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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."
I quite enjoyed the apparent abolition of self-service scales in favor of weighing fruits at checkout. Let's hope they don't make a comeback.
Fleur de Sel
I for one welcome our new intelligent self-service weighing overlords
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
Except that the linked picture shows strawberries on the scales, but the screen shows a choice of all kinds of other fruit and veg, not different kinds of strawberry.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
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.
My girlfriend unwittingly leaned across one of these scales to reach a bag of apples, whereupon the screen started showing pictures of different kinds of melons. Fairly accurate, I'd say.
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
Untrue. They will not reduce the wait time. They will reduce the staff. So instead of 10 people doing checkout, they will have only 8.
It will indeed reduce your time at the checkout, but it will not decrease and perhaps even increase your total shopping experience.
Stores want you as long as possible in their store. It will make you buy more. If you then have a perceived time gain (not a real one) that is even better.
Obviously the time spend must not be irritating, otherwise it is counterproductive. So they know how long it takers before people will start to get irritated and have moved your time with the girl to a minimum, as people think that time is the most 'wasted' while not decreasing the overal time.
For some it might take less time for others it might take more time overall. You can be sure that the profit is calculated. If the store would not gain, it would not happen.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
If it could figure out the type op the tomatoes, it should also be able to recognize the things as tomatoes...
My girlfriend unwittingly leaned across one of these scales to reach a bag of apples, whereupon the screen started showing pictures of different kinds of melons
... You never removed the bar code from your inflatable life partner? :\
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Usually stores do have the facility for the check-out person to enter the code and weigh the fruit themselves at the checkout, but as they only do this when tourists come to town (or the OAPs who forget) they don't remember the codes off the top of their heads and have to spend a while looking them up.
In Australia, it is standard for the "checkout chick" to weigh fruit & veg (or anything else) as part of of the checkout process. The scales are built into the bench/barcode scanner and it takes maybe a second longer than a typical barcode scan.
(Which resulted in a bit of minor confusion and embarrassment the first time I visited a grocery store in Switzerland after we moved here.)
Having seen both systems in action, I'm in favour of having it done at the checkout. It doesn't add any meaningful amount of time, is more convenient for the customer and removes the ability for dishonest people to game the system by deliberately using an incorrect label on their goods.
My usual lunchtime shop has trouble reading BARCODES on half the stuff I buy. Swipe, nothing, swipe, nothing, swipe, nothing... Type in tiny number, beep. Yeah, that's time saving. And now I'm being told computers can tell the difference between tangerines and satsumas? Heck, I can't even do that!
I call shenanigans. Either:
* each vegetable has a secret RFID chip in it
or
* the picture is sent to some outsourced call centre where someone sits at a screen watching vegetables all day and clicking on what they are.
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).
Self service discount? Over here we call it shoplifting :).
Depends on the store. In germany they often do it at checkout, also probably at aldi in switzerland. At one particularly annoying store in germany (edeka), you have to type in a 3-digit number at the scale. So you spend a lot of time looking for the place where you got your fruit or vegetable, remembering the number, going back.
These "smart" scales have been around for more than a year now at some Real,- stores, and if they are supposed to intelligently learn, they are apparently still not doing a very good job. Still, anything beats the number system.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
that's definitely not 'redundant'.
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My friend used to buy only onions. Coca-Cola onions, chicken onions, etc. Instead scanning the barcode he used to put them as loose items. The cheapest ones were onions. So he always had lots of receipts for several kinds of onions. Funny, illegal but saved him quite a lot of cash.
No he'll need to behave like proper citizen...
Maybe I could open a shop where every product has approximately the same cost per unit mass, then just charge customers by the kilo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_store
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
The problem with regular self check registers is that even though they are more compact, the store still never installs enough of them. If I have to wait in line to use a self service register, it doesn't really save me time. On the other hand, my grocery store has a rack of 100 portable self checkout scanners at the entrance. These allow me to scan and bag my groceries as I shop. This is much more efficient than a self service register or even an actual cashier because I don't have to unload my cart at the register. I've never had to wait to get one and I've never had to wait more than a minute to pay when I'm done.
I can't stand these systems. I said TomAto. It said ToMato. Then I went and tried to get some PotAtos. It said poTato.
Then I just called the whole transaction off.
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".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Right - and these plants just uproot themselves from the jungles of darkest Peru, randomly arrive in the supemarket and teleport themselves onto the shelves do they?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Armark has edible rfid out now. My company has been contracting with them to put them in various foodstuffs. http://www.rmark.org/ Not much information on the site, but the tech is pretty cool, and completely foodsafe.
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!
Yeah when I lived in Germany, they always did the weighing at the checkout. I never shopped at the big supermarkets like Real or the super-sized Edekas or Aldis because I lived too far away from the large shopping centres and didn't have a car. I just shopped at the small local stores around the corner. They never really had problems with identifying the produce. If they were unsure they usually referred to a guide with pictures to find the right code. If they still couldn't find it they just asked you or someone else. Didn't take long.
Same deal in Canada. I can't speak for the whole country, and have no idea how its done anywhere else, but in Winnipeg at the various Superstore locations I've been to, they have about 4-6 self-checkout kiosks which have the computer scales built in, but definitely are not smart whatsoever. Real Human Beings® still exist as cashiers in far greater numbers. Safeway seems to get the idea that people are better. Their recent store renovations (to the darker more luxurious look with wooden floors and all that) don't have any of the self-checkout kiosks at all. Maybe their next round of renos will put everyone out of a job, who knows.
For bulk purchases, like at Safeway buying a bag of candies or spices from the bulk bins, you still are asked to write down the number on the twist tie, but if you forget, don't worry about it, they can look it up in their guide. Very easy.
Once in the UK, we tried using the self-checkouts at Tesco and they were the hugest pieces of garbage on earth. The machine supervisor/manager guy basically waited beside us the whole time and constantly had to intervene where the machine screwed up. Double-scanning and not sensing the items in the bagging area were par for the course. Took about 10 minutes extra just to do that while people with full carts who went to the Real Human Beings® after we'd started were already loading their cars before we were finished wasting our lives with relatively few items vs. vastly inferior technology. The least the supervisor/manager could have done was to void everything and take us to a proper cashier to get it done in no time. Hopefully they've fixed those things up by now.
Moral of the story: go see the Real Human Beings® because they are harder, better, faster, stronger.. well maybe better and faster. Plus you can chat with them, or chat them up as the case may be, not have them talk down at you in some stupid disembodied voice. Human interaction is much more pleasant than interacting with a computer. I know this is Slashdot, and that may not be a universally held view, but it is the truth. Even Slashdotters have to emerge from their dens and get some food sometime...
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.
One species' weed is another species' diet.
Or something like that.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.