1337
Learning on the job (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
243 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 30 points 1 year ago* (48 children)

Fun fact: This is why a huge amount of people don't use self-checkout despite it potentially saving a lot of time. They are afraid the person behind them is going to judge them like this while trying it for the first time.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 48 child comments
    •
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    Super fun fact, the people who aren't idiots at the self checkout, are not notable and therefore are not noted. It's the morons who stand out.

    Just like with driving. The guy in front is always too slow, and the guy behind is always going too fast. Because you don't notice when the inverse is true.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (25 children)

    I avoid self checkout for different reasons.

    1. I'm not getting a discount while I have to do more work and the supermarket less.

    2. I take extra responsibility, if I forget to scan one item I could get in actual trouble during a random check.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 25 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

    Further:

    • Most self-checkouts are too small and unwieldy to hold two shoppings bags when you're packaging a week worth of purchases.
    • You still need an employee to come over and certify that you're over 18 if you buy alcoholic drinks, and there's usually just one for many tills who is usually busy with somebody else.
    • I like to pack my weekly shopping in specific ways (cold items together, fragile stuff on top, weight balanced) and whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout plus already place things roughly ordered on the threading band to the cashier, in the self-checkout it's just me and things are in whatever order it went into the trolley so it takes at least twice as long.
    • They often have quirks, such as for example the one I used more recently would not let me start unless I put a bag in the output compartment first, so I needed to have or buy a bag even though I was buying just 1 item (mind you this might have just been trying to force people to buy a bag, since many forget to bring one - in other words, structuring the software to force people to spend money which is a form of enshittification).
    • They're non standard and each store has a different model, with different physical structure and different software with a different UI with buttons in different places and often different quirks, so anything you learn beyond the basics about how to use one effectively is often non-translatable to self-checkouts in different stores.
    • They often don't take cash. Cash is good, it means your buying habits are not in some database somewhere and used for things like having an AI estimate how much an airline company can wring out of you for a ticket for a flight or a Health Insurer assessing your risk profile and upping your price, it works always even during outages (of power, of your bank, of payment processors) and studies have shown people save money if they pay in cash because they tend to spend less (something about the physicality of parting ways with your notes and coins makes people be more wary of paying more than if it's just a number on a screen).
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 14 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I'm happy to see someone who dislikes them as much as me.

    I recently went to the self checkout because I was in a hurry and only had 5 items (one of them ice cream).

    One item (croissant) didn't have a bar code, I accidentally selected chocolate croissant. When I wanted to correct this, I had to click 3 menus just to delete an item. After I deleted it, the counter locked. It told me to wait for assistance. After a while I just picked up my 5 items and went to a different self checkout counter. Still nobody came to unlock the other machine.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

    There's a good argument to be made from the point of view of customer convenience and expediency for using self-checkouts to pay for a small number of items, but even then most existing implementations of that concept are so fucking bad that there are all sorts of stupid problems, like my case of the thing not working unless I had a bag (it literally had no button to just skip it) and yours were a normal human mistake is complex to correct even though the users are amateurs and hence naturally more likely to make mistakes hence the thing should have been designed differently.

    I've actually worked with UX/UI designer at several points in my career, and one thing that pisses me off about most self-checkouts is just how bad their UX/UI design is.

    That so many self-checkout implementations are like that is probably explained by, having moved the costs of wasting time to the side of client, those businesses are not financially incentivized to make the self-checkouts efficient to use, which probably also explains all manner of weird choices in everything from their shape to even the order of their menus - in a manned checkout it's their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it's bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it's not their problem so they don't care.

    This is also another reason for me to be against self-checkouts: the financial dynamics are different with self-checkouts than with manned checkouts since the costs of inefficiency on the former are on the customer, whilst with the latter the costs are on the store (which has to pay a salary for somebody who is less productive than they could be), so stores have less (and more indirect, hence harder to measure, hence often ignored by MBAs) financial pressure to make self-checkouts efficient to use than they do with manned checkouts.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    What I also don't understand, how in this day and age when we have AI that are better at image recognition than most humans do we even need to scan items? A couple of years ago I was in a supermarket that had a conveyor belt, where you place your items. Basically identical to a normal check counter. But instead of a human the items go through a small tunnel with a lot of camera's (possibly a scale) on the inside. All items scanned automatically, no extra responsibility of forgetting to scan an item, etc. Not sure why I never saw that concept again, it worked great.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I suspect that outside a well controlled environment (like that small tunnel with a lot of cameras), image recognition still yields too many false positives and false negatives to be acceptable compared to scanning a bar code (then again, maybe scanning barcodes is what that tunnel does rather than image recognition).

    That said, there was this whole idea of using RFID tags on products so that checking-out was merely passing by a scanner with your filled trolley - which would scan all of its contents at once - and paying (or even have your card directly charged).

    However I believe this failed to take off because neither product manufacturers nor the stores wanted to spend the few cents per box that would take to add the RFID tags.

