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Learning on the job (infosec.pub)

submitted 2 weeks ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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).

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks 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.

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] camelbeard@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week 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.

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