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Kroger introducing AI at self checkout to lower both accidental and organized crime theft.
(www.thestreet.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
97 points (93.7% liked)
Technology
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"Consumers don't like self checkout"‽ Are they crazy? I love self checkout! You know what I don't like? When I have to wait for a self checkout to become available because there's not enough human checkouts.
My local Walmart has about 25% of their checkouts as self checkouts. They'll have 4 lanes open with humans and 1/3rd of the self checkouts won't be operational. This is the worst of all possible options!
If you only plan to have 4 human checkouts why do you have so few self checkouts‽ Arg! It frustrates the crap out of me every time I go there.
Another thing that pisses me off is that the human checkout lanes are designed so inefficiently. In the self checkout I can pick up the scanner and scan everything in my cart at about twice or three times the speed of a human checkout because the human lane has a horrible setup that necessitates taking everything out of the cart to get it scanned whereas with the self checkout one can scan everything while it's still in the cart.
You can scan scan scan at super speed, grab a bunch of bags, then put everything in the bags as needed in your car afterwards. You can be done in seconds!
Or be even more efficient like me and just keep your own bags in the car and skip the whole, "grab some bags" step.
This way also makes the door receipt checker person's job so much faster because they can visibly see everything in your cart; no need to peek into every bag looking for expensive items that may not have been purchased.
Let's move forward, society! Give us 100% self checkout lanes and just have people there to assist with scanning and bagging for the people that need help.
My local Target as 3 self checkout with 16 human checkouts but only ever manned with 1 person. The lines are over 15 minutes long all the time, and I've complained to corporate multiple times. I just stopped going there all together. You can't have 4 registers to service a population of 200k.
You absolutely can. All it takes:
Inhuman desire to incessantly raise profits even when unsustainable.
willingness to subject your customers that provide said profits to a worse experience
An oligopoly where there is no real competition so customers can only run from one bad oligopoly to the next. Like highly populated areas with one of now 4 chains of grocery store miles apart.
An SEC that is run by those whose future yachts are based on allowing mergers and acquisitions to take place with meaningless concessions and gestures to keep up the illusion of competition.
Courts staffed by appointment, loyalty to an individual or philosophy, rather than competence and objectivity
Toothless labor movement, whittled away by decades of neoliberal policies like NAFTA and globalization.
Yeah they clearly just made up that conclusion. At my grocery store you will see the human cashiers just standing there waiting for people to come to their lines while the self checkout lines back up. I stopped reading the article almost immediately because they don’t even justify that comment at all.
We have self-checkouts at some chains, but you know why they are not usable? Because they are CARD-ONLY. So to pay cash, I have to stand in a bigger queue.
I'm going to have to ask - why not just use a card?
Because I don't like to broadcast all my transactions and use money that doesn't belong to me.
Would a debt card from a non profit building society not be ok?
(Are building societies a UK thing only?)
What do you mean even? Wouldn't it still be a debit card that tracks your activity and where they can theoretically take away your money?
Building societies (similar to mutuals elsewhere?) Are not trying to get every last penny out of you so won't be tracking/selling that data. (Though their credit cards might?)
Not sure where the taking your money comes from?
I doubt it would even be technically/legally possible to not keep logs of spendings from a debit card. I like to have privacy at least in my day-to-day transactions, and I do want more people also using cash.