    So in order to save the few cents per-box that would enable pretty much instant checkout, we have these crap self-checkout implementations were clients get to do all the work of cashiers in a teller which is worse than that of cashiers, and without even getting a discount for it (actually prices just kept going up) - the whole thing is fucking insulting.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Ha I remember reading some article in the early 2000s about the future of grocery shopping, and it said just that. We could all load up a cart and walk into a pay booth and pay. It would have been really great if that actually was a thing. Everything was going to have an rfid tag.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    in a manned checkout it's their problem because wasted is money being paid to a teller for nothing, so if it's bad they fix it, whilst in self-checkouts it's not their problem so they don't care.

    It still cost them money as they need to install more checkouts to serve the same number of customers.

    I don't usually blame maliciousness where sheere stupidity can be at play.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    whilst in a normal checkout I can do packaging in parallel with somebody else doing the checkout

    The store I go to most often has those rotating plastic bag holders at the end of the belts which makes it effectively impossible to put stuff into your own bags. And they have the fucking gall to put up signs asking you to bring your own bags! I do self-checkout there no matter how much shit I have in the cart.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked.

    If you have social media or associate with anyone with social media your face is online and can be matched to your name. If you have a drivers license your face can be matched to your name.

    You are 100% deluding yourself if you think you're not being tracked b/c you used cash.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Even if you're not using a card, or discount/member program, you're still being tracked. Your face, what you purchased, how much of each item, what you paid with, etc are all being tracked

    You will be all right mate, you just need to wear a little tinfoil hat, that stops this kind of tracking.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    They have to go massively out of their way, spending a lot more more money both in hardware and ongoing processing power costs, to do that kind of tracking which gives far less reliable results, than simply matching the entry in the database of a specific purchase with the person identified by the card that paid that purchase.

    Your "argument" is akin to a claim that people shouldn't worry about having a good lock on their door because it's always possible to break the door down with explosives.

    "Don't be the low hanging fruit" is a pretty good rule in protecting your things, including protecting your privacy.

    But, hey, keep up the good work of giving them all your personal info on a platter so that their ROI of investing in the kind of complex tech needed to do tracking of people like me remains too low to be worth it.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Clearly you're not in tech, shadow profiles are a thing and the ROI on tracking "people like you" is pretty high.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Clearly you never actually done Tech projects in large corporate environments if you think complex shit is implemented across all sites just because it can be done, rather than because the expected profits exceed the cost and the hassle.

    Also you seem to be under the impression that the social media guys would just give searchable access to their store of pictures (or provide a search service) to those big companies for free, which is a hilariously naive take on how Tech businesses work.

    Automated following customers in a store with overhead cameras for the purposes of studying how they move around and purchase things is only done for some stores and has entirely different requirements for camera positions, external dependencies (no cross-referencing with external data to ID anybody is needed) and acceptable error rates (the data is not for selling to others so the error rates can be higher), because they don't need to actually ID anybody to extract "human movement patterns" out of that data and it's fine if the system confuses two people once in a while because there is no external customer of that data getting pissed off when the same person is reported as making purchases in two places at the same time or other stupidly obvious false positives.

    Meanwhile matching the list of items bought with payment information, both of which already get sent from the tellers to the backend systems (for purposes of inventory tracking and accounting), is easy peasy and has a very low error rate.

    You're ridding a massive Dunning-Krugger there in thinking you're the expert.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I never said they'd be tracked around the store. Matching items bought with who bought them using data taken at POS, including pictures of the face is what I said. AI and website scraping make putting a name to a face a low bar to get over. Or a company could use any of the plethora of OSINT tools to find who a customer is.

    tools to find someone using a photo

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    You're still thinking it at a the level of "can", rather than the level of "is it worth it".

    "Possible" isn't the same as "profitable" - the whole point of stores doing it would be to sell that data to entities such as Health Insurers, and that data would be sold at pennies (and I don't mean pennie-per-entry, I mean pennies-per-thousands), so it has to be possible to do it extremely cheaply, which it is if you already have the necessary information in digital form in a database (user id from the payment card and the list of items purchased along with date, time and location of purchase), but it's not if you have to do reverse image search in bulk, not least because the providers out there won't just allow other businesses to do it for free to make money out of it - they'll demand a cut for doing the computationally hardest part of the process (or, if the supermarkets want to do it themselves, for access to their store of pictures).

    Also, the quality of results from reverse image search is pretty bad in terms of actually finding and correctly identifying a person from a picture - it often just outright fails or gives false positives, which means data obtained that way is a lot more polluted with false results than just finding the person ID via the card used for payment, which is near perfect (not quite perfect because somebody might let somebody else use their card or the card might have been stolen, but way more reliable than identifying somebody via a picture).

    So all this hassle and cost to have a parallel process to try to ID people like me who pays in cash to sell my purchasing habits information, when most people are like you and just give them their ID on a platter by paying with card, doesn't make any business sense.

    They ain't doing it because they can't, they ain't doing it because so long as the market is flooded with customer purchasing habits data obtained cheaply by just using the information from their card payment, deploying facial recognition technology to match buyers to purchases wouldn't actually be profitable.

