'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology

ooli@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 513 points –
'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology
bbc.com
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We have those by me still, I love them. Except when they check the weight of every item so you can't have one person scan and another bagging.

Hey, as someone who has a job installing and configuring and training independent stores with the NCR version, thank you for your basic ability to recognize cause and effect.

Genuinely, the number of people that hold something in their hands after scanning it and see and hear the thing telling them to put it down multiple times and then get mad because it won't let them keep going while it is explicitly saying out loud to place the item down really makes me wonder about us as a species.

Like, I know that's not how Walmart does it, because they turned off security as a consequence of only paying vendors on scan data. If a cart full of stuff goes out the door at Walmart, for the most part Walmart doesn't pay for it either. Everyone else in the world needs to have some assurance against theft.

Anyways, have one person hand the other person stuff from the cart and the other person both scan and bag everything and you should get things done a bit quicker.

Edit: I know that traditionally, asking "wHy DoWnVoTe" is kinda a deathknell for the poster, but I am actually 100% open to hearing the criticism to this comment.

Scanning something and putting it in a bag, rather than onto the platform next to the scanner, is not theft as far as I know. The machines are set up to nag you after 0.5 seconds of not placing an item on the scale. As a young person this is annoying, but for someone who actually needs to move more slowly it has to be infuriating

Well, mine are configured for 5 seconds. I can't really program it to know what theft is, only to know that it should expect to see a weight change in the bagging area after an item is scanned.