TL;DR

The self-checkout terminals by Toshiba at my local supermarket measure the weight of the items in the bagging area. After the purchase, while removing items (putting them in my backpack) the terminal repeats instructions over and over to remove items from the bagging area, even though the weight measurement should indicate that exactly that is already happening.

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To make this post a bit LinkedIn compatible (why?), let’s open with something business: The self-checkout cash registers at our local supermarket have ‘TOSHIBA’ written on them. I assume in some business to business negotiations that was agreed upon and effectively Toshiba is paying for having their brand name displayed on the terminal (or the supermarket would’ve needed to pay more to receive unbranded terminals). And I think this deal backfires because the UI has some flaws which make the product appear poorly designed or tested - so poorly that I’m writing a blog post about them. (Or maybe all publicity is good publicity, whatever, it’s not like I expect many readers).

Note: I did recently reach out to Toshiba (seemed fair let them know about the issue instead of only ranting online). But it’s a huge company, I just contacted the contact address on their international website and I have no hopes my message is going to reach the software team which is in charge of my issue (assuming there still is a code owner in the first place). And even if, the matter is not worth shipping a patch.

Self checkout in supermarkets varies in my experience drastically from country to country, so let’s get the operational parameters out of the way:

• The terminals measure the weight of the bagging area. (Which also means: there is a bagging area)
• You’re not allowed to use your own bags, backpacks, folding boxes in the bagging area. The software has a button for this (essentially tare the weight of the empty bag). This triggers the call-clerk mechanism, but the clerks then tell you that you can’t use that functionality. I didn’t investigate why (language barrier, and it’s not like I could argue my way around the whys. Even if the clerk shares my opinion or I convince them, it’s still their job to enforce store policy). I can imagine the feature doesn’t work properly (heard rumors that the software can’t handle bag weights of more than 100g) or it’s against shop policy (if you have an article in the supposedly empty bag at this point, you can smuggle it out).
• There are no purchasable single use (or multi use) bags at the terminals, though you can summon a clerk to hand you bags from the staffed cash registers. The clerk then ensures the bag is scanned (they cost probably a few cent).
• The self-checkout area is adjacent to the shopping trolley parking spots - where you can even lock the shopping trolleys for deposit with a 1 EUR coin. (Thieves might still steal items from the trolley while it’s parked, but that’s the customer’s problem and not the store’s problem.

This is by far not the best self-checkout UX I’ve ever had, but also not the worst.

After payment one can then fetch one’s shopping trolley from the trolley parking spots (actually, I usually leave my backpack there, for the remainder of the post, I’ll refer to trolleys, backpacks, and bags as bag) and pack all the paid items into the bag¹. Once all items have been removed from the bagging area, the terminal jumps back to the landing screen and asks the next customer to pick a language². This jump to the landing screen happens rather immediately³ after the last item is removed from the bagging area, therefore I assume the state transition is triggered by a “no weight in the bagging area” measurement. This means, the terminal must be constantly measuring the weight of the bagging area after the payment operation is completed. And yet, the terminal plays a message “please take your bagged items from the bagging area” twice per minute while the customer is taking items from the bagging area and transfers them into their bag. The weight measurement is constantly reporting changing weights, indicating that the customer is taking items from the bagging area, and the control flow of the terminal still decides that the customer needs to be reminded to bag items.

I fail do find an analogy. Occasionally, I yell “What do you think I’m doing?” at the terminal, but purely as a release valve for frustration, it’s obviously futile.

This is in my opinion an oversight. The terminal has (imo) not been tested with purchases that take more than 30seconds to pack.

For comedic purpose, I would like to highlight the following option:

• The shop doesn’t want customers who buy more than five items. Revenue is not their goal.

More realistically:

• Between the shop and Toshiba, it has not been communicated that the use-your-own-bag option would not be used. Toshiba assumed that customers would pack directly into their bags, while scanning and before paying, such that customers could just grab their bag and go. Which would be way more convenient and more ergonomic (the bagging area is higher than the shop floor).
• It has not been communicated to Toshiba, that purchasable single-use plastic bags are not conveniently available at the terminals (I assume that’s one main reason why many self-checkout users don’t use them).
• Generally there were wrong assumptions about the scanning process because the voice commands by the terminal assume that the paid items are bagged, which they aren’t.

In any case, from the software perspective, I see a missing if statement to check if the weight of the bagging area has changed in the past 15 seconds before playing a reminder.

From a business / marketing perspective, I see a device, with a big “TOSHIBA” text on the front, which passive aggressively blasts “please take you already-bagged items from the bagging area” while I’m busy taking and bagging items from the bagging area (while there are actually no bagged items in the bagging area). A passive aggressive voice, which - in the name of Toshiba - is wrong about the situation, wrong about my actions, but still seems entitled to lecture me about what I’m supposed to do. And every time I go grocery shopping, I get a reminder “this Toshiba product is annoying”.

PS: At time of writing this post, I haven’t heard back from Toshiba, but it’s been less than a week for a matter that’s not urgent at all. And there’s not much the customer contact could do to improve the situation, all they can do is say “sorry our product sucks, it will stay that way.” and then I shrug and think “thanks for nothing, I guess you get paid to respond to customers and not for fixing issues, that would take time and be expensive”.

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