    Just because it's technologically possible to go after the hard to get info using a complex process, doesn't mean it makes business sense to do it, especially when they're already making money with a far simpler and cheaper process.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    My number one reason for avoiding self checkout is that I want people to have jobs.

    If fewer and fewer people use the manned cashier lines, there will be fewer manned cashier lines.

    If it's busy, and I'm just grabbing a few things, sure, I'll divert to the self checkout, but if there's nobody in line, or just a few people in line, I'll avoid self checkout. I'm not going to be the reason someone lost shifts.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)
    1. It’s often very time saving to go through checkout. It is really that much hassle to scan your own items? If you’re using a card you typically handle that yourself anyway and many places already have you bag your own goods.
    2. you’re not going to get in any real trouble if you forget one item. If they happen to check and you did, simply go pay for it, or say “oops, missed that, here take it back I’ll get it next time” if it’s not needed.
  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    About the second point, this is copy pasted from a Dutch magazine that looked it up (auto translated)

    Forgot to pay for something? That can have serious consequences.

    Forgetting to pay for something doesn't automatically constitute theft. The shopkeeper will have to prove that you intentionally left something unpaid. However, if the shopkeeper believes it was a case of theft, they can call the police. Is this your first time? Then you'll receive a reprimand, a kind of warning. However, you will have to admit to the theft. This won't result in a criminal record, but it will be registered in the police system.

    Another possibility is that theft will be reported to the police. In that case, you may even have to appear in court. The police will then have to prove that it was intentional – and therefore theft. The shopkeeper can also handle the matter themselves. In these cases, offenders must pay €181 in damages. In some cases, a ban from the shop will also follow. Last year, tens of thousands of shoplifting cases were handled this way.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I got a question, how much are you being paid for this?

    No. seriously. What business is it of yours if someone chooses to not use a self check out?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    What? I'm not OP, but I'm pretty sure they're just stating why they don't use it.

    Why are you assigning their logic to what they think of others?

    So to your question, I say: they never said it was their business.

    Enjoy your down votes. I'll give you and upvote just to try to equal the scales slightly. Good luck.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    they're defending the use of self-check out lanes, which were introduced as a cost saving feature for the benefit of retail stores- not their consumers.

    They are more than welcome to use the checkout lanes for the reasons they gave, but others- myself included- chose not to. I don't think any one cares about whether or not a retailer has to hire more employees. at least nobody reasonable.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well then don't be a fucking moron. Sorry for being a dick towards those kind of people, but the voice prompts walk you through the entire process. All you gotta do is listen to them. I didn't have any issues when I first tried one 20 years ago. They're self-explanatory.

    I mean at this point they've been around long enough that everyone should know how to use them by now, unless you recently moved from a country that doesn't have them. But again, the machines walk you through the process every time.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Mate, not the previous poster but I'm a senior software engineer with an EE degree and broad enough experience that I could design and implement myself a self-checkout from the ground up, both hardware and software, including UI and backend integration, and I still tend to avoid self-checkouts for those reasons and a lot more (many which I listed in another post here).

    There are two very opposite ends of the curve for people who don't like self-checkouts: those who can't deal with the tech (who you deem "fucking morons") and those who have evaluated self-checkouts as a process and found it to overall be inferior to the existing process for their own usual use conditions or who look at it in a broader context and find it to have indirect social damage.

    That you can only spot the "being a moron" as a reason to avoid self-checkouts is a pretty good indicator of your own intellectual limitations.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    For me it's mostly privacy concerns. Now the fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 15 child comments
    •
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Why? At least here the self checkout gets exactly the same info from me as the regular one

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    You mean you can pay with cash? The one I've seen is with making an account with email and online payment, or worse, an app that can extract all sorts of info.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I just tap my card

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    Well then they know your name at the very least and can use and sell your shopping data.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    But that's not at all specific to self checkouts

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago
    1. Self checkout rarely allow you to pay with cash. 2) Self checkout can be made easier faster by scanning with a phone app

    That leads to different complications and outcomes. See OP complaining about slow self checkout. The more self checkout, the less cash transactions and the less privacy.

    A fully cashless society would make people more vulnerable. Not just privacy, but maybe some bureaucratic snafu that doesn't allow you a residence, maybe your ID card expired, and no banking account. If you're not in the system, you can't even buy food. Or if your account is in the red and blocked.

    Ideally we should have have fully anonymous cash cards. But regulation is being pushed in some countries to limit them, or make you give ID. Or they take 5% "tax" on the revenue. And a phone app is easier to use.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but all you need to do is wear a small tinfoil hat, that protects you from this.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.

    What?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!

    If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity.

    App/account - yes. Card - no.

    That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.

    I realise USA is quickly descending into totalitarianism but what you are presenting is a tinfoil hat level of madness.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    In what reality do you live in lol? This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of "data collection companies". European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.

    If you don't think all this data isn't being collated and used then you don't understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they've already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •