On 27/10/09 01:23, Frank Erskine wrote:

What's the alleged advantage of an automated checkout? Clearly it
does away with a humanoid (although they still need to be such around
for, say, alcohol purchases). In RL they seem to be much slower than a
checkout manned by real people.

What they need is faster humans, such as the ones in Aldi, who are
equipped with tills designed to be fast, rather than pretty.