.