The banks know the identities (personal identify number) of their customers via their physical offices. BankID offers an app to individuals and an online API to paying/approved third-party services. Third-party services are able to offer BankID authentication in websites and apps. In the end the third party receives an authenticated personal identity number.
There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.
> There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.
At risk of sounding snarky, I'm growing in awareness that the anonymous nature of paper money and coin had a lot of advantages. I would be unhappy if the only option for groceries in my area required me to strongly identify myself to shop there.
there are prepaid visa/mc cards which can give you anonymity while still using card.
accepting cash, means a store has to be staffed with people and it makes it more expensive to run business=>higher prices for products
> there are prepaid visa/mc cards which can give you anonymity while still using card.
There kind of isn't, at least in Sweden. The option that does exist is a seedy borderline scam with exorbitant overhead and hidden usury fees, which will effectively confiscate your remaining money a few months in.
Also, in stark contrast to real cash, it still results in a log of all the transactions and ties them up to one weakly pseudonymous identity which will be re-identified at one single purchase with an identifiable connection, or could by from a collection of weaker clues. That is, for instance, goodbye to ever using it for anything with an account, unless you also want to announce you probably bought everything else the card was ever used for.
It's cheaper to dump toxic waste in the bay than to have someone neutralize it as well, and personally I'm positively delighted the resulting products cost more instead. There are lots discounts that should be shunned, and in my opinion this one is a prime example.
Exactly like in the US except that the target market here isn't the privacy-conscious, it's the people banks don't want to service (poor and/or poor credit history)
If you have the means to tally an order and a card terminal, though, you could have a kiosk with a note acceptor attached.
>There kind of isn't, at least in Sweden. The option that does exist is a seedy borderline scam with exorbitant overhead and hidden usury fees, which will effectively confiscate your remaining money a few months in.
You can have a non-swedish Revolut/N26/Bunq/Curve account, and use that card instead, that way you are not directly linked to your cashless purchases.
Well, previously "no shop for you", now "no shop for you". So no big change for you really. No net decrease in happiness for you and a net increase in happiness for others.
And yet, you are probably happy if some criminals are caught with the help of surveillance camera footage. In the past when there were shops in every neighbourhood, the owners of these shops knew all their customers. They exactly knew who they could trust and who not. It has happened to me that when I went to an open air market, where you stil have to make an order, they people behind the stall after some time just remembered what I was coming for, while they must see thousands of customers each week.
That sounds all nice and small-town rosy, but I would pick anonymity any day. Road to totality and 1984-esque society only takes 1 step at a time to build, and this is definitely one of those steps. Although coming form smallish town, this familiarity with shop owners ain't something high on my list of priorities, in contrary.
The strongest reason for it would probably be the old 'power corrupts', as we can see just about anybody with access to it, be it a person or organization in the past. No reason to be so naive to think some other place is special and avoids it. And knowing basically everything about any individual is a massive amount of power and very personal. Also rarely are these kinds of laws repelled, in contrary, the data are just too sweet and there is always the next terrorist threat to prevent.
I wonder if my reply was down-voted because people did not agree with it or because they thought it was not relevant or besides the point? Probably, you are not among those, because you did take time to reply to it.
You did not reply to my first and main statement. Probably because you agreed with it. In the past shops had other methods of preventing shoplifting. Some of these methods also involved keeping track of what people did. Not information stored in databases, but in the heads of people. What I just wanted to say is that we are happy if some kind of system is used to catch the bad people, but not us, because we think of ourselves as being good. Many shoplifters also think of themselves as good, because they beat the system or have the right to do it because society treated them unfair. Or maybe just because of the fun of doing it. I understand that a high percentage of people did some shoplifting at some point in their lives. And many would do more if there would be no chance of being caught.
I simply wanted to point out that safety (as in preventing crimes) and privacy are in opposition with eachother and that each society has to find a way to balance them. It is also expected that your opinion on that balance is influenced on your position in that society.
Why? Why are you worried about disclosing how much milk and eggs you buy?
I know this is the age old "I have nothing to hide" argument but I truly am curious why people are so afraid of saying where they're travelling (train tickets) or what they're buying (shops).
Don't you think that once that dystopian future comes - when that info might be used against you - we'll have much worse things to worry about?
Never thought I'd read the "What have you got to hide?" argument on HN of all places.
First of all, you're being disingenious by putting up a strawman argument about "how much milk and eggs you buy." It is never about only milk and eggs. Advertising is only a part of it. Once you have an ID required to shop there, you can easily track who was there. You can follow their movements around the shop with cameras once you've identified them at the register. You can see who was with them. You can use this for your own gains, let's say you are a bank employee or police officer who wants to keep tabs on your spouse. Or maybe you are a politician who wants to run a smear campaign on your opponent.
Also whether we'll have much worse things to worry about doesn't mean everything else before guillotines on the street can be hand-waved away.
> You can use this for your own gains, let's say you are a bank employee or police officer who wants to keep tabs on your spouse.
I think it's obvious that the data would not be public domain but stored strongly secured somewhere with very limited access. There are already very strict data privacy laws in Europe and the trend is clearly towards even more strictness.
I, too, don't see any issue as long the as the laws punish misuse of private data.
The laws may punish the misuse of data, but laws change, as do vilified minorities.
Never forget that while you may be one of the privileged now, your status will change throughout your life. If you’re lucky you will only become a more privileged individual, if not, you may wish to have a few more anonymous interactions on a regular basis.
Protecting privacy isn’t so much about not caring who knows the quantity of eggs you buy a week it’s about acknowledging history and the fickle winds of change. It’s sort of easy to believe that progressive attitudes will continue to prevail and that history tends to lead to increasing enlightenment, but there are often major backslides on issues of social norms and inclusiveness. It’s also about realizing that what you do today might not get you in trouble, but what you did last year might, even though last year no one would have thought twice about what you did.
"Let's just amass a huge amount of power in a place that only I can get to it, and I'll just promise that I'll never misuse it and that no one will every break in to take it."
That plan has literally never worked throughout history.
> I think it's obvious that the data would not be public domain but stored strongly secured somewhere with very limited access.
That may be an obvious intent, but I do not believe it is obvious the implementation will succeed in achieving those goals. From past experience, it rarely has.
For example, I'm disclosing my schedule: when I'm likely to be in a given neighborhood, at a certain store, or simply not at home. I'm disclosing my habits: do I buy alcohol frequently? Do I buy certain magazines?
None of it is critical information, but I'm not only handing it out, I'm wrapping it up into a neat, searchable bundle for bulk analysis. And more importantly, there will soon be no easy way to opt out; anyone who truly does have something to hide will be obvious by the lengths they must go to in doing so. This is one more step in a dangerous, inhuman direction.
> I'm disclosing my habits: do I buy alcohol frequently?
Not in Sweden, because only state-run stores can sell alcohol (above 3.5% alcohol to be exact) - it's called Systembolaget and they already know exactly how much you drink!
In the State of Oregon only state-licensed stores can sell hard liquor. "Hard" seems to be about 20% because you can buy wine and beer under that percentage in grocery stores.
A lot of business is done in cash at these stores. They're traditionally a lucrative place to rob because of the cash. There seems to be some people who don't want to be tracked but mostly the cash customers seem to be people who deal more with cash themselves.
They are allowed to ask your for your ID to make sure you're old enough (even if you look much older than enough), so they will still know who you are (just half-joking - they don't use that information to store information on you... or do they).
> Don't you think that once that dystopian future comes - when that info might be used against you - we'll have much worse things to worry about?
What if this kind of technology helps create that dystopian future? What if this kind of technology makes it worse, or at least harder to fix? More sinister and more protracted, so to speak.
We aren't in that future yet, and it won't happen overnight or through one big rollout. We'll get to that future through small, incremental steps that all seem perfectly reasonable at the time.
Yes. Information absolutely can be used against you. Imagine if you perhaps decide to smoke... now the bank (and others). know this behavior and can calculate it into your overall credit score / health care score / behavior score.
You could use lots and lots of examples where market forces and banks could influence human behavior through this method. There is freedom and power in using cash.
Even something as seemingly innocuous as milk and eggs can be a big deal. Suddenly spending more? Maybe you have guests. Maybe you are hiding refugees. Might be innocuous, might be life and death.
Maybe just don't have a government where that's an issue, rather than holding back the technological development of society.
Why use mobile phones or credit cards? Or ID cards? or ISP subscriptions? It could all be tracked! Let's just do everything by landlines and faxes like Germany...
Let me turn around and ask you - if you think this is not a problem, why don't you publish all your purchase info online? Along with where you bought them, what time, how etc? While you are at it, also publish your travel info - including mode of travel, time of travel, source, destination...
I might be the boring-est person on the planet - lets say nothing about me is of any value to anyone. It is still nobody's business to know even the most mundane aspect of my life. My life is my business, just like your life is your business. Thats all.
>why don't you publish all your purchase info online? Along with where you bought them, what time, how etc? While you are at it, also publish your travel info - including mode of travel, time of travel, source, destination...
Yes I prefer that for everyone (not just me), including people in government, so that I don't have to worry about hiding the information. Hiding the information has its associated cost.
Transparency for everyone to level the playing field.
Sure its your business to be private but as times goes and as technology advances it going to be more difficult and expensive.
