I was in college when self checkout became a thing and it took us all of about 45 seconds to realize that you could just check everything out as bananas. Steak was weighed and priced at 4011 (banana code) as the stoned teenager cashier paid no attention. Everything on the receipt was literally Bananas
That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items.
Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.
The visual risk of walking out without paying is much greater than the risk that anyone actually investigates AND tries to track him down for it.
Back when I was a kid it was common to still just have simple price tag stickers on every single item. We’d pull off a cheap sticker and put it on an expensive item. If they noticed, we’d just shrug and say “oh Nevermind then” when they found the right price.
The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, believe it or not they even knew how to make change back in those days /s. So you couldn’t always get super aggressive.
A year or two ago I had a cashier ring up my zucchini as cucumbers because he apparently couldn't tell the difference. Young guy, looked barely 18. I have no idea if he overcharged or undercharged me as a result, but I didn't care enough to point it out because he seemed like the type who would have needed 20 minutes to figure out how to change it (or would have needed to call down a manager for help) and I didn't want to waste any more of my time (or his).
> The visual risk of walking out without paying is much greater than the risk that anyone actually investigates AND tries to track him down for it.
So scan everything, then put it in the cart and walk off without putting in the credit card. Again, both are stealing but paying some fake, reduced rate is leaving your calling card at the scene of a crime.
Calling card doesn’t actually mean anything without enforcement. My city police didn’t have time to investigate when someone kicked in my back door and fled once the alarm sounded. I really doubt they give a crap about looking me up and coming to cite me for misdemeanor charges.
Anything that risks an employee might confront you in the store is a greater risk IMO. And, usually they light on the register is green (or a similar indicator) so they do know right then if you don’t pay.
Police may not care about stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks one time by entering a PLU of 4011 and declaring them to be bananas. It's hard to prove, and even if everyone takes the time to prove it: Then what? A misdemeanor?
But at some point, they do start to care.
Stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks on 20 different occasions (every couple of weeks, say), with video and transaction evidence of the acts happening over and over again? That's a lot easier to prove, and in many states adds up to a nice juicy felony.
There will be video either way though. They'll either have security footage of you walking out the door without paying or they'll have security footage of you "paying". The only important variables here (AFAICT) are the likelihood of getting noticed coupled with the frequency of the act.
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks out the door, they don't know who that person is. And while they may have video of parts of this, they don't necessarily see enough to prosecute. (Acting like you're stealing a steak but not actually doing it isn't a crime. Shoplifting can be hard to prove; part of that proof means demonstrating that they didn't change their mind and just drop off the steak somewhere else in the store.)
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks it up to self-checkout and pays for it as if it is a bunch of bananas with their credit card, they have identified that person. They have them on video at the self-checkout committing this crime.
It actually doesn't matter much if they leave the store with their bounty or not in this second case. The crime is already done by converting the steak into bananas.
In principle I agree with you but in practice I feel like this really misses the reality of the situation. If it was an isolated incident at an isolated store in the mid 90s I think you'd be right. But presumably the thief makes a habit of this (otherwise why worry), it's likely a major chain with centrally coordinated loss prevention, the thief has presumably made a legitimate purchase from this chain at some point in the past and will again at some point in the future, and facial recognition is a thing.
In that scenario it seems to me that the best the thief can do is to "accidentally" ring up a steak as bananas occasionally and hope that if someone ever takes note that the past events will remain undetected.
That said, I'm pretty sure all of the self checkouts I've interacted with over the past several years would automatically flag such a "mistake". There are some things they're still bad at and they generate plenty of false positives but they seem to be reasonably good at identifying obvious "errors".
The best a thief can do is just not ring up the steak at all and if confronted just act like it’s an honest mistake.
Anyone just buying bananas and steaks is going to look suspicious fast. So rotating the banana for other things is key. Having a mixed bag of purchases where the steaks are always just accidentally unscanned or misscanned.
The facial recognition thing isn’t really in the picture for this minor type of crime. Law enforcement doesn’t have easy access to it as Hollywood would lead you to believe. Its use is reserved for higher profile crimes. You’d have to really be running a steak stealing criminal syndicate for this to happen. Before that, retailers would have already started forcing different procedures for the steaks. Like locking them up or pay at the butcher stand.
