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Smart Self-Service Scales
Roland Piquepaille writes "German researchers have developed intelligent self-service scales for supermarkets, able to recognize fruit or vegetables placed on them (photo). The scales automatically recognize the item being weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant, such as various kinds of tomatoes. The scales are equipped with a camera and an image evaluation algorithm that compares the image of the item on the scale with images stored in its database. Store managers can add items to the database. The scales are now being tested in about 300 supermarkets across Europe."
It would be more useful the other way round: if I told it they were tomatoes at it could figure out exactly what type they were.
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This is just plain silly and useless. If you fail to see why, I am sad for you. Cool software/hardware has its place, but this will just cost consumers more for no gain whatsoever.
Which is better for me as a customer, having someone in checkout that just grabs my tomatoes and enters the price, bags them, or, a stupid robot that makes me do everything. This technology doesn't benefit me at all, it benefits the store. I refuse to use it.
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I don't know how widespread these are outside the UK, but ever used one of the self-service checkouts that are appearing? Scan item, bag it, scan next item etc...
Great idea. Except that the whole point is to save time, and these things were clearly never tested by someone in a hurry because it's trivially easy to scan and bag faster than the checkout can keep up. Well, it would be except the damn thing refuses to scan item 2 until item 1 has been bagged and it takes forever to register that item 1 has been bagged.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Just a few days ago when I was shopping with my family at a "real" store (maybe comparable to WalMart in the US) in Potsdam (near Berlin), I was confronted with this kind of scale. The scale looks similar to the standard self service scales, but it sports a touch screen instead of the panel with selection buttons. The camera is also included in the touch sceen.
After I had placed a clear bag with nectarines on the scale it displayed a number of selections that it considered the appropriate type of fruit. None of the selections came even close, so I had to select "nectarines" manually on the touch sceen.
Generally this is a nice idea, but it just does not seem to work, maybe also because we always place the fuits in bags before putting them on the scale.
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We have stopped making things, and now increased automation is rendering the service industry pointless. To be honest, like most of the public, I would rather deal with a machine than another human being, if only because that other human being is inevitably some slack-jawed sack of cynicism and self-loathing who hates their job and thus a large percentage of their existence.
The economy of western Europe, therefore, is developing into one based entirely on producing reality TV shows and suing people for sharing them on the Internet. Hooray.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
And that is the whole point. That way they can use less staff there. The process for the customer as a whole takes more time. Often I need to wait for the scale to be free then I need to look for where the selection is. So for the customer it take more time, but the store saves.
Also I have used supermarkets where you do NOT put a sticker on it. The person at the checkout has a scale in the same place where the scanner is and enters the PLU. This is as fast as scanning, while not having the need to scan them myself. (I can still check if I want to)
As for people doing the packaging. I have seen it and it takes me again much more time. I do not care what time I spend at the checkout. I care about the time I spend for the whole experience.
To compare it: I am not interested if you have the fastest computer in the world that does a process 2 seconds faster if I as a user lose 5 seconds by needing more time to enter the data.
And then there is the self-checkout. The only advantage I see is not so much the speed. It is that they can use one person instead of 4 to man them. The same with the scanners you walk around with yourself.
OK, the last two might indeed save me about 5 minutes. It will also give me the not so nice feeling that just put some people out of a job, so I can have 5 minutes more to waste on /.
So I now take my time whenever I go shopping. If somebody runs to get in front of me, I let them. I do NOT use the self-checkout lanes, even if there is nobody there and I do have the technical knowledge.
To not use the scanners you can use is also because I do not use a customer card. They can not link my stuff I buy to the way I pay. The privacy laws here do not allow it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
But given the level of knowledge of the average checkout person, this might be more useful at the tills - having to explain to the staff what 'fennel' or 'parsnip' (I kid you not - it actually happens) is can get kind of frustrating after a while.
I can see this technology helping the checkout staff - of course, staff training might help as well (looking at you, Tesco...)
