Comment by hrktb
6 years ago
> Works fairly reliably in supermarkets
No it doesn’t.
Not just because they can be badly calibrated, but also because the range of weight they have to deal with must make it hard to manage any sane range.
The only SCO I’ve seen doing a decent job at dealing with weight use a binary check (“was there any product at all added to the to total weight of the basket ?”) and they still miss products like lollipops or anything too light to pass the range.
Sure much more reliable system could be built, especially at Amazon’s engineering scale. But so far supermarkets are mediocre at best at this game.
Works great in any supermarket I've been to with a self-scanning systems and that's been the standard in my country for many years now.
I hated the weight check at Tesco when I lived in the UK. It unnecessarily locked up my self service checkout a few times per week and in general made things slower.
Compared the AH in the Netherlands where you just scan the barcode on all your things and they really don't care about the weight or where you put them after scanning.
I'm sure there will be a tiny percentage extra fraud that Tesco may catch with this, but given the choice I don't shop there due to the shitty user experience. That's got to cost them more in lost revenue than the fraud they stop.
Yes, it's really annoying. It's that bad that I normally just queue for some personal touch with the cashier :)
“Unexpected item in bagging a area” gets me every time.
I haven't heard that phrase in years. There were some growing pains when self-checkout systems were first introduced, but every one I've interacted with in recent memory has been re-calibrated to be much more permissive.
It used to be like that the first couple of years but the newer systems never give me that and feel very accurate.
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Same. Have to have a clerk unlock the machine 3 times on bad days. It feels like the shop doesn't want me to shop there.
Speaking for France, a lot of supermarket who introduced self-checkouts have further invested in developing scanning apps operated by the client on their phone as a parallel solution. Basically a low-tech amazon-go solution, where the client is its own casher.
Those bring their own set of issues, can be difficult to understand and use from the customer, yet they still felt way easier to deal with than the SCO experience.
We've had this for years with Waitrose, who just give you a scanner that you can take round the store. I think more recently they let you do it on the phone. Then you just pay at a special checkout and leave. They also have no-scale checkouts where you scan and leave (these are still attended). Usually if you buy something very expensive it'll flag up for a "random" check which always happens to be the expensive item.
The handheld scanners are easy to use. All it has is a trigger for scanning (which everyone knows how to do), scroll buttons, and a delete button if you make a mistake.
For vast majority of things amazon sells, a system checking if the weight is within a pound or 25%, whichever is greater, would almost never have a false positive.
So a pound is 453g.
I checked my order history and my last orders are around:
- 350g
- 600g
- 200g
- 500g
- 5kg
- 120g
a box with empty packing would fit within a pound for most of these. I don't intend to nitpick your back of the enveloppe calculation, just that it's not as simple as it seems.
I don't know if I am the typical amazon shopper, but on my 35 orders in the last 6 months the above pattern is repeating with mainly very small items (like cables, dongles etc.) and one big heavy package from time to time.
I think an important part of the equation would be knowing the weight of the boxes you're using as well.
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