this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
1351 points (98.7% liked)
People Twitter
7796 readers
441 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.