One thing facial recognition can do, if used properly by the retailer, is flag you and alert the store to put extra eyes on you every time you enter the store. There’s an increased chance they’ll confront you in the act or otherwise scare you off of it.
I mean, eventually the people working there would take notice. "Oh, look. Banana Man is doing it again." :)
That said: I've never, ever weighed meat at self checkout. In fact, I've never had a cashier any weigh meat, either.
I've bought plenty of steaks in regular grocery stores, but each of those steaks (even the ones that they wrapped in butcher paper just for me after I selected them from the glass case at the back of the store) had the weight coded into the UPC that was printed at the time it was wrapped up (and weighed by the meat cutter).
There has no further weighing required for the register to know the price, so weighing a steak at the checkout is pretty bizarro-world behavior to begin with -- at least in my experience.
That's why you peel off the UPC and then ring it up as however many cucumbers would approximately correspond to its weight. Fooling the overhead camera and associated ML algorithm is left as an exercise for the reader.
There's already an scale that prints UPCs in the produce department for customers to use. I'll just put the package of steak on there, punch in 4011, and scan out my "bananas" at the self-checkout. ;)
(But they'll still know who I am. Walking out is cleaner, and has fewer steps.)
The man in the sky can see what is being scanned in real time, it’s on his video display just like the cash register except overlayed on the video of you. If they see a ribeye in your hand and it says bananas on the screen, good chance they’re going to stop you before you exit (assuming they can mobilize to do so).
Honestly if you’re a thief this is just a dumb idea. Probably works for the original commenter a few times fine. But it’s way too obviously and intentionally theft. You need to come up with something you can claim was an honest mistake.
Find another item that sounds similar but is cheaper and use that upc. If you’re keying in the upc, on a scale or something, then find one that’s cheaper but off my 1 digit or something where you can say it was a typo and you didn’t notice. Those kinds of things are more defensible. None of us have been trained to be a cashier so honest mistakes are a strong defense to any claim of misconduct.
Police know which side their bread is buttered on. Target is famous for being to get local cops to do exactly what they need post-facto (now prosecutor is another story).
I.E. just because police don’t “waste” time investigating a crime with $1000 of damage to your personal property does not mean they won’t dedicate the time to pursue $200 in losses for the local mega mart.
What Target is famous for is doing their own investigations rather than expecting the police to do the grunt work. They operate such a sophisticated forensics lab that they actually do contract work for LE agencies across the country.
If you funded your own private investigation which unambiguously identified the culprit and demonstrated damages sufficient for a felony I imagine the local police would readily act on your behalf as well.
Breaking and entering into a home is more serious of a crime than $1000 of property damage. But regardless of that, it’s a point just to highlight how little policing resources exists and tells a broader story. At least in my city, cops don’t do anything for minor crimes. On my local Reddit, I see people mentioning that you have to mention that you have a gun in your hand if you ever want them to actually show up. I think our police force has half the personnel they’re supposed to have given our city size. I think this is becoming more common in the US.
There’s plenty of documented cases where local police are the basically henchmen for large corporations, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and believe it’s kind of a fear mongering meme to think they have enough power over them to dictate them to do roundups after the fact. They may however give all the evidence they collect on you to the police with a bow on it and the cops may decide to take it seriously. Where I am, I do not see this happening. The police will have expected the retailer to have protected their inventory. Off duty police officers make a lot of money working private security and they don’t want to disturb that dynamic.
> The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention,
Yup. I was in a local super market and saw Tomahawk steaks priced at $4-6 each. It had to be a mistake but I figured I would give it shot and see if they noticed. Cashier looked at the price, did a confused double take and immediately called over the manager. Turns out the decimal point was off by one so my $4.50 tomahawk was really $45. I bought it anyway and it came out great in the oven.
Did you pay the sticker price or the intended price?
Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.
We have similar rules in the US, but depends on your state. In mine they have to give you the price on at least one of the items but you can't demand they give you 100 of them at the wrong price. Or yes you can demand but they are not required to do so.
Seriously. Especially since self-checkout is almost always with a card tied to your identity, not cash.
Depending on the value, the police probably aren't going to show up at your address, but use that card again at the store in the future and you might find the security guard coming over. Or, like many stores, they wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor, and then they bring felony charges...
The stores have cameras. Likely someone is well aware those weren't all bananas, and has it on video.
> wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor
Isn't there a concept in the legal system where you have to mitigate damages even if you're the victim? I can't think of the example off the top of my head that Steve Lehto (consumer lawyer on YouTube gave).
I'm guessing people who steal from the stores aren't able to afford a decent lawyer, but I imagine a decent lawyer would ask the Target witness(es), why didn't you stop him after the first theft? Why did you keep letting him steal?
> why didn't you stop him after the first theft? Why did you keep letting him steal?
Enforcement goes to the police. Stores can't apprehend thieves. There is a lot of training for store employees to not try to engage the thieves because some can behave erratically and dangerously when they feel like they're caught.
You can tell someone they need to stop and pay for merchandise, but if they choose to keep walking there's nothing the store staff can do but document and report it.
The reason stores wait until it reaches felony level to report it is because police are too busy to try to pursue every small case that happens everywhere. There are fewer crimes that rise to the level of a felony, so they have to focus their efforts on the smaller number of more serious crimes instead of taking every report FIFO style
Stores can and do trespass people without police involvement.
The stores can also make a police report after the first theft, but the stores are choosing not to.
The stores are choosing not to mitigate their damages, something that the courts frown upon in my limited knowledge.
I understand that might be a civil aspect (mitigation) versus a criminal aspect, but perhaps someone who has been to law school and studied the law, might be able shed some light.
Well they can apprehend thieves but they choose not to because it has the potential to go poorly or result in bad PR. That's a modern trend though - 50 years ago they were happy to have private security do the job.
I once got stopped at self checkout because I put two vegetables (peppers, IIRC) of different types in the same bag and weighed them together.
They were the same price so it's not like I was trying to pull a fast one one anyone, but "the system" noticed and flagged me for someone to come over.
This was pre-pandemic, and I'm sure they're not less capable now than before.
IKEA did this to me two years ago. Flagged me as not having paid the right amount. Turns out that they sell fake plants as one cost and the pot you put them in as another; even if they're put together.
It was a difference of like $5 at most on a $400 bill. I suppose 1.25% is enough to pay someone in another country to monitor everything.
I used to work in a suburban supermarket during high school and college, first as a cashier and then as a frontend supervisor and payroll clerk. We had a security booth where you could watch security cameras, and it was literally never manned. Tapes were changed, but they were there mostly in case someone would try to rob the place. Cashiers routinely rang their own lunch up either as 99 cents or as bananas. No one cared.
Supermarkets actually factor breakage, theft, and spoilage into their books as "shrink", which averages between 2-3% of sales. There's no detective building a case, biding their time to bring down the banana bandit.
Although, modern self-checkouts have cameras on the scanner with ML-powered item detection, and they will alert the attendant if you incorrectly scan something that's sold by weight. (I've done this before on accident, fat-fingering the wrong PLU.)
I was of the impression that, in our golden age of individualized surveillance, merely interacting with the kiosk was enough to leave a facial-geometry calling card these days.
I feel like I may have heard this from one of those Illinois BIPA class action suits [0], which reliably have a whiff of crackpot to them from a technical perspective. But it surely seems an obvious enough sort of application…
I know people who regularly stole this way. They would usually work in pairs and one would leave a full cart near the exit and the other would walk out confidently. Worst case they figured they would just act the fool and either leave the cart or pay. Irked me that they did this but not enough to rat. I bet these days doing that with any kind of regularity would have you starring on much higher quality film.
This gives the ability to use the excuse "I didn't know how to use the machine, I thought I used it correctly, nobody ever trained me on this", where as just walking out does not
(Not a lawyer, I'd imagine you know better here than I do)
I think the point was that they COULDN'T have just walked out with them, BUT, by learning then going through the motions of a typical check out this A+++ hacker was able to bypass a normal security layer.
At my grocery store, they are using image recognition for self checkout. Bananas show up as bananas automatically, and if you select otherwise, I imagine it flags the item or purchaser. Shouldn't be long before the store figures out who is regularly overriding the image recognition for the purposes of theft.
Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for stealing low price items.
Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.
Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.
Please explain to me which part they are automating.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages. More staff can only mean higher prices. I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
> Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages.
And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
> More staff can only mean higher prices.
When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.
> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.
> And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.
> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.
Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.
There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.
You're blaming the store, which I agree with. My question was whether you could blame the GP, or the consumer in general. They have little control over how much the staff of their grocery store is being paid.
People have different preferences. What's to be confused about that?
