BillD: The store I mainly use handles a full range of produce: fruit, vegetables, and sundries like mushrooms, garlic and packed salads.

What you do is: take a bag from the dispenser, fill it with as much of the particular produce line you want (eg choose from about six varieties of apples, organic or other hands of bananas or whatever), take it to one of about four weighing machines scattered around the produce area, hit the particular code number for that product (it's displayed on the card next to the produce) and the machine prints you a label giving you the weight, price per unit, total price and a bar-code, which you scan into the scanner and stick the label onto your bag.

Or if it is an item like heads of broccoli, which are sold as single units, there will be a bar-code attached to the display box, just scan that once for each unit you have.

It *is* a good system, and while I suppose it opens the store up to more possibilities of pilfering, I suppose the savings in checkout staff outweigh any shrinkage.

And as regards languages, you can select at the checkout from a range of about 10 languages (including the main European languages, Japanese, Chinese, Maori, and most of the Pacific tongues) you want your items and totals displayed.

Here in NZ the banks all use a common system for electronic payment (goes under the acronym EFTPOS - Electronic Financial Transaction at Point of Sale, I think) and terminals are in almost every shop, garage, cafe, restaurant and hotel. It also works for ATM machines, too. Most people, me included. carry very little cash around - we rely on the EFTPOS system. Of course, if the system goes down (which it has done from time to time), there is total chaos, but that's another story. Mostly, it seems to work real well.