Comment on OpenAI sees human interaction as a competitor to ChatGPT's super assistant ambitions
Thorry84@feddit.nl 5 days agoNo, the hand scanners aren’t connected to the kiosks. They are at the entrance, you pick them up, scan all you want to buy. Then at checkout you place the scanner into a kiosk, it knows what you bought and you can checkout as usual. Every once in a while a store employee takes the scanners and puts them into the holders in the entrance. Depending on the size of the store there can be up to a hundred of these scanners available.
Other stores do the same, except your phone is the scanner with an app you can download. It works basically the same way. Most stores that offer the app also offer the hand scanners, which I prefer.
semperverus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
What I am telling you is that while that sounds like an amazing idea in theory, in practice almost no stores offer it. How can we do that if its not even an option? I have literally never seen it done anywhere here or in any of the other places I’ve traveled to (I’ve been to about 5 different states this year alone).
sykaster@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Brother I live in western Europe and of the 6 supermarkets in my smallish city, 4 offer the handscanner. It’s incredibly common here, and very convenient.
Thorry84@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Ah you are from the US? No then it probably won’t be available. The US is very slow to make changes in retail. You only recently got those digital price tags that update constantly, we’ve had those for 10 years or so. In Europe the hand scanner or app self scan thing is very common.
abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es 5 days ago
abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es 5 days ago
Thorry84@feddit.nl 5 days ago
Yup, that’s the one.
I think where I live it’s a company that offers the whole thing white label to supermarket and other shops. The systems are very similar across a bunch of different stores, but the branding is specific to the store. So their logo, their colors. Not just on all the UIs (both the scanner and the checkout), but also the physical hardware colors.
The hand scanners all run Android, the other day I got one that said Google Play Services had crashed. The scanner itself is probably made by Zebra and then customized by the company providing the scan and checkout solution.
It has become super common around here, to the point where I’m annoyed when it isn’t an option and I have to use the self-checkout where you need to scan at the checkout.
abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es 5 days ago