I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.
Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.
I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.
I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?
Sure, but I deliberately choose my grocery store to increase the probability of having an actually skilled cashier. And I’ve never had a skilled bagger, including excellent cashiers. Doing it right is worth some of my time.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.
Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.
Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.
The "too bad" is most people lacking the understanding that you don't steal from a store, you steal from honest shoppers who keep the store open for you to steal from.
Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.
None of the other automating technologies like this in the past ended up causing job loss. We used to employ hundreds of people 24/7 to connect phone calls...
if a store does not want to hire capable staff to perform an essential function, they should not expect laypeople to perform that action for free (or at higher cost, as we've seen with grocery prices in the US as human cashiers are reduced) at the same level as a trained staff member.
we do not have to accept this decision to reduce staff and raise prices as a matter of course. plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't.
If GuinasEyebrows does not want to drive an appropriately security-hardened armored vehicle, then they should not expect that I will not jimmy the lock and hotwire it. If you see me drive it away, no you didn't.
People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.
With about a month of practice you could learn to pick 95% of residential locks.
So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s
Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.
Living in low trust societies sucks.
I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.
Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.
It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?
That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?
There's a disconnect because all of the accused corruption are big picture things people barely understand happening with shady political influence, corporate structure to avoid taxes, defrauding investors and those kinds of things.
When do these people that glorify their stealing interact with actual low-trust-society events from corporates? Almost never. They just hear about it on the news and social media influencers sharing stories.
These are people who have no idea what being shaken down for a bribe is like, have always benefitted from strong consumer protection laws, generous refund policies, and all around honesty in most every corporate interaction and the complaints they have are minor compared to their proud theft.
How often are you short changed at the store? Lied to about the weight of something you were sold? Received an adulterated or diluted product?
> plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
By everyone who uses any tool invented in human history. You are drawing an arbitrary line at self checkouts for some reason, but I am sure you have no problem with the millions of other ways automation has benefited you, obviously including using a computer to express your ideas on a forum hosted by a business that invests in other businesses that use automation as their springboard to success.
But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.
I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.
And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.
GuinansEyebrows's opinion was that businesses are wrong for implementing self checkouts. Presumably, ryandrake agreed with GuinansEyebrows.
I do not think that a business's decision to use self checkouts is wrong, and in fact the business is consistent with all of us, as we all choose to use automation/technology how we see fit.
Maybe it is suboptimal for some people, but why would a business be wrong for trying something that reduces their costs? I try to reduce my costs all the time. For example, I like restaurants where you order at the counter or on a device and self bus. I don't like waiting for a waiter. Is that business wrong?
I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.
This was an actual thing (complaining about this) when super-markets started to take over from general stores and butcher shops et c. Having to go get your bag of sugar off the warehouse shelf yourself rather than a clerk fetching it for you is unpaid labor on the part of the shopper (and is also not automation).
Oregon recently eliminated their mandatory gas station pump attendants. It seems most people considered that a good thing. For those that prefer the premium experience of having a human cashier, it seems that for now, they're still easy to find. For establishments that regularly expect to have large orders with dozens of items, they'll probably continue. It seems there's less to gain for large complicated orders.
Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.
I've always felt this is an absurd statement. Yes customers are paying the wages of the people working at the store, that's literally how basic exchange of goods and services has worked forever.
Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.
Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?
At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.
Two thousand years ago, most authors didn't know how to read or write. The erudite author would dictate their words verbally to a scribe, who had learned these specialized skills. Then other scribes and copyists could copy out the manuscript. When Gutenberg made the printing press, more specialized skills emerged: that of typesetting and publishing and printing and all that.
These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.
When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.
Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.
Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.
Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.
I’m not sure whether this is a bit of a joke about the broader thrust of my post, but I actually do think tons of the “automation” computers have given us is fake, for many of the reasons you suggest. I think it’s part of why the benefits of all this alleged automation have been more muted than one might expect (though not trivial, to be clear) and that it’s imposed costs in a bunch of ways that aren’t tracked on a P&L sheet but do make life less pleasant.
If people are needing to steal food to survive we need to radically work on changing society so that doesn't happen, not just then a blind eye and ignore it.
But no, most people in the US aren't stealing from grocery stores to feed their kids, they're stealing from stores to resell on black markets.
IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.
