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Safeway experimented with that here (UK) about fifteen years ago. I used it. It worked, but I don't think it saved that much time, since shoppers are much slower at doing the scanning.

For enforcement they used sampling: at payment time, you were sometimes required to have your items scanned by a cashier anyway. The theory was that the more reliable you showed yourself to be, the less likely you were to be selected.

I haven't seen back to the store that they trialled it in recently, but I guess that it didn't work for some reason since it has not become widespread.



Interesting. I wonder if this kind of system will make a comeback as RFIDs, QR codes, digital payment systems, and smartphones get more ubiquitous.




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