I don't understand why you should decide for others? If you want to put all of your info online, that is your choice. If I don't want to put my info online, that is my choice.
Its not the milk and eggs its the condoms and birth control.
Its the data on why you suddenly stopped buying alcohol after buying a pregnancy test a month before.
Who works at the store? Your former teacher? A prior fling? A neighbor? Does it matter when it can all be leaked with everyones data by a hacker anywhere when the ransom isn't paid by the store?
I'm not very much worried about my personal data being collected, what worries me is that when it is pooled with the data of many other individuals the entity who controls that pool will be able to do all sorts of analysis and make all sorts of predictions about behaviours on the small and the mass scale, the benefits of which might allow them to engage, with an advantage, in various fields and with various intentions which cannot be predicted or understood by other entities.
Good thing Sweden has decent public insurance then...
Don't hold back technology and society just because of a few other issues - those other issues can be better resolved directly. In this case, with single-payer public healthcare.
The country you live in does not matter. If the data you emit is recorded, it will be used against you. Cambdrige Analytica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica ) might have closed down but there still are a lot of company that do the same things and are still in business.
Jews in pre-Nazi Germany didn’t know they had anything to hide. Are you religious? You could one day be targeted. Are you an atheist? You could one day be targeted. What political party do you agree with? You could one day be targeted. You can’t decide to be against this stuff once it’s out there and starts affecting you.
I don't agree with any information tracking, but should note that this type of collection, e.g., of shopping data, doesn't exactly mean the information will be leaked or used for nefarious purposes, etc. And, for many, they do share with the world what they're buying/many parts of their daily lives, just not by pushing a commit or updated a webpage; e.g., Twitter, Instagram, Snap.
> There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.
I don't agree. I'm a Swede too (as I assume you are), and I have basically never heard anyone complain of BankID being owned by the banks. I am really happy that our government does not own BankID, since they suck badly at developing software.
It is an issue that digital identification in Sweden is run by a single private company. The drawbacks are not clearly seen from a consumer standpoint, but they do charge service providers for each login, and can set their prices freely since it's a monopoly.
They also have rules against being logged in for too long, and against identity transfer (directly or indirectly using BankID to authenticate for a different login method) [1], since that would result in fewer BankID logins and less revenue for them.
One result of the latter restriction is that any letters containing authentication codes need to be sent by physical mail, since all digital mailboxes such as Kivra and the government-run "Min myndighetspost" support login by BankID. The University Admissions service (antagning.se) were forced to stop sending codes through digital mailboxes due to this [2].
My understanding: After the recent money laundering revelations the banks have become relatively strict in accepting/keeping certain customers. I think that most of all the banks are afraid of being blacklisted/sanctioned by the US.
This leads to friction and situations where some people are essentially excluded from large parts of society.
The banks also don't seem to be all that interested in interacting with their invidual customers in the flesh.
I think the natural conclusion of this is that the issuing of electronic IDs becomes a government responsibility, decoupled from banking.
Wasn't all of those scandals tied to foreign branches of the banks and the strictness has mostly only been applied there? I might be wrong, but I haven't heard of swedish residents being denied banking.
- 6-9 months ago I started reading online of mostly Swedbank customers who had suddenly been asked to move their monthly salaries to this bank, or they'd lose their accounts. These people were doing stock trading only via Swedbank.
- 18 months ago I tried to facilitate creating a corporate bank account managed by a foreign CEO from a non-EU and very first-world country in order to be able to create a Swedish company (AB) with the goal of hiring software people here in Sweden. Tried two banks (SEB and Handelsbanken) before giving up and going another route.
My impression is that Swedish banks have tightened up things quite a lot in the past few years.
Yeah, that first example does sound unexpected based on my experience. I might have to deal with something like the second example in the soon-ish future, mind telling me the route you took?
You kinda need to have an EU-based CEO. Swedish-based is (marginally) easier.
There might be tricks via Cyprus or so, but that will only let you create the AB - you still need a Swedish corporate bank account to pay your employees the proper way.
Well the Swedish banks are pretty much the worst I've encountered anywhere, while the government is comparatively efficient (tax returns are very easy, apply for parental leave etc.). So yes please don't let the banks control it.
In their defense: They used to be pretty good, before international money laundering became a giant thing. After recent regulations there are very few reasons for why they would want to accept foreign customers. Just too much risk.
I agree that something needs to be done.
They have been innovative in the past:
1996/1997: Mass adoption of two-factor hardware devices providing secure authentication for online banking.
2003: Leveraging the two-factor hardware devices to create BankID.
"Ownership" is can be kind of abstract, in this context.
A service like this needs to be infrastructure, one way or another. Secure, reasonably neutral, trusted... You don't want it serving as a retaining wall for a monopoly.
So give me the bull case where there’s a regulatory gray zone and institutions who really don’t understand technology get to decide how it should be operated. I’ve been in contact with Finansinspektionen on multiple occasions and there’s a pretty low understanding of technology in general. Another detrimental aspect is that there’s very little competition to the regular banking system because of this.
So since HN is a place primarily for technologists who like to push things forward, maybe you have a stronger argument than just saying that you’re a Swede?
Honestly banks are pretty regulated and some insights are already in place (as they shiuld be). This does not exclude the need for more regulation and insight mind
Swedes also use the BankID app for online interactions with health care and other public services. Last year I did my taxes in under 60 seconds. (Get notification; BankID login; check prefilled values from bank, employer etcetera; BankID sign.)
It is a curious construction; we wouldn't accept a personal id card issued / owned by banks but for the digital equivalent we do so with little debate.
I just got NemID as a foreigner -- it took me about 4 months of circular references (x is closed because of covid, get it from y; y is shut because of covid -- try x) and a rooting trick on my phone to get the app to work. I am sure that it is nice for the government and the banks having a unified point of sale, but it _really_ took a lot of work to get sorted. I think I prefer the decentralised, less secure, presumably easier to defraud method…
In Norway the usual form of ID for anyone without a driving license used to be your debit card. Banks have mostly stopped issuing cards with profile pictures on them now, as they don't want the responsibility. But the national id card has been delayed for a decade. So many now have to bring their passport to buy beer...
Even then you usually needed a letter proving your identity (personbevis) from the government, right? So the bank was not the arbiter of "who was who", but issued the ID cards.
California classifies this as "crimes of necessity" with zero repercussions and in many cases people defending the acts of lawlessness. In CA everything is upside down!!
Government run debt collection? Is this widely used by companies? Are there any drawbacks/cases of misuse? Does the government keep a credit score too?
Yes. It's a bit cumbersome, so there are companies specializing in doing this for small debts (say < $5000).
> Are there any drawbacks/cases of misuse?
Hard to say. My impression is that having one trusted party to manage debt collection makes it easier to handle the edge cases in a more humane way, but I haven't really delved into this area.
Same thing happened in Belgium
in the last few years where it is called 'Itsme'. Including government openly promoting it in their messaging and services.
There is sadly little awareness of it being a private joint venture between banking and telecom.
I don't know if it is realistic to expect governments to come up/run this, but when they promote it, I think it should at least be open source.
But it's very expensive to integrate it and it's Ogone all over again ( most expensive option = the Belgian one) ~3€ / user/year for the most complete option for ( what is basically) a login verification.
Practical question: Does this mean as a foreigner you cannot use these shops?
I know from trips to sweden that a lot of people use a custom payment system called swish that only exists in sweden, but I never had trouble paying with a visa card (with cash is sometimes a problem in sweden).
Wait - BankID requires an Android or iOS app in Sweden? Sounds cumbersome. Here in Norway BankID is a SIM application that follows your SIM card regardless of OS or if you swap your phone. So you could basically stick your SIM in a stone age cell phone and still use your BankID.
It would be a good idea to remove the 'date' from the number.
Edit: because having your birthday right there as part of common ID number is an obvious transgression of privacy that wasn't probably thought of back when the number was established. How anyone could disagree with this is beyond me.
Do people really have a hard time remembering their phone numbers, which are relatively private?
Having one's date of birth signalled to the world is an obvious breach of privacy in the modern age, and since there is obviously no need for it, it shouldn't be used.
That you have 'never heard of a concern' not hugelry if there are obviously people who are going to take umbrage - moreover - in this new information world order it can be used for all sorts of shady reasons.
There's clearly no need of it.
If the scheme were designed today, there's a 0% chance of DOB being used in the number.
I'm hoping this can have even wider implications for society and the way people interact. In rural Sweden the last decade all the small local village stores have totally disappeared. This means that when people who are spread around the countryside could previously just cycle a few kilometers to a nearby shop, they now need to take their car and drive (say) 25 kilometers to the nearest town - which also has usually built an out-of-town shopping area that sprawls enormous car-parking over land that might previously have been forest or farmland.
The roads are therefore constantly clogged by speeding cars, and have become seriously bike-hostile, discouraging local interactions even more.
I think these small stores could actually become a focus for local activity again - even without staff.
I used to work at a major multi-billion dollar retailer. One of the biggest complaints from customers was waiting at the check out line, especially for small, quick orders.
This is the future of grocery stores, like it or not. Employees are expensive and make mistakes, whereas machines are cheap, don't take breaks, and work pretty reliably once you set them up correctly.
