Archive for the ‘Home Appliances’ Category
Self Service
Not too long ago grocery shopping was a full customer service experience. While selecting groceries you had the full service of the butcher or bakery counter while shopping. When your cart was full, the cashier rang up your groceries with a friendly attitude and the bagger carried your bags out and placed them in your car for you. It was generally a pleasant experience. However, grocery shopping is leaning more and more towards the trend of self-service. This is cutting down on their labor costs, but leaving discouraged customers.
Not only do most grocery stores have self checkout lanes installed, but they are not providing cashiers for the regular lanes so a shopper is sometimes forced to use self check-out instead of being checked out by a human being. These self-check out systems use a touch screen display to allow the customer to scan bar codes themselves. Customers are asked to manually identify items such as fruit and vegetables and place them on a device that weighs them. Then weight is then processed into a monetary amount using a price computing scale within the system. After each additional item, the user must place it on the bagging platform so that the weight can match up with what has been scanned or weighed.
In some grocery store chains such as Market Street and Central Market, there have even been price-computing scales installed throughout the store. In these cases, a customer can take the produce, olives or potato salad they want and weigh them on a scale that will convert them into price per pound and print a bar code. Then, at the self-check out lane there is no weighing and manually identifying items needed. The item will already have a barcode and can just be scanned. Some retail chains see this as improving the process of self-check out while also cutting down on labor needed to man the deli counter or prepared foods section.
While this is saving the stores money and ultimately probably cutting down on the product’s price based on less overhead, some customers do not think it is worth it. Studies have shown that it only takes one bad experience to turn a customer into a non-user of self-service checkouts. Customers that are confused and then embarrassed about the machines inability to scan their item will never use it again. There are other kinks that frustrate customers. Such as having to scan every single packet of Kool-Aid so they weight matches. Whereas, the cashier could have just scanned one and told the cash register to multiply it by 20. Coupons and loyalty card discounts are more difficult to handle in the self-service lanes. Also, while the price computing scales inside the machine can convert the weight on the scale into the price designated for the item the customer chooses on the touch screen, the customer still has to choose the correct item. If they choose bananas instead of plantains, they might get charged much less than they should.
Self-service is also starting to work it’s way into pharmacies. Med dispensing kiosks are being implemented in Canada. McDonalds is even trying to roll out a self-service order and pay machine in Europe! Even movies can be checked out in a self-service vending machine now. As each aspect of our lives moves to self-service, it leaves customers wishing for human interaction with cashiers more than ever.
Counting Scales
Manually counting parts or small items leads to human error. By using special scales designed for counting parts, a company can eliminate this human error and a therefore eliminate some labor cost. These scales called counting scales are used to count small items or parts quickly and efficiently by weight. This scale quickly converts weight information into piece count information and vice versa.
Digital counting scales look at the weight of the items you have placed on the weighing platform and divide the weight by the number of pieces you entered to compute the average piece weight. Usually, the person operating the scales will hand count a sample of the pieces he/she wants to calculate. After zeroing out the unwanted weight for any container, he/she places this sample on the scale and enters the number of pieces in the sample. The scale divides the weight on the scale by the number of pieces on the scale to determine the average piece weight, or APW, of the piece. Then the scale can apply this APW to the total weight and display the count. Just as a scale can be calibrated to weigh in pounds or grams, a counting scale can be calibrated to weigh in units of a specific piece. The items being counted must all have equal weights for the scales to operate correctly. Of course, the more of the items there are, the more accurate the scale can be with its results since it will average out any variations to all the pieces.
Counting scales have different levels of capacity. Some scales can count pieces with tens of pounds of weight and some only have a capacity of a few grams. It is important to not purchase a counting scale with too much capacity than your needs. In order to have a larger capacity, you will be sacrificing resolution. Do not be fooled into getting a larger capacity thinking you “might” need it in the future. If you think there might be a possibility that you will need to be able to count things above the capacity of your counting scale, make sure your scale has a remote scale option. This means you will be able to attach a larger scale to your mechanism for counting items of a heavier weight.
There is some error involved with using counting scales, but certainly less than would be had with manual counting. There can be operator error such as forgetting to zero out the container weight or miscounting the sample. There can be piece weight error. This happens when the operator does not take a large enough sample to average out the variations in weight equally. Piece weight error can also occur when the scale is not level or if a draft or open window affects its accuracy. Some error is from scale related issues. These issues usually have to do with the scales settings. Counting scales can be set to certain resolutions. After millions of counts, a scale will start to not accurately weigh the sample, which throws the entire count off. Setting the scale to tolerate some errors can alleviate this. Usually allowing 2% is a good idea to keep the scale accurate.