[yesimahuman]

In my experience, the slow down is the cost of the extra features of the self-checkout system running on (I'm guessing) weak hardware. There is a rather large delay when choosing payment sources or in between bagging items.

[philwelch]

Between bagging items, it has to wait for the scales underneath the bagging area to register a consistent weight. When choosing a payment source, it probably has to do a network call to the PIN-pad system. It's not like it's running on a slow CPU.

[yesimahuman]

Good point. At any rate, there is room for improvement, especially considering the normal checkout systems appear to perform more quickly.

[philwelch]

Because cashiers are trusted and customers aren't. There's still the delay during checkout, though.