Machines are even better then that, they generate digital data which unlocks all sorts of possibilities. Amazon could not care less if they lost $1,000,000,0 in stock if they had the data to back that up (sensor data, images, video), which is worth that much to optimize their systems and become a 'leader' which can make money itself. It's why they want to sell data gathering devices so cheaply, cameras, smart assistants, prime, anything that gives them information they can use for AI is a money maker to them.
Even if a machine is terrible and useless, you can collect that useless information/data and use it as a data point for other machines that are perhaps not so terrible, any data point is useful afterall.
I love the quick self service checkouts and will line up for them even when a regular staffed checkout is free. I’m just the opposite and instead dislike interaction I guess.
One implicit benefit of the self-service checkouts is that there's often one line for multiple machines. Any student of queuing theory will know how much this reduces waiting time compared to the one queue per cashier that's otherwise common.
This one gets me every time. I’ve only ever seen a couple super markets or stores implement this for human-operated check out stations. Ross has this, and Best Buy used to during the holidays.
Can't stand Ross in downtown SF for this reason. You get placed in the same queue as the high-hagglers who have nineteen dozen coupons and constantly argue with the checkout agents. They then clog up all available slots.
At least at Safeway I can spot the kind of person who looks like they value their time and it'll usually go faster.
I'll literally never shop at Ross again because it takes forever to exit their damned queue.
The model works better at Trader Joe's in SF where it's mostly people who value their time. You can then be confident all the counters won't be used by slow people.
Ironically, some smaller stores near me have implemented this just the past few months. The covid-19 rules that stipulate only a few people in the stores have created a single queue outside the store, for all cashiers!
I would honestly be fine with making that permanent. It's so much easier to pick the things I want with fewer people between me and the shelves. All in all a much more efficient shopping experience.
that’s odd, none of the trader joes’s i usually go to in LA regularly have a single line. i’ve seen it irregularly, and seemingly temporarily (when especially busy perhaps).
I Think the intuition is that queuing time is asymmetric around the median, so when you increase variance you also increase the mean.
Put another way: if the median is 1 minute, then half the time you'll wait less than 1 minute. The other half you might wait not just for 2 minutes, but significantly more. They won't "cancel out" to preserve the mean.
Whenever I use self service checkout, it always takes much longer time for me to get through. I guess I am not so good at quickly juggling and locating bar codes at each item as the staff working at checkout are. So I leave it to professionals.
Resident in Sweden here and heavy user of the self-checkout.
My experience is that self-checkout is slightly slower than the serviced one.
For a serviced checkout I try to put all bar-codes towards the cashiers scanner (it is a nice thing to do, the cashiers do not like juggling either) when putting stuff on the belt and I will need to unpack from my basket, pay and pack it to my bag.
The same is operations needs to be done for the self-checkout but even the best setups needs some managing of the machine that the cashier would have parallelized in a serviced one. Usually it is slightly more fiddly to do packaging and scanning on a self-checkout system than on a serviced larger belt.
However, considering that there are usually many more self-checkout terminals available with much less queue it means that the total time spent is less than on a service one.
My local store, open until 23, usually closes down the self-checkout terminals the last hour since there are too few people to make it worthwhile and you rarely have a queue to the serviced station.
So I totally agree that the serf service checkout is slower for that actual station but considering that the store can cram in much more of those in the same space and they need much less personnel to manage it saves everyone time and money to use them, unless there is no queue to the serviced checkout (and personnel is manning it at the moment).
that’s my experience too: because i am serializing unloading, scanning, paying, bagging, and reloading, the checkout process itself is longer, but when buying only a few items and including line wait times, total time is usually shorter.
Here in the UK some stores offer a handheld wireless scanner at the entrance to the store (and some chains offer an app so you can use your phone too)
You then scan items as you pick them off the shelf - if you're really prepared you put the item directly into a bag you brought with you.
Payment is then a case of walking up to the till - human or machine - and scanning one final barcode. Your order is presented to you for a final review then you tap your card and leave.
Arriving at the till and paying instantly means my entire queuing experience is over within 5-10 seconds
(Unless you get subjected to an infrequent random poll of your items but these are worth the occasional hassle)
QFC tried this in the Seattle area. I actually never tried because it feels more cumbersome than just scanning everything at once.
Also, scales to price veggies and fruits are at checkouts in the states. If they had them in the veggie area, like in much of Europe, things might be really different.
No idea. In Europe you put weigh them in the veggie section, type the code in, put the sticker on your bag. In China, the same thing happens, except there is an attendant to do it for you.
The USA, this is always done at checkout. If it was a law making that happen, it would have to be at the state level.
In addition to avoiding interaction, I also prefer not standing there awkwardly while people work for me. I can't help the checkout clerk scan my groceries faster, and (if there is one in that lane) I'd just get in the way of the baggers, so I just have to stand there letting them serve me. I don't like that feeling of power/superiority/(not quite sure how to phrase it). It's the same reason I don't like mani pedis.
Agreed. I find it easier to interact with people in service situations if they're responsible for the whole experience. The point of going to a restaurant or a barbershop or getting take-out is that you're leaving the whole process in someone else's hands.
A checkout clerk just feels like a weird adjunct to the whole process. I walked to the store, pushed the cart around and grabbed all my items, yet somehow someone else has to do the quickest and easiest part for me?
They'd really rather you not get in their way, anyway. It isn't awkward for them until you try to help. They enjoy the feeling of power/superiority they have over you. That's why they smile while you stand there naval gazing.
It's not only that, it's the fact that the stores have externalised the checkout process to customers themselves.
I could never understood why should I, as a client, do the work that someone else can do for me (and more reliably, of course)? It's win-win, I'm not stressed at doing something wrong, I can do something else while my products are checked out and that person doing the product checkout also has a job.
But because it sounds tech-y and more automatic-y lots of tech-literate people fall for all of this, I don't see what's more automatic in me doing the same work that another person used to do.
Analogously, I don't see a reason why I should be forced wait in a queue for one of the limited other humans to help me do something that I can do myself in one of the 8 self-checkout lanes whenever I'm ready to do so.
People who want the assistance of an employee can go that route, but I prefer the self-checkout process for the reduced waiting and self-service nature.
In these stores, cashiers are waiting around most of the time. That's the issue. They couldn't stay in business because they had to pay for the cashier to checkout as well as wait around. By letting customers checkout, there's no more wasted money spent on employees waiting around.
Also, the stores that are most promising don't require checkout at all, so that's an entire category of human effort eliminated, for better or worse.
Most stores keep one person up front when they are not busy, the rest of the checkout clerks wonder the store looking for things out of place, stocking shelves, finding or customers to help. Each store has their own set of duties but for the most part there are plenty of tasks to do when people aren't waiting in line.
> I can do something else while my products are checked out
But the point is we don't need the 'while my products are checked out' step. We could skip that. You save time, save more people handling what you're buying, save them having to staff a checkout and freeing them to do something else instead. That's the real win-win.
I think it's demeaning to employ people to do something that is so clearly not necessary. If we want to create and possibly subsidise jobs for people let's create useful, productive jobs.
if you want someone to ring up and bag your groceries for you, go to a high-end grocery store. meanwhile, I'll be paying less and getting out the door faster than you anyway.
But it's not efficient, is it? These people could be doing something more productive with their time than staffing a checkout in order to make small talk.
More efficient for the company, perhaps (though self checkouts are typically still manned, though at a reduced rate). But much less efficient for the customers.
Who do you optimize for? IMO, ideally not the company.
I don't know what your experience is, but I always find self-checkout massively more efficient for me and I'd always prefer it and would choose shops that offer it over those that don't.
I can just breeze through with my AirPods still in listening to my podcast, not having to wait for anyone else or have anyone else wait for me, not having to say anything, and just get on with the rest of my day and what I really want to spend my time doing.
It’s faster because there’s 20 open machines and I don’t have to wait in a queue.
It’s lower effort because talking is a bigger cognitive burden for me than scanning a few items. Over time with experience, you get as fast as an employee would be anyway.
Pretty often, they do enjoy people who act like the whole thing was pleasant. If you force them into long chat they will dislike it, but if you smile, are nice to them, thank and say one socially appropriate thing, they tend to like it.
I was recently at a CVS and the cashier shouted out that she’d help us as we walked towards the self checkout. She was very friendly and wanted to talk about everything from the upcoming time change to the vaccine. Some people just crave interaction and with the current pandemic they may be too isolated.
machines may not make mistakes, but the people who program them do. I just bought a guitar for $50 under the going rate because the in store pricetag was lower than the company's own online price. the system had lost track of the guitar entirely, so they had no way of knowing they needed to update the local price. by policy, they had to pricematch themselves. the associate told me this happens all the time.
I'm enjoying the speed of checkout at Walmart with Walmart+. With a little bit of care, checkout takes almost no time. The little bit of care is going at a time when it is not so crowded that there is a line to get to a self-checkout station.
The way it works is that you scan the bar codes with the Walmart app on your smartphone as you add items to your shopping cart. The scan function is very fast. If you are adding more than one of an item, you can either scan them separately or scan once and then set the quantity.
To checkout, you just go to an open self-checkout station, hit the "check out" button in the app, scan the QR code that is on the home screen of the terminal, tell it how many bags you are using (default is zero), hit "pay", and about two seconds later a confirmation appears in the app, and you can leave.