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B might actually work
I refuse to use self-service checkouts. They have installed two of them in the local Tesco (occupies the position that Wal-Mart does in the UK market).
Every time I go in, a clipboard-wielding junior manager tries to make me use them. I usually just say "No", but next time I've resolved to explain why.
Completely aside from the fact that the implementation is dreadful, the things are designed to do people out of a job, in a town that sorely needs jobs. Two of these things are typically supervised by one worker, instead of requiring two people to man two manual ones. You only spend on capital if you have an expectation of increased quality or reduced labour costs, and I can't see these things increasing quality.
People who work grocery retail are at the bottom end of the labour market, so where are they going to go? I don't feel comfortable helping the the likes of Tesco line their pockets like this. I'm starting to feel close to the line where I stop shopping there (if only they hadn't managed to crowd out all the local greengrocers and fishmongers, which I suppose is partially my fault).
Around here, the cashiers don't have to know what it is. Just throw it on the scale and type in the PLU code that's on the sticker.
Yeah. Daikon in my case. Isn't that just an indication these people _won't_ be retrained as rocket scientists? I hate auto-check-outs and never use them. More work for me, I assume more profit for the supermarket instead of lower prices, and I get to pay for somebody's unemployment/retraining. And, to be honest, you go back to the same place every week, there is the sociological angle as some of them become "familiar strangers". Why do I want to crap on them?
Nonetheless, "reprogramable" object recognition simple enough for a supermarket manager to use is a good hack.
The problem is that no such device exists not because we can't build the device but because there is such a paucity of taxonomists and so many varieties of plant life that we don't really have a bead on how much is out there. If you can't build a database, having an interface for it is useless. Data first.
The opposite of progress is congress
Well knowing all the PLU codes for all the types of vegetables can be hard, depending on how big a selection the store has. Used to work at a grocery store; had a very very wide selection of stuff. I imagine any vegetable recognizing application would be useful regardless of whether you weight on scales in the shop or at the checkout.
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Yeah, because it would be such a disaster for taxonomists if they had a machine that they could point at unfamiliar plant life and press a button that said "Is this in the database".
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That depends on how granular it gets. It sounds like it could only narrow it down to "apple" or "tomato"; the weird stuff that drove me batty as a cashier would probably just come up as "weedy thing"...
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
I think they are talking about fruit and veggies you bag mate, the ones without any stickers. There is no associated code on the bags and the attendant has to know the type of food before weighing it.
This device could help identify the various types that look similar. Although I gotta wonder how it's gonna handle the difference between a McIntosh and a Red Delicious apple. From the article it seems that it will just identify "apple" and then give the user choices. Which makes me wonder how much more useful this identification will be over the typical self-checkout you see in grocery stores.
The problem with self-service scales in the supermarkets I've been to is not that it's hard to enter the item, it's that frequently _the item isn't in the database_. Or the PLU sticker is missing from the item or the shelf tag... and can't be looked up because it demands an exact name match and you don't know whether a sweet Vidalia onion begins with O or V or S.
The premise that it can recognize produce visually is unlikely to say the least. Do you really think it can tell the difference between bananas at $0.69 a pound and organically grown bananas at $1.19 a pound? How about a Fuji apple and a Gala apple?
I'm willing to bet that the system does more to impede legitimate purchases than to facilitate them.
I'm bet that "ask[ing] the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant" sounds like a smokescreen and a pretext. I'll be these scales really being sold to control-freak store managers who fear that customers are building a better retirement by ringing up expensive orange peppers as cheap green peppers, and is willing to spend $50,000 to prevent a couple of customers a day from bilking the store of $2.67.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In fact the trend has just started to change again, the transportation prices are rising making it increasingly profitable to produce closer to home.
Just the other day I read an article from the UK about companies moving manufacturing home from China. And don't forget that the same thing is happening in the US [in some areas].
And China is experiencing problems with higher labor costs following a real lack of available manpower. People in China are getting picky about what jobs they take and the wages they get.
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Or something like that.
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