Omega Point

Adventures in self-checkout UI

Part of being me is that basi­cally every pos­si­ble task I decide to under­take in my day-to-day life is com­pletely unac­counted for by city plan­ners, archi­tects, design­ers, doc­tors, soft­ware engi­neers, and so on. Some­times, this is sim­ply due to the fact that I am tall^[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted in the hall next to my desk at work, or the fact that every­thing from door­knobs to toi­lets are gen­er­ally too low for me to com­fort­ably operate.

Other times, it’s due to my trade­mark life planning.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing scenario:

I stand in line for the self-checkout sta­tion at the Real Cana­dian Super­store in Metro­town^[2], hold­ing a $4 bag of chips and noth­ing else. Super­store shop­pers will note that this bag is going to end up weigh­ing some­where in the neigh­bour­hood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not aller­gic to pota­toes. So it’s healthy.

Upon actu­ally step­ping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the num­ber of bags desired. Super­store shop­pers will recall that part of their no-frills pol­icy, they have a suck­ass web­site and charge 3 cents per plas­tic bag.

I select zero bags, pleased to see that what­ever cir­cu­la­tory prob­lem that pre­vents me from using touch­screen kiosks has tem­porar­ily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.

“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.

Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling plat­form, trig­ger­ing the weight sen­sor which tells the com­puter that an item has been added to… noth­ing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to com­plete the sale. I briefly spec­u­late about the num­ber of peo­ple who bring their own reusuable bags to Super­store com­pared to the num­ber of peo­ple who don’t want shop­ping bags because they’re buy­ing the biggest pos­si­ble bag of potato chips before decid­ing that it prob­a­bly isn’t worth attempt­ing to guess whether or not some­one is liv­ing entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to com­plete the trans­ac­tion. Besides, I can’t imme­di­ately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.

For­tu­nately, the “pay­ing” part goes well and only a mod­icum of grum­bling and frown­ing is required.

[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)

[2] I am not afraid of Metro­town crowds because I can just push every­one out of my way and they’re usu­ally too bewil­dered to do any­thing. Tragedy of the com­mons, bitches!