The confirmation can be shown to the person at the exit to show that you have paid, although usually they don't ask.
If you are buying anything sold be weight, it tells you when you add it to your cart that you'll have to weigh it at checkout. At checkout, it prompts you to put each such item on the scale, weighs it, and adds it in.
It is literally 10-15 seconds from the time I enter the self-checkout area to the time I'm pushing my cart toward the exit. (I don't bag in-store. I have my reusable bags and some boxes in my car trunk, and do my bagging and/or boxing at my car).
This has been great for pandemic shopping. It is fairly easy to avoid spending more than a few passing seconds around any given other shopper while going around gathering items, but when scanning and bagging a full cart of groceries at self-checkout, you might be around the same other shoppers for several minutes, some within 2 meters.
machines implement stupid broken ux patterns which make shopping hell.
on edit: evidently people would like their supermarket checkout experience to be as pleasing as the typical online shopping experience, thus a quick downvote.
I agree. I've found self-checkout (of the variety common in US supermarkets) to be no faster than employee-run checkout for normal grocery loads. It may be faster for a handful of items, but once the shopper has many items, particularly a lot of produce, the lookup mechanism (picture matching, usually) for he produce slows the whole thing to stand-still. Add in manual ID verification for alcohol and drug purchases and it slows even more. Add in problems with coupons, payment, or other errors, it slows more. And then most of them have some sort of scale on the bagging end which never works well - bulk items, too many items to fit on the shelf, etc.
I never experienced that "Unexpected item in bagging area" here in Sweden, the UX failures are not universal.
Most stores I visited don't even have scales and just trust you to put in the correct items. Especially the ones where you get a handheld device to scan while you walk trough the store. I would guess that fraud levels are much lower here so the stores don't need to do that.
>I never experienced that "Unexpected item in bagging area" here in Sweden, the UX failures are not universal.
the automated føtex near my house has this, or also put your item in the bag, you need to put an item in the bag etc. crash because you didn't put item in bag fast enough, or you took bag off scale to put new one on.
>the UX failures are not universal.
yes, because they do not have a universal interface which a human checker provides. By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff - to having as many ux as there are companies implementing automatic checkout machines and however many versions of their workflow are in distribution.
The UX failures for a self-service checkout are unique and unfamiliar to the user, just like the ux failures of a new checkout flow on an online retailer.
> By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff
Even this is not universal. In Sweden the checkouts have that divider so the checkout clerk can start scanning the next customer's products while you're packing.
In the UK, you can't move on until the other person has bagged and removed which you're expected to do before paying, which makes self-checkout considerably faster because you're already bagged.
The UX of a human being is only good if you have a common language. I'm not fluent in Swedish, so for me the ability to read the text on the machine instead of listen to it is a plus. Of course, I can ask the cashier to talk English to me, but that also has some friction to it.
And I only regularly go to two different supermarkets, so once I know their flow, there's nothing new to it. In contrast, humans seem to like to change their interface quite regularly, even between customers...
Ok, I've gone to shop in lots of stores in countries where I do not speak the language, as part of the whole human checkout system there is always (in non street market situations) a machine display that says how much of the local currency I need to give up.
On the other hand I think I may be abnormally sensitive to badly worked out human machine interactions since working out these kinds of interactions is part of my job as a programmer. So when something is poorly thought out I think that I feel it stronger than most people do.
God, I wish buying things in person was as smooth as buying them online.
Being able to add and remove things from your cart in near zero time, being able to shop at any time of day, being able to search for things by name
If I could get all my groceries delivered at negligible cost I would do so
We have it now, where I live. We started ordering our groceries when the pandemic happened, but it's so convenient that we'll probably keep doing it once it passes.
I'm not sure if about 5% of our weekly supermarket spend would be negligible enough for you, but it's been worth it for us. One big factor for us is that we don't own a car, so we'd be (and previously were) hauling all that stuff by hand.
My understanding is that the chain is running the delivery service at a loss, though they probably make it up by people buying more at a time. It remains to be seen if they raise prices for the delivery when the pandemic passes.
Maybe to you, but until online shopping will be realizable via user chosen User Agent (like e-mail, etc.) via open API, online shopping will continue to suck horribly for anything but single items. Shopping for groceries online is complete hell, for one.
There are queues online too. They are just at the delivery side, not at the checkout side.
I often shop for groceries online in these corona times, for a family of 5. I usually use nemlig.com (a danish online super market) and I dont have any issues with the UX. Its easier than searching for things in the physical supermarket.
On delivery its not really a queue as I dont have to spend my time doing it.
Nemlig looks clean and good, with the category sidebar that mostly will not slide away, and as you type search, that's actually useful, and product list that's immediately in your face. Great! :) And this is exactly why I'd love the open API. To be able for people to make a client like this or better, and just use it everywhere.
Here we have to suffer through websites like this:
where you open a category, then you see a whole screen useless stock image for a category, then you scroll down through a bloated list of subcategories, then there's half a screen of recipes, and then quarter screen of filters, and then finally you get to a algorithmically selected grouped product lists.
And you have to scroll through this every time you change a category, which is also a hassle, because of all the huge multi-column popups and annoying category images everywhere and the constant scrolling you have to do to get to the subcategories from the product list.
It takes more time to select all I want online, with this interface, than a bus trip to a shop and back + typical 15 minutes in the shop for a moderate grocery shopping session.
I wonder how much of a concern shoplifting would be. The article says it's limited by knowing who's there and security cameras, but I also suspect it's kept in check by Swedish social norms.
There's an interchangeable, overpriced, soulless gas-station chain on nearly every street corner in my town. When I fill up my tank at any one of them, I'm forced to listen to the sound of 9+ pumps puke out celebrity-gossip, advertainment pieces, and PSAs telling me about the coronavirus. You can't mute them anymore. Inside, the shelves are lined with nearly identical selections of overpriced merchandise.
I could be anywhere in the midwest.
I still have have a preference for the station I use, because the staff and I at a couple of the stations recognize each other, and have developed rapports over the course of many 30s smalltalk sessions. It's superficial, but it helps build social trust. We exchange small favors. I forgot my wallet one day, and the guy behind the registered covered for me and told me to pay him back when I could. I've told off a belligerent customer or two in ways they couldn't without being fired. We've discussed the local jobs market, and at points turned each other on to different employment opportunities.
I'd pay higher prices if I knew it got them more money (and got rid of those damn telescreens).
Nevertheless, I wouldn't pay for that kind of interaction directly if I could. I have a couple groups of regular friends. If I wanted social interaction alone, I'd get with them.
It's not really about the interaction itself, it's about having some semblence of place and community in a world that's too big, too standardize, too indifferent, and too increasingly automated to think about you as anything other than an instrumentalizeable commodity, or a function to be optimized.
Every technological step forward like this puts us under increasing surveillance, dedifferentiates the spaces in-which we live, and obviates the labor of large segments of our society while reducing the power of all but a select few.
Hyperbolically, I feel like we're all just a few years from being stuffed in padded rooms with an ad-supported games console and permanently affixed morphine drips to optimize mortality, health, and quality of life metrics.
I hate those auto-playing advertisements at the pump with a perhaps inexplicable passion. The worst is that they often can be muted by pressing one of six unlabeled buttons. As if they knew there would be people who would find the adverts obnoxious and want to mute them, but wanted to ensure that only people so enraged as to take to blindly smashing buttons would find the mute feature before they bashed the screen with the pump handle. Such blatant distain for their customers.
Just for the record, I've found I can still mute them if I do the right combo of button presses.
Most of these pumps in my state have a column on either side of the screen of four or five unlabeled buttons. If I press the left side top to bottom (usually by running my finger straight down the line) on the left column, then the right, then the left, that shuts up 90% of them in my area.
It sounds like you guys could use a YMCA or community center catering to these types. My grandmother was lonely so I convinced her to go to a YMCA for exercise reasons and she made a bunch of friends.
Very true, and young people too! I think these shops could reduce loneliness as customers may talk to each other. There's more chance of interaction with a shop than no shop. The concern is where technology is used in place of staffed-shops, but perhaps you would have to make small talk with the security guard instead.
Perhaps in cities, where there is more footfall, it might save money to employ one. But you're certainly right, in these rural Swedish shops, there doesn't seem to be.
Shopping daily does not implies being poor, I'd argue its mostly cultural, for example, many Japanese prefer to buy daily and keep low stocks on their pantries.
I could see this being beneficial for some communities real far out in the sticks
If major chains is all a small rural community has left, then I'd liken this to cracking open the bones of a well-pecked carcass and sucking out the marrow before discarding the corpse
It's a little bit... weird to think of "working in a grocery store" as indentured servitude. You know, not everyone has to be a software engineer or full-stack whatever. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working in a grocery store, it's a fine way to make a living!
The problem is that they don’t make a living. People who work in grocery stores aren’t working there because they want to, but usually just because it’s their only option. If they quit their jobs they would be homeless by the end of the month. Do you understand what their living conditions are like? It’s really sad and it makes me uncomfortable to talk to them. Minimum wage workers in high cost of living cities are just slavery as a service.
I have done plenty of jobs that are shit pay in the same tier of manual labour (stockist, hospitality) and have never met anyone in that field who didn't want to do somethinge else if possible.
