Interesting article about the trends in automatization and robotics from a somewhat left-wing perspective:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/when-the-robots-rise-16830
Some of this is really scary...lots of people might become economically superfluous, while oligarchic elites live in their gated compounds protected by robot security systems...looks pretty bad for the future of democracy.

"You must be a subscriber of The National Interest to access this article. " The workaround for non-subscribers is to click the "Printer friendly version" button.

We've had them in the UK for at least 5 years. At first it was big chain supermarkets and only at a few stores with a 10 item limit.

Now every big chain has them at every store and even the smaller markets have them too.

We have basket points for smaller shops and conveyor tills for larger shops.

We still go to a human till for our huge monthly trips, since the check out staff can handle multiple of the same item with out scanning each one.

thx, I had read it some time ago when it was freely available, didn't notice it's restricted access now.

No problem. Nice of them to leave that backdoor open for one to slip through. On a site that discusses security issues, I must assume that was intentional.