That's lovely. However, due to the stupid machines' inability to deal with slight variances in the minuscule bagging area (i.e. switching out bags, oversized items, my cloth bags that I brought from home) there's still gonna be a lot of human/machine verbal escalation going on at the self-checkout if/when I am forced to use them.

@humorbot: FRT FTW?

FredicvsMaximvs

@frndlybnny: Not only does it increase their profits, it put people out of jobs. No DYI check out for me.

Curves

@robo: uh, no: the more they can increase profits. When's the last time you saw a company permanently lower their prices?

frndlybnny

Frutial recognition technology, or FRT.

humorbot

The less people the grocery store has to employ at the checkout counter, the cheaper they can afford to sell food.

Good news for consumers.

robo

I don't mind looking up the produce so much as it annoys me that if you buy multiples of the same thing (say containers of strawberries) you have to go through the process for every single one of them. You'd think they'd make a "same as last item" key or something.

Personally, I think it's cool that they know what each item should weigh and freak out when you put something that ways too much on the bagging area.

tidybowl

@Hiphopopotamus: Some kind of pepper, or alien reproductive organ?

Curves

@Hiphopopotamus: *The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly theme plays*

I wouldn't mind seeing this in the store so I wouldn't have to wait for the grandma in front of me to cycle through the entire produce menu 3 times trying to find the image of the single tomato she's buying.

Griffehpoo

Your move, Smart Scale.

Hiphopopotamus

Damn. No more buying peppers and tomatoes but selecting "Watermelon" ($0.59/lb versus $2+/lb). I know, it's a skeevy thing to do, but nothing will separate a college student from his beer money.

Tommasta

@OMG! Ponies!: I'm right with you. I make that same argument every time I send back my apple pie for "not being citrus-y enough."

92BuickLeSabre

Can someone explain to me why it is inappropriate to compare apples to oranges?

Both are seasonal fruit which grow on trees which are cultivated on a wide scale and sold commercially and come in a wide variety. Both are popular choices by parents to feed children as a snack as they are cheap and largely nutritious. Both may be made into spreadable preserves or juiced. Both are roughly spherical and roughly the same size.

Wouldn't a better illustration of an inapt comparison be "comparing apples to Albert Camus' The Stranger" or "comparing apples to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity" or "comparing apples to the nagging suspicion that when people are speaking in a foreign language that they are talking about you which you write off as generally vague paranoia"?

OMG! Ponies!

@humorbot: It should be Fruitial Accurate Recognition Technology, or FART.

Works best with beans!

SomeoneUKno

i wonder if you can spoof it by holding up a picture of cheap fruit... like those age recognition smoke machines in japan that get spoofed by pictures of old ppl.

urbanturban666

@Curves: [en.wikipedia.org]

Hiphopopotamus

@robo: yea but the less employees the less human interaction which leads to lazier employees, the ones that still have the jobs (because of replacement of machines/computers)which then leads to poorer customer service which will drive the grocery stores out of business. or at least the major ones would.

yea i got into a pointless rant. and that would never happen but hey u never know maybe the employees will be replaced by robots. evil robots. mwa ha ha

kswiss19

@Curves:

it doesn't. it just increases the number of people that can be served at a time. theres an optimal amount of checkout staff for a store and they won't go beyond that to make the lines go faster. its much better to break that barrier and simply have more self checkout stations to help speed things further along. this is esp true at night when staffing is low, a self check out is super convenient during those times. and the only impediment was their inability to deal with veg/fruit. this solves that one last thing. i hardly think of standing in line with arms crossed fuming over the long wait is worth the "service" of being checked out. i'll do my own if it saves my time.

and if you've ever worked at a check out counter you wouldn't be so "hot" on saving that job. its surprisingly back breaking and tedious having to stand there in an awkward stiff position. a worker who gets to oversee 4 self check out stations is under less stress, thats a far better job to have. check out is grinding labor

Justifan

@Hiphopopotamus: Buddha's Hand. It's a kind of citrus fruit.

Gimme something harder.

humorbot

I could have sworn I saw something on Modern Marvels (or some similar program) that the checkouts in some US stores already do exactly this. Now, I don't think it was for the self-checkout lanes, but I swear I saw it.

BlackSmokeDMax

@Justifan: I have worked as a cashier at a grocery store and my best friend from high school still does. Don't be down on the job.

I was a full-time union employee, received a 25 cent raise every quarter, had major medical with a good prescription plan, received OT after 8 hours of work per day plus every hour after 40 per week was OT, and I had a pension with 2 weeks paid vacation per years.

Starting pay was $8.25/hr (in 1997) and it caps at $28, which is where my friend is at now, having worked there since he was 15. He all but refuses to go to college, which I can fully understand. He has no student loan debt, has a job with benefits, vested pension, and enough seniority to get OT whenever he wants it. Keeping in mind that the average starting salary for an attorney in NYC right out of law school is $45,000 - which, when you factor in the 60 hour work week comes to $15/hr - he may have gotten the better bang for the buck.

As far as it having a bad working position, desk jobs are hardly better - what with the expanding hours and expanding waistline.

Self-serve cuts down on the number of full-timers needed - and that's where the problem lay. More and more, my friend works grocery or receiving rather than checkout.

And I'd rather work a check out stand than oversee 4 self-serve lanes. Overseeing self-serve lanes is like actually having to watch the computer take your job in real-time.

OMG! Ponies!

@Justifan: Actually I did work as a check out person in and just after high school, and it was hard work (thats why they call it work) but I learned a lot and moved on. I also got to work interfacing with real humans, 90% of which were great.

Curves

Just to tell you: I have seen this scale already in Germany (Future Store, a project on future technology in grocery shopping). It just did not work. I had to put an Apple in there at least five times; it always stated it was an orange?! (I mean, I can do better with only a simple color recognition program).
Wait until you see them in stores, try them out and you will see that you don't really need to be very enthusiastic about these devices.

I would rather go for the self check-out, without the annoying cashier :)

cmdrcool

Hey! They have had this for at least 6 months in the supermarket I usually go to here in Germany! Works great! Although in the beginning I did not know about this feature and kept using the touchscreen to find my fruits. One day I took too long and it automatically came up with the correct produce... Imagine the look on my face, I thought I was on Candid Camera!

lo--rez

@cmdrcool: It works good in the "real,-" supermarket here in Mannheim, not a prototype either, they have like 4 of these scales there.

lo--rez

@OMG! Ponies!:

well i have worked as checkout as well. i'm just sure that working as a self checkout attendant would be more relaxing and less physically wearing, basically you are support staff instead of grunt labor.
its not as if there would be any job reduction really, you need more people as more self checkout lanes are added anyways.

Justifan

Why not charge the same price per pound for all produce? Much simpler solution, and probably less expensive in the long run.

Or have tables of the per-item weight of each type of produce, and identify the item type by whichever comes closest to a whole number of items.

mkant