In the Nordic countries, those manual labor jobs are union jobs. Sure, pay is lower than other jobs, but thanks to collective bargaining and the union having your back in case of unforeseen overtime, it isn't "shit pay" like it might be in, say, the United States. I worked some of those jobs when I was in uni, and many of my coworkers were older people who had decided to stay for the long haul, because it does feel like a stable, acceptable working environment.
It seems like every year we are loosing more union jobs than ever.
Safeway has always been a hated place to work, but it used to pay their employees a decent salary with benefits.
Now—they have a weird semi union status. They load up the stores with desperate people, and still manage to make them maybe the most angry workers I have seen. I overheard one manager tell an employee yesterday to drive to a store two hours away, and be there by 7:00 am! The employee just looked crushed. That kind of crap didn’t happen in union shops.
I guess the future will be self checkouts, security cams everywhere, and facial recognition to track.
Don't underestimate the satisfaction of a job where you don't have to prostitute your brain and where you can send a smile to people a couple of times a day.
worked in restaurants for years before moving to software engineering. despite being 'good' at coding, it screws me up a bit that I was a lot happier in many ways while working at a restaurant. i felt I had a lot more brain bandwidth for my personal activities outside of work, too
Where I'm at, the vast majority of employees working "grunt" positions in supermarkets are high schoolers along with some elderly and disabled folks. Given those demographics, I strongly suspect most of them are not working there to make a living.
I never said anybody was working for fun. The disabled people to which I am referring are certainly dependent on others for their care. The livelihoods of most people in the demographics I mentioned are not dependent on a part-time job like that.
I believe Sweden has pretty good policing, and the Swedes are just about as honest as you could ever expect a nation to be, but if this was in "rural" Denmark and someone decided to raid the store, there would be very little stopping them. Police is in many cases at least 30 minutes away, if not more, and have no resources to investigate the theft of 10L of milk.
In many cases the staff is a store is just as much present to scare of any one wanting to steal. Even if we've seen gangs just walk out with massive amounts of goods, and the staff understandably choosing to not confront them.
This was true 30 years ago. Today the police is all but abolished, especially in rural areas. I wouldn't be surprised if there were police regions the size of Denmark with a single police car.
My experience is directly opposite yours, funnily enough. I spend almost all my summers in Denmark and find people amazingly honest and friendly.
I think people are just people, wherever you go - neither more nor less honest than anywhere else (given the opportunity).
Even in Stockholm the 'local' police branches often close over the summer.
I've only needed to dial the emergency number twice (luckily) and both times I was placed in a queue. Another time when kids were smashing bikes on my street in central Stockholm on a warm summer evening, the police simply said there was no-one available to send.
I'm not sure that'd be a solid strategy. You have to scan your ID to get into the store. So just to raid for a 10L of milk, you'd have to then break and enter, not just steal the milk. The store is probably riddled with cameras and, with the low population density, there's not a great chance you can get away with breaking and entering, much less stealing.
As most grocery stores aren't open 24 hours there is plenty of opportunity for people to break into grocery stores with no one in them and steal but that isn't a common enough issue to worry about.
>Police is in many cases at least 30 minutes away, if not more, and have no resources to investigate the theft of 10L of milk.
Just for reference [0], NYC police's response times for "serious" and "non-critical" 911 calls are close to or over 10 minutes. Responses to "alarms" (which I assume would be things like B&E to a shop after hours) is over 30 minutes.
People in rural towns are also as honest as they come, but even so I'd expect trouble by youngsters. But maybe the cameras are enough of a deterrent.
I could also see a solution where you need to identify yourself in order to be let in through the doors. If you have been spotted letting someone else in who proceeds to steal or vandalize, that person could be held accountable.
I was thinking that, something like what Amazon has done, where you need to ID with the app on your phone, but with no security, you can just jump whatever is blocking your entry.
The stores can't be to secure, people need to be able to exit safely.
There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future.
Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers. In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing.
Although locating stuff _could_ be solved by looking it up with an app, I would rather pay the markup. And I'm quite certain that a lot of other people will, because as opposed to with a lot of other goods, you're often low on time when shopping for groceries. I guess the urgency of shopping is why online grocery shopping hasn't taken off as much as even I would have predicted a few years ago.
>wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers.
What stores are you going to now where this is the case, every time I buy some food I need to know exactly what I want. I wouldn't expect some 19-year-old clerk to be a culinary expert either.
the cheese counter staff at whole foods are usually pretty knowledgeable (more so than me anyway).
but even at a lower end store, the people that work there aren't idiots. they might not be able to tell you what cheese would go well with a california syrah, but they can probably recommend a good blend for homemade mac and cheese.
You'd be surprised how useful local butchers are at big chains. They really know their stuff and have been able to sort out cuts for me, even are happy to slice up some cheap big beef cuts into stir fry, they can make special orders of sausage, etc.
Same goes for the bakery, I stand by my local ACME bakery being the easiest and very tasty birthday cake around, even above mom and pop shops.
oh for sure. I'm probably gonna go to an independent butcher if I want a nice ny strip, but otherwise I'm going to the local chain and asking the butcher what cut they recommend for the recipe I'm making.
> There will be a market for both automated and manned grocery stores in the future.
I don't think there will be. In countries like the Nordic countries with very high costs of labor, specialty physical retail locations of all sorts have been closing left and right, with people now ordering those things online. Certainly some consumers enjoy shopping in a shops with social interaction, but not enough to keep those shops solvent in the long haul.
As I said, many people are pressed for time when they shop for groceries. If physical staff could help reduce the stress of shopping, I still see a market for physical stores the next 20 years (longer than that is anybody’s guess).
As long as it's not produce. Everytime I try a shopping or delivery service a good chunk of the produce is trash. Bruised, under ripe, over ripe. Yes I am picky.
You still have to make an order for everything you need and then go to the store to collect it. So the only time you really save here is the difference between collecting stuff from the physical shelves and the online counterpart.
Cant imagine that being more than a couple of minutes of saved time for me.
I like your sentiment but you are here on HN so assuming you are somewhere with food and an internet connection. Life is good. I see people around me begging on Facebook from the public library internet connection for cans to return so they can eat. They won’t care for one second about a human in the store they only care about getting the cheapest food they can. These automated stores I can really see being a hit especially if they can cut the costs of a regular store even by a small percentage.
>I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers
Why not? Also, it's not necessarily a computer recommending anything. The decision of which cracker to pair with which cheese was already made by human experts employed by vendor, the computer just scales the suggestion of pairing to thousands or millions of people.
There can be one person making recommendations remotely for 10 stores. That same person can be sitting in front of an interactive map which allows them to look up the location of items and since there is a a camera in the store they will know where you are in relation to the item to direct you.
This seems like a strange counterfactual to insist on when the article is empirical evidence that, in this case, there wasn't a market for both kinds of stores and that people weren't willing to pay the markup.
Given the quality and scope of most state of the art chat bots and personal assistants I can only imagine this being an immensely frustrating experience.
> Until we have developed artificial general intelligence, I wouldn't trust a computer to recommend a cheese to with a certain kind of crackers.
Supermarket employees, if you can find one around, have no clue about this and can indeed at most tell you the location of a type of item.
> In stores with a reasonably wide selection of goods, I usually have to ask for the location of at least one thing.
Which is easily doable through an app on your phone or touchscreen in store.
The reality is that as soon as the technology is there, and we seem to be very close, many supermarkets' staff will become redundant across the board.
Having real people providing real service will still be a thing, I think, but more of a luxury experience. To take a British example: There won't be many staff left at Tesco but there will still be at Harrod's.
Then you're excluded, simple as that. We're rapidly approching the point where you're:
a) Expected to have, engage with and be active on a smartphone
b) Be accessible via the mobile network (have an active phone number that can get SMS)
c) Be "always online", frequently checking the bank in 'real time' to verify transactions, account balance etc
d) Have battery life on your device. It's no good if you have just 5% and your phone turns off, your smartphone to person uptime needs to be very very good (your phone needs to be online quite often to be a very good citizen!).
e) Be verifiable to you. The make, model and other information needs to be tied to you as a person. The SIM card needs to belong to you and you need to be traceable and trackable via your smartphone at all times, 24/7.
If you do not meet those requirements you WILL be locked out of some functions in society. This is already the case today and will be the case in the future. No smartphone? No digital cash? Not for you.
Our phones are becoming and will eventually be a part of "us", they will be a digital heartbeat and will need to output a "pulse", if your pulse stops, so will your societal inclusion (perhaps you can't go to a place without scanning a QR code, for example).
The levels of exclusion will vary depending on criteria, for example, Covid passports will likely use an "app" as most things do otherwise you'll be denied access.
Eventually, it'll be a law to ensure your digital pulse is active and working 24/7, every citizen will be issued a digital ID and a personal device that will need to be kept on your person at all times, it'll talk to various networks (telephony, GPS etc), and will act like a "tag". We're not there yet but the pathway to reach that point has been made obvious during the covid pandemic. "Health passports" are the next step, various smartwatches that record health data (Apple, Fitbit) are getting into that territory. Eventually you as a human will be constantly monitored and uploaded to a server 24/7
Not particularly, if that just means you're beholden to those companies instead.
My issue is not that you need to be using Android in general for example (base Android is FOSS, so the user can in principle have full control over their device), but that often for these things you need to be using Android with Google services, with all the tracking and such that entails.