Some retail chains, of which Dollar General is the poster child, have one price displayed on the shelf and a different, much higher price at the checkout register.
Links:
> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.
> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”
> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
In Norway, if you notice that the price at checkout is higher than what it said on the shelf, you can in most cases demand to pay the shelf price and the store has to honour it unless it is an obvious error such as some expensive electronics being tagged as costing an impossibly low amount.
It goes without saying however, that the customer himself is of course not allowed to alter the price on the shelf (like the Flipper Zero program in the featured link facilitates) and then pay the altered amount :P
In America you can also do that, but how far you'll get is highly reliant on the mentality of the manager that has to do a price override.
For the most part, when it's happened to me, they've always taken the loss on the chin and then the next time I come in the prices have been updated, but I have also once encountered a grouchy old bastard manager who, when I asked to pay the price that was listed on the shelf, immediately launched into a tirade about how people are so ungrateful and how he's not making any money, blah blah blah.
I immediately put my intended purchases on the counter and left while he berated me the entire time I was walking out of the store.
But, crazy people aside, if you're not a dick about it then most of the time they'll do right by you.
>> [...] the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive [...]
So - if the state didn't have any blabbermouths on staff, and spent some time training, how many "inspections" could they speedrun in an hour?
It sucks that we have to do extra labor and expose ourselves to this kind of legal risk all because a grocery store doesn't want to staff workers. It's not even like they pass these savings onto us...
That's true, grocery stores made record profits during covid.
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of an "open sourced" grocery store that's extremely transparent about every detail. Think electronic price tags that give you a complete breakdown of the cost of an item, cost of labor, cost to account for "loss", over/under-supply, etc.
I feel like there's a niche out there for hyperinformed consumers
That is actually quite nice. I’ve been toying with the idea of mandating this 10% maximum margin for products and services on every for-profit company.
Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit?
This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the increased oil prices. The same as the overheated graphics cards.
You hit on what, in my opinion, is the actual core issue with this type of thinking -- it doesn't compose.
To make a poor analogy to physics: if you measure something which changes when you change unit/frame of reference -- it's not a well-defined thing.
The best policies have the same effect regardless of the legal structure (within the policy) superimposed on the actual action.
Medium policies can be optimized/gamed (perspective) -- but are designed to be adversarial, in that the gamed outcome is at least OK but potentially in fact the desired one (for example -- if you tax land, then not paying the tax means not using up land, which may be a desired policy goal).
These can cause issues, though -- common law is an adversarial system, and "justice" can usually be translated to "access to lawyers," imo.
The connection with the above is that while the solution used is probably not universal -- sometimes, the optimal solution is, so the adversarial policy is just an approximation of "good policy".
Bad policies not only don't compose -- but then bureaucrats go on and insert discretion to try to make them compose. On the surface, this often looks like common sense -- but the result is insiders can keep doing the Bad Thing, but you can't do anything which isn't the Way Things Are Done -- because you need approval, and it Looks Bad.
So, how would we go about defining policies that prevent “excessive” profits while still allowing for building buffers in risky and capex heavy industry?
More heavily tax profit above a certain level? Allows for funnelling back some of the excessive profits. Suffers from the same tax evasion as we currently have where profits are skewed on the books with all kinds of accounting tricks.
Demanding sales prices cannot exceed cost + 10% of cost? In aggregate or per unit?
This is a bad idea if your industry is CapEx heavy and you have a lot of bets that don't pay off.
The drug industry is like this; the profits on a single drug sale are insane, even counting the R&D costs for that particular drug. However, those profits are offset by the losses incurred on all the other drug ideas that hadn't panned out despite the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in them.
The record and publishing industries are similar. As Steve Jobs once said, the main job of a music label isn't selling records, it's not even marketing or promotion, it's identifying artists with potential to be great hits amongst the thousands of wannabes. The revenue that labels get, and it's a lot of revenue, mostly goes towards recouping the costs of failed bets.
Absolutely and costco has other interesting business model mechanics that make that margin feasible. Membership fees of course but other things as well. Like the fact they are all warehouses they don't have intermediate warehousing or unpacking like say Target does.
Yeah food co-ops are awesome but they don't expose that kind of information to the casual shopper. Even most members. Even if you're very actively involved you'd have to strap together multiple spreadsheets and receipts to come up with something like I'm describing
I guess I'm thinking of something like dynamic pricing, except instead of