Grocery/discount store "self-checkout" lane machines

Summary:
Self-checkout lane systems can offer significant advantages to consumers. Unfortunately, most of these sophisticated "electronic cashiers" have serious inefficiencies and defects. Simpler systems that shift the job of cashier to the customer are easier and more pleasant to use.

Background: I frequent 4 stores with electronic self-checkouts: Meijer, Walmart, Kroger, and Kmart. With the exception of Kmart, all of them have more-or-less the same voice, menus, scale checks, and physical setup. Kmart's was overall different.

Self-checkout lane systems offer advantages to the consumer:

They create smaller, faster lines.
They remove unnecessary interaction with the cashier and bagger.
They allow self-pacing.

Self-pacing gives the consumer time to verify prices. Human cashiers tend to move your merchandise past the UPC scanner at a lightning pace. However good for the store, this rarely allows you the time to see if you are being charged the correct amount for each item. Self-scanners not only allow you to go slower, but they constrict you to think about every item or menu interaction. This is excellent for consumers who hate being overcharged.

Unfortunately, these machines have one major disadvantage:

They very easily pass errors onto the consumer or self-checkout manager. The grocery world is not perfect enough for a computer to understand all of its input. Machine designers had to allow for product, store, human, and self-checkout manager error. All of these entities can be imperfect to some degree and the system has to continue to function.

Example of passing the error: The Meijer system requires the self-checkout manager to push a button whenever an item's weight is above or below its 'standard.' If you bought a pound of cheese and it weighed 5% too much or too little according to the scale, this is interpreted as an error. The remedy requires the line manager to push a button stating that he verified the item to be cheese and the new weight should be added to the database. Unfortunately, he cannot easily check, as the item is already bagged. Thus, line managers never bother to verify items.

Imposing the weight error onto the line manager only makes them push buttons like a starving rats in a Skinner box. They do not pay attention to the items! A check of actual use by the machine designers would have exposed this flaw.

I am not convinced that the Meijer weight check is a good idea. If consumers want to steal, they will steal. Adding weight checks onto the system does not constrain consumers ability to cheat the system much. The main thing that stops people from stealing is fear of people seeing them pocket items, and this does not occur at checkout. The main effect of weight checks is that the system becomes more unwieldy. Consumers hate the inconvenience, and the store has to pay an employee to waste time and effort. I have to wait for self-checkout manager to push buttons for an error nearly every time I shop at Meijer.

The reasons I like Kmart's self-checkout system:

It discourages (but does not prevent) interaction with the machine until after all items have been scanned. The designers placed the monitor away from the scanner (where you are at the beginning of the transaction) and toward the bags (where you are at the end of the transaction). This way, the system does not impose its use until it is needed at checkout. This is a brilliant, but simple, system constraint.
It was simple and stupid. There is no unneeded "press here to start" or pauses for instruction. The machines are so simple, in fact, that they require no separate self-checkout manager. Not once have I run into an error with the Kmart system. It works so well that I still don't know if it has a scale-check.

Conclusion: I think we have reached the point where a scanner is a sufficiently obvious tool for most American shoppers. Upon seeing the electronic scanner, virtually all people know how to UPC swipe. All we need is to not be interrupted by a "helpful" or "human-like" machine. The machine should simply present all of the tasks we may want to perform.. In short, the machine should be a functional tool.

In other words, machines should not be programmed to be cashiers, rather, they should enable the customer to be a cashier.

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