While I agree this level of possible exclusion isn't great, what is the alternative?
In Germany for example, that had resisted a lot of technological progress (online credit cards, Google Street View, etc.), I had to cancel my internet subscription by fax in 2015... It was hard enough to get a fax service, and then send personal details, etc. to prove my identity.
I'd rather have a streamlined experience with apps and technology than have to deal with loads of bureaucracy.
Just want to point out that the same people who say "sorry if you don't have a phone you can't shop" are probably the same who claim requiring ID to vote is "voter disenfranchisement" and that disabled people should have special exceptions made for them.
The claim "sorry you don't have a smart phone you can't buy food / clothes" has implications for people (children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor). Just replace "smartphone" with "stairs" (if you can't climb stairs sorry no food / clothes for you). Hey if its a problem, just order online, or get a friend to do it, why should we have to cater to people who aren't normal?
Combine that with a culture where your phone can be disabled for many reasons (failure to pay, socially unacceptable views, employer owned) and you're creating a rather distopian picture.
I'm all for a more streamlined version for people who are able, and that may well be the vast majority, but it makes sense to make provisions for those who aren't and not to say "sorry history has moved forward, if you don't have a car you can't have a job or go shopping." (as another example)
Covid has already accelerated a cashless society, whereby you are incentivized to have a digital means of paying; GPay, Apple pay, Contactless card (and payment limits have increased as a result). You also have various testing and tracing schemes, perhaps using QR codes to scan as you enter a place, an "app" to monitor closeness to people who might have Covid.
Those who cannot, do not or will not have a smartphone will become marginalized and excluded from society. The expectation and norm will be to obtain and fully use your digital extension (and there are many smartphones that are very cheap).
Eventually, smartphoneless people will become a percentile point of the population that are easily discarded and hidden, and from my perspective that's becoming more and more obvious as time goes on.
To me this is simply an observation, not a commentary as to whether it's good, bad, but it seems this is the direction society is accepting since I don't see any movements against smartphones or this type of future.
> Just want to point out that the same people who say "sorry if you don't have a phone you can't shop" are probably the same who claim requiring ID to vote is "voter disenfranchisement" and that disabled people should have special exceptions made for them.
What makes you think that those are the same people? At first blush it seems like people in favour of easier access to vote and easier access for the disabled would be the same people that advocate for more inclusive access to shops.
> why should we have to cater to people who aren't normal?
Because (in the USA) the ADA exists, and has been shown to help even non disabled people. Elevators were mandated on multi floor buildings because of wheelchairs, but they have a benefit of also being available for non disabled people who have their hands full of groceries.
Also, what is “normal” to you won’t be the same as someone else. Is a wheelchair bound person normal? A highly autistic person? What about high functioning autism? If you’re going to define “normal”, you’d be drawing a line somewhere where you can’t please everyone.
I think you may have read a specific bit of that posters sentence and taken it as a direct attack and not the fact that you are 100% in agreement with them.
They are saying that with the way society is moving forward, if you do not own a smartphone you are not considered "normal". We have the ADA in the USA for this reason, so that all aspects of society are accessible.
There is nothing currently that prevents you being excluded if you do not have a smartphone and are therefore not considered "normal".
For example, "we" didn't collectively decide one day we absolutely need to have credit cards. But if you don't have one now, there are a ton of things you can't really do.
If a area that has not had a shop for a decade can now have 80 or 90% of the population served with this method, then I believe not looking for the mythical 100% coverage is a perfectly good thing to do.
Then you've selected yourself out as not the target audience. There are plenty of shoppes that I don't patronize as I'm not the target audience. This is no different.
Many grocery stores nowadays have hand scanners in addition to a smartphone app (they often had the hand scanners before a good app), so that + a payment point = problem solved.
Exactly. My local supermarket in the UK has this, including handsets for people not using the mobile app. Here's a decent overview of how it all works:
Sorry to disappoint aboringusername, but this is not a ploy to starve us all into carrying surveillance devices. Still, the tinfoil hat at least looks fetching.
From a business point of view you obvisously don't need to be accessible to 100% of potential customers to be viable. People without smartphones are probably less <0.5% of the population.
Shops without access ramps lose probably more customers, and yet there are plenty of them.
Yesterday on Spanish local tv show they showed how in a small rural town without banks / ATM's, a pharmacy dubbed as a bank / cash retrieval service in a rural town...
In another town the banks shared an office and each day of the week was for one of the banks to recieve customers lol. WeBank
Could have the same but backwards, give cash, recieve e-coupon, scan e-coupon in store.
The first example is very common in El Salvador too.
The largest store in every town is usually a "financial correspondent" of one or more banks.
The services available are: Remmitance sending/receiving, deposit and withdrawal using bank card, credit card payments, service payments (Eelctricity, Phone, University), service withdrawal, (Drive sharing driver withdrawals), among others.
The tricky part for banks and businesses is offering services with similar deposit/withdrawal amounts so cash is always available without having to organize cash delivery to/from the bank correspondent.
In Netherlands we used to have ATMs in loads of places. Stores had semi-moveable ones. That stopped due to criminals blowing regular ATMs up. The explosives sometimes took out entire walls and made the entire building unsafe. Most stores removed those semi-moveable ATMs. Similarly, loads of regular ATMs were removed, especially ATMs close to a house.
As Netherlands tried to do something about it the criminals started to attack the ATMs in Germany more. The criminals also often stole really quick cars, so Dutch police recently and finally have a few quick cars again. Before the quick chase cars the criminals often just outran the police. Oh, Dutch police take safety into account (try to minimize the risk for others).
I'm reminded of a redditor commenting how he visited a music festival in Sweden as a foreigner, and how annoying it was for him, because all the food stands were expecting the Swedish payment system. And he couldn't even ask other visitors to buy stuff for him and take his cash, because the Swedes were very cash-averse.
Most people nowadays carry very little (if any) cash. However, I really doubt it would be a problem to find someone to buy food for you if you give them cash.
Except for supermarkets, I don't expect any stores to actually accept cash anymore.
This have lead to a growing bag of small change that is not leaving my home, so I can understand people not wanting cash :)
You don't need to be a Swede to get bankid, but you do need a national registration number which you can apply for if you intend to live in Sweden for something like a year or more.
In other words, if you live in Sweden you'll likely have bankid. As a tourist or seasonal worker, not so much.
Then you're going to have an extremely difficult time in Sweden. The same system is used for online banking, paying you taxes, verifying online purchases, accessing online pharmacies and medical systems, and using online doctors. I'm sure there's a dozen more services that I'm forgetting that use BankID.
There's plenty of older-generation people without a smart phone in the Nordics. It doesn't matter though, since the smart-phone carrying majority will be enough to keep a store running in most places.
Thankfully the Swedes are not as luddites as the Germans and adopt more easily solutions that make their lives easier
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if these stores were cashless, in several Scandinavian countries shop attendants handling change manually are already on their way out
> Thankfully the Swedes are not as luddites as the Germans and adopt more easily solutions that make their lives easier
Germans are not luddites, they are careful with privacy. They have more than one reason to be careful with it [0, 1]. There's a tradeoff between "personal convenience" and "civil liberties" like privacy.
> Germans are not luddites, they are careful with privacy.
Being scared of Google street view and continuing to use fax machines are not wise worries about privacy, sorry
Yes I know about the historical reasons they're "worried" about privacy, but it's a misplaced worry because they don't address their real privacy shortcomings, like requiring registration of people (+ sensitive privacy info) who live in a city, using last names (and not apartment numbers) in mailboxes, limited anonymous internet access (to please the copyright lobby, etc) and their lax internet security capabilities (like the Berlin courts who were still on Windows 95)
So again, if they really worry about privacy they're addressing it through the wrong angle.
And this is a 100% a good thing the Swedish central bank has floated the idea of enforcing -ve interest on accounts in the past.
This drive to a cashless system has downsides for the more vulnerable, poor and elderly - it also pushes extra risks onto the customer (which is why I don't do online Banking the UK)
> So this is basically run on a trust basis, right?
No, from the OP:
> works in conjunction with BankID, a secure national identification app operated by Sweden's banks
You are identified, so it should be easy to see on camera who steals and then they can send the cops on you.
My worry is more about tourists[1]. As someone who has travelled extensively in rural Europe I would not appreciate a growing network of stores that requires country-specific id.
[1] Technologically disadvantaged people are already mentioned in the article.
Spot on. I remember trying to get petrol in Belgium at night sometime in the late 90s. The country had its own smart debit card programme (very leading edge) and garages there had unattended pumps that would accept these cards to cater for out-of-hours customers. But, being a UK tourist without a local payment card, I was stuffed. Stopped at every garage along the way, getting increasingly concerned, before coasting in on fumes to one that was actually open all night and would accept my Visa or MC.
I've had that last summer driving through Germany - stopped to charge my car, only to discover that all charging stations at that particular Auobahn station will only accept a German-issued[0] debit or credit cards. As a tourist....tough luck I guess?
[0]I knew it because of course you had to use an app to start charging, and the app had a pre-filled and unchangable country set to Germany for billing details.
I had that problem with rail tickets in Germany, too... stations with machines that would only accept the local kind of bank card, not my Visa card.
