[tialaramex]

The closest I have to this today is the grocery store nearest me - I walk in, I pick up a scanner (you can use an app on your phone but I use their scanner because my phone locks immediately with a passphrase when unused so it's ghastly for this purpose) and I just wander about scanning items and putting them into bags. The scanner shows its estimate of the price paid, which in my experience is always 100% accurate but I guess "estimate" is needed because legally the shop is not promising to sell at this price yet. I walk to the exit and scan the exit and give back the scanner, it tells me the final price which is the same as that estimate and then I pay with my card and walk out.

This is still extra steps compared to "Just walk out" but it's close. There is no interaction with store employees (which suits some friends who struggle to do human interaction on "bad" days) for example, this store would seem to work just fine without any employees although of course it's a huge grocery store so it has dozens doing various things and couldn't in fact function without some.

The really nice optimisation of course is to get rid of the money. If you stop caring about trying to make the numbers add up and just rely on people going "Huh, I only need two cabbages, why would I take sixty cabbages? What am I going to do with sixty cabbages?" then this is all much simpler. But I think even Amazon doesn't expect to deploy this to a culture where that's realistic.

[ascagnel_]

When I last used one of those systems, I found it to be reliable, as you said. And to keep people honest, they'd randomly pick shoppers to go through a regular checkout, which is both understandable and annoying.

It also made it super easy to bag groceries.

[wojciii]

I used something like this deployed to Coop stores in Denmark. It's a nightmare to use and the random check pissed me off enough so I deleted the app and decided never to use it again.

Try shopping with a little kid and using one hand on your phone and being randomly checked when there are 20 people waiting before you. This is not working in the current version of the technology.

[wingworks]

We used to have that in some of our supermarkets years ago, but they've all disappeared over the years. It's all a mix of self-help checkouts/human checkouts now. Not sure why.

[moosamus]

One of my local grocery stores has these mobile scanners and I strongly prefer it. I’ll go slightly out of my way to hit this store instead. While I am loathe to give Amazon more data/consumer insight and see this as massive consolidation play, I suspect people will, once accustomed to it, totally normalize this and not look back.