Weirdly, at the main station in Bochum (for example), there were some machines that would accept a Visa card - but even the staff in the in-person ticket office seemed to be completely ignorant of this. (And no, they wouldn't accept my card there, either. But eventually - no thanks to DB's staff - I found a machine I could use.)
I've run into a similar problem in Sweden with parking. Many places have app-controlled parking, I have the biggest apps, but some parking places have other solutions. One place had removed the on-site machines that took card payments, and only had a phone number. I called the number from my Swedish phone number, entered my Swedish personal ID number, and then the automated service informed me that they couldn't process me because I wasn't a Swedish resident... So there was no way for me to pay for my parking.
Non-swedes would be even more shit out of luck than I was, they wouldn't even be able to navigate the phone service. So weird.
This happened to me driving from Germany to the Netherlands on a Sunday. We needed petrol but could not stop in Belgium because all of the stations were closed and the machines only accepted a Belgian bank card. Luckily we were close enough to Luxembourg to get petrol there. This was around 2004/05. I wonder if it's still this way now
Thats a really good point regarding EU citizens having access to this service.
Swedish services are thoroughly tied to the bankid/personnal number. There is a EU regulation [1] somewhat related to this that prevent sellers from discriminating the availability of goods based on your place of residence.
I wonder if this regulation applies to these shops.
A couple of paragraphs are particularly interesting, #18 and #19:
(18) [...] traders should not, through the use of technological measures or otherwise, prevent customers from having full and equal access to online interfaces, including in the form of mobile applications, based on their nationality, place of residence or place of establishment. [...]
(19) In order to ensure the equal treatment of customers and to avoid discrimination, as required by this Regulation, traders should not design their online interface, or apply technological means, in a way that would, in practice, not allow customers from other Member States to easily complete their orders.
I'm pretty sure the regulation is violated all the time everywhere, i.e. vending machines that require some local electronic card (e.g. to prove your age for sigarettes).
Which EU countries have cigarette vending machines? I've never seen such a thing, in the countries I shop they're behind a cashier. Sometimes even hidden so that if you don't know what to ask for you're not getting it.
In Germany, cigarette vending machines were incredibly common until around 15 years ago, but I haven't seen one in ages. Between stricter age verification requirements, a decline in smoking in general, and vandalism towards those machines, the profit margin was probably stretched too slim to continue maintaining these machines.
I kinda see this as the next step after self checkout - conventional wisdom was that there would be too much theft and I think there is slightly more (intentional or accidental) but it is more than offset by the fact that you can pay just one employee and run 8 checkout lines
My grocery store has a self-scan and checkout that works on trust basis with random audits. Some stores had to get rid of it because of stealing, but thankfully mine has kept it. I find it very fast and don't mind the occasional audits at all. Small price to pay, and still faster than if I had stayed in line.
The value the self-scan systems have for the shop owners is not in automation but the fact the work is reported on customer, with of course no price reduction. That should be forbidden. I boycott those systems and wait for the human clerk to do his job, this way a little of the money made by the shop is redistributed.
No price reduction as compared to what? Maybe all the prices would be 0.5% higher if all the checkout was human-only? At the end of the day, the customer is paying for most everything in the shop. (They're the one bringing the money into the system. There may be a small amount of payment for placement or other advertising, or financing via invoices, but the vast majority of money coming into the shop is coming from customers.)
I can't see a reason why self-checkouts should be forbidden. If people don't like them, don't use them. Why should people who do like them be forbidden from shopping in a way that they prefer?
It should be forbidden because it makes people work illegally (because of a lack of contract and pay). In France a restaurant was fined by the work inspection because they asked their customers to give plates back. Using the same logic and existing laws, a shop shouldn’t be allowed to make its customers work for it.
For me it depends. If I have a shopping cart full, including typically, a bunch of produce, I'll go to a cashier. If I've got a half dozen bar coded items to scan, I'll probably just do self-checkout.
Some shops have scan yourself where you scan things with your phone when putting them in your basket, even produce then have a barcode, maybe not on the item but then at a sign at their location.
Mine you get a little "zapper" to scan the bar codes with. I select, scan, and bag into my cart. When I get to checkout everything is bagged, so I save that time as well.
The only "pain" is having to look up the produce and weigh it, but with a little practice I got to be pretty fast at that too.
I've never seen that in the US and produce isn't barcoded unless it's shrink-wrapped--which it isn't in most stores. And I'm not sure that seems any easier than a normal self-checkout in any case.
There are scales and look-up tables for the produce out in the produce area (the look-up tables are also programmed into the scales but the UI is slow and tedious).
So you gather your, say broccoli, look up the PLU code (it also might be on a sticker affixed to the item), put it on the scale, enter the code, and the scale prints out your bar code that you scan.
And you have to scan your bank card (which apparently in Sweden is a secondary ID card) to enter. I wonder if they do an extra verification to make sure you just didn't steal someone's card, maybe with a PIN?
Hah, I guess for the vandals, being blacklisted by the network would be a big hassle...
The bank id is not a physical card. Rather, it's an app that provides 2FA and which is backed by the major Swedish banks. It is the de facto standard for electronic identification in Sweden. Originally, it was mostly a desktop application that helped you log on to your internet bank, but it has increasingly become a way to log onto web sites - anything from e-commerce to government agencies - while proving your identity.
I wonder what will the non-banked people do in the future? Their life is in many cases miserable enough as it is, not being able to purchase basic groceries because you don't have a credit/debit card is next-level capitalist dystopia.
A lot of Sweden is already like this. They're a super cashless society currently. I have only lived in Stockholm, but a large number of places will not accept cash in any form. This is done for security and convenience reasons, and most Swedes from what I have seen seem to prefer and like this method. It definitely has implications of course... but none that seem to be bothering the masses.
In some countries, and I wouldn't be surprised if Sweden is one of them, it's a requirement that you be allowed to have a bank account. You can't be refused.
That’s very good to hear, from where I’m from (Eastern Europe) a bank account is very heavily linked to a current physical address (as in, you must have a physical address officially attached to your name which in itself is a quite cumbersome process) and oftentimes with an additional proof (like an utilities bill on your name attached to that address). That makes getting a bank account a little difficult for many people.
I haven't used the stores themselves but they reference using BankId which is an national identification app on your phone you link to your bank account that also requires a pin code.
Stealing is still a crime, so there is no need to have direct access to your account. At the very least you would owe the store for what you stole, just like if you're late on an electricity bill. You essentially can't escape that without emigrating.
I want to add a note to people who aren't familiar - Sweden has a government debt collector[0]. Unlike the US where I'l told you can mostly dodge private debts and it just becomes a massive nuisance and credit nightmare, in Sweden the government will actually garnish your salary and repossess your stuff for private debts.
> Sweden the government will actually garnish your salary and repossess your stuff for private debts.*
It's called "attachment of earnings" in the UK there is no special agency for that, it's just a court order sent to the debtor employer.
This also exists in most US states, I believe it's often called "wage garnishment" there.
Repossession or seizure of property also exists in the US and the UK (and indeed most countries). Here in the UK there's even a TV show about that, with the cool name of "The Sheriffs are coming"...
I remember visiting a fully automated store already in the 90's in Tromsø, Norway. It was like an extended vendoring machine. It was quite fun watching the robot hand go up and down based on your order. I believe such stores were already common in Japan at the time. The shop didn't make it, though, and was discontinued after a year or two.
Today automated checkouts are popping up in more and more shops in Norway, though they're not present in all stores yet. You simply do your shopping as normal, but instead of having a shop clerk beep them for you, you have to do it yourself. It's pretty straightforward, and no app is needed. Sometimes there will be a guard overseeing the terminals, but mostly you're left to your own devices. Otherwise there's usually a normal teller on hand for questions or for products that don't scan. Or if you simply want to pay with legal tender, which Norwegian shops are still obliged to accept per law.
In the Coop stores (at least Coop Obs) you can use both the coop app and one of the handheld scanners to scan products while you pick them. Then you scan the device or your app in the checkout to pay.
At least until a few years ago there were some unlocked open stores in rural Finland, where you just took what you needed and left the cash. The owner just turned up once a day or so to restock and take the money.
They may all be gone now, it doesn't take much to destroy that level of local trust.
Advocates of much higher minimum wages should understand that the eventual consequence will be automating many jobs out of existence, not just people doing the same jobs but for more pay.
> Advocates of much higher minimum wages should understand that the eventual consequence will be automating many jobs out of existence
That's been proven not to be the correlated in various studies. Similarly, there's a huge discussion regarding minimum wage in the US, while actually minimum wage adjusted for inflation went down significantly over the last few decades.
Automation happens in any case, especially with technology continuously getting cheaper.
Anecdotal: In e.g. Netherlands the minimum wage is lower if you're 15 until 21. Different amount until you're 21 or so. As a result supermarkets often fire anyone over 18 while pretending it isn't about the age. The minimum wage is already extremely low for 15-18, raising it would encourage more people to work in supermarkets instead of the current situation. Further, supermarkets are fully focussing on self-checkout. Despite the super low minimum wages.
A lot of retail has a trade off between small convenient stores and bing inconvenient ones. One is convenient. The other is better stocked, better priced, etc.
Software is eating the inconvenient stores. Better stocked, Better priced. Hard to beat. Maybe robots eat convenient stores.
Depending on how these scale and what price economics are like, this might work well.
"There are 24-hour surveillance cameras too, which alert the store's manager Domenica Gerlach if there's a break-in or a stock spillage.
She looks after four stores in the region, usually visiting once a week to clean, stack the shelves and put together click-and-collect orders made online. Lifvs uses artificial intelligence to work out what stock to order for each store, based on the data it collects about locals' shopping habits"
You can use statistics to determine what can of stock you should favor (e.g. winter clothes vs summer clothes) and the quantity (more Christmas food in December less after). If you have enough data from previous years or a good heuristics, you can start this one easily. Even a plain old markov chains could help.
I'm stunned that week after week, I'll come across the same shelf, with one variant of a thing sold out by midweek, and the unpopular variant next to it virtually untouched, as always. The amount of statistics or programming required to prevent this, and balance the stock to what the market shows that it wants, is fairly trivial, and yet my local supermarket has failed to do so for several decades now.
I had a good chuckle in March of last year when I realized the shelves had plenty of "all natural, non-toxic cleaner" sort of products during the run on Clorox wipes and bleach.
The on hand inventory is most likely wrong in the system, so it probably thinks there are phantom units available. This happens a lot with products that could have been lost, stolen or expired and the system was not updated.
I'm waiting on Automats to come back, esp. in a complex firm. Basically a bunch of little windows with stuff. Half expected the article to be about that.
This change is being sped up by the fact employees don't actually deter anything anymore. If there is shoplifting they just call the police. In fact, intervening will usually get them in trouble.
They have Amazon stores in the US. There's one I know of in downtown Chicago. I don't know if it did particularly well but it wasn't robbed bare every day.
- warehouses and public dispensaries are content-address-based networking for the physical world.
- I don't really care about purchases being deanonymized because money itself a public good.
- I do care about the private sector having the data, because they will surely do terrible things with it.
Back to the networking analogy, the post is classic local-address-based networking for the physical realm. Just as we have a state-run post service utility, we should have a state-run warehouse-and-store utility.
Even all you free market types: the point is of the free market is that the transacting agents are independent, not that the market itself is. Running the marketplace and goods distribution utility as a public good is perfect fine "market socialism".
The only thing to be mindful of is that there is a standard and fair procedure for new sellers to have their goods stocked and distributed to bootstrap the demand.
So how will the people who would have worked in a shop like this, afford to shop for food? In Sweden this probably isn’t as big of an issue, but not every country is as socially conscious.
Broken window fallacy argument - we can’t artificially keep doing demonstrably less efficient things for the sake of jobs, it has never worked and never will. If it becomes a problem then we have to deal with it by finding new avenues to employ people or not need employment to live a life.
Yep, refrigerators also wreaked havoc on the "blocks of ice" delivery industry, but trying to prevent that change would have been as useless as trying to hold back the tide with your arms. The effort should be put into ensuring everyone can have decent lives in a world improved by increased efficiency, not holding back progress.
> we can’t artificially keep doing demonstrably less efficient things
Well then it's a good thing adamcstephens didn't suggest that, is it not?
> If it becomes a problem then we have to deal with it by finding new avenues
That's the correct approach, but so far the strategy has been a combination of denial (which I hear an echo of in the word "if") and inaction. Protectionism is a dead end, but so are denial and inaction. It's going to get worse before it gets better.
You're just paying the price of rest of the world catching up. Privilege of getting out of World War 2 as the pretty much only major unaffected economy could not be sustained for a century, ya know?
Straw man argument - I didn’t say we have to pay people to do this, but today you have to be paid to eat. I’m all for eliminating the requirement for work to live.
Efficiency is the reason we can have this conversation instead of standing out in a field, manually trying to coax a living out of the unforgiving soil every day. Efficiency isn't the goal, but it's one of the best tools we have for improving what a human life can be - like for example giving us enough leisure time to be able to read, have hobbies, do art or spend more time with loved ones.
>like for example giving us enough leisure time to be able to read, have hobbies, do art or spend more time with loved ones.
You say that like it is a universally accepted truth, yet the American worker allegedly takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant[0]. Going even further back, prior to agriculture we likely had even more "free" time[1].
Efficiency is a goal is nice, but the modern work day does not strive for efficiency.
Sure, the American ass-in-seat mentally is not efficient. The American for-profit healthcare system is not efficient. And the American way of leaving its poorer citizens to fend for themselves instead of investing in them is not efficient. That's not an indictment of America's belief in efficiency, that's an indictment of its blind belief in the market as the best source of all solutions.
There's nothing wrong with efficiency and it provides a lot of benefits, as you say. But the efficiency argument is also used to knock out local businesses in favor of big box stores and so on. Everybody likes efficiency but we should be wary of using that as the only way to measure outcomes.
I agree that a singular focus on efficiency without regard for unintended side effects or negative externalities is crazy too. "Sustainability" should be right up there with efficiency as a main tool - doing something efficiently in an unsustainable way (societally, economically or ecologically) will by definition not be efficient in the long term anyway - but our society is often organized in a way where those who benefit from short term profits are not the same as those who must bear the long term costs, so they don't balance out like ideally they should. So the effort should be put into aligning those incentives, make it unprofitable to chase short-term profits in ways that harm society - not to fight efficiency as a concept.
The answer seems to be that these stores wouldn't have existed in the first place. For now, at least, they're not taking jobs away.
> The store is part of the Lifvs chain, a Stockholm-based start-up that launched in 2018 with the goal of returning stores to remote rural locations where shops had closed down because they'd struggled to stay profitable.
Except these aren’t the only stores like this, and they aren’t and won’t stay in only remote locations. Automation and self service will continue to grow, and collectively we need to figure out how to care for our fellow humans that will lose out due to the evolution.
The whole history of human civilization is one kind of labor replacing another, with no shortage of people wondering about how the new being a destructive force doesn’t make it a social evil.
The people who would have worked at this kind of shop will find other jobs created or otherwise enabled by the lowered costs of automation.
The whole of the industrial and now computer revolution has been the degradation of human existence in the name of profit and progress. Elimination of employment that is a requirement for sustenance and a non-miserable life is common.
Automation doesn’t create jobs, it shifts them, generally towards less well paid options. Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers?
> Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers
That’s a political problem. Obvious solution is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those that don’t. Make higher education free, pay people to learn, or to do research, universal basic income, etc.
Agreed these are policy problems, but as creators of technology we're responsible for the outcomes as well. Ignoring the problems in the name of progress, as others replying to my thread seem want to do, is unethical and immoral.
I’m on board with your suggestion. Let’s implement it. Alongside the progress in automation, not as an afterthought.
How many people would have worked in a small grocery store for a town of 1000? I'm no expert, but I know there's small corner shops that have just one person running them with maybe another one or two people helping them. Full rotation staff, maybe 10? That's 1% of the local workforce.
I mean what do the 1000 people in the town do for a living to buy food?
Let’s extrapolate then. Assume these stores spread to an entire country, since they’re not just located in rural areas. We'll also stick with 1% of the population losing jobs. In the US that’s over 3 million people. What should those people do instead?
You’re comparing two labor intensive efforts. This is an article about a store that has no in-store employees. What jobs does such a store have to offer as a replacement?
It’s not always about what is necessary because customer preferences can change, too. The automated ordering on machines in fast food restaurants or self-checkout in supermarkets may have been introcued to save businesses money and reinforced to limit interactions under COVID, but some people just prefer not to have that human interaction when it’s not absolutely required. As more people get used to and come to prefer managing things like that for themselves, the fact that it isn’t necessary will be overcome by the fact that people like it.
Yeah! I have a very soft voice. I’ve practiced to make it bigger, but even my loudest voice is not terribly loud. Ordering things behind the counter can be tough for me especially if there’s background noise of people chattering or machines whirring like in a coffee shop. Kind of an odd situation, and I’ve been able to get through life fine without self order kiosks, but I’m glad when they’re there because I just feel like I’m easier to deal with as a customer.
If it's necessary during COVID times, it could still be beneficial during non COVID times. Even if COVID goes away, there are plenty of other viruses lurking around that kill lots of people each year.
Is your point that there should never be a job displacing technology or that retail workers are a special class that should be protected from automation?
My point is that our fellow citizens deserve dignity of work and an ability to feed themselves. This is but one example of automation displacing workers, but there are plenty of other examples that also include non automation related job eliminations.
So you're arguing the first one, never implement technology to save labor because people deserve the dignity of work. How far should we take this? Should we burn the tractors? We could create lots of new jobs for agricultural laborers. Or perhaps the government, instead of handing out welfare, could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again.
As above, you use a straw man argument. I said nothing of the sort, and your jumping to that conclusion is rude.
You’re welcome to ignore the questions I raise, but hungry people won’t give a shit about your philosophy when they upend the systems that have abandoned them.
Swedish residents have a personal identity number issued at birth or immigration. Format: YYYYMMDD-NNNN. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...
BankID is a service run by the Swedish banks that interfaces with the banks, individuals and third parties (like this chain of unmanned stores).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
The banks know the identities (personal identify number) of their customers via their physical offices. BankID offers an app to individuals and an online API to paying/approved third-party services. Third-party services are able to offer BankID authentication in websites and apps. In the end the third party receives an authenticated personal identity number.
There is growing awareness that this service should not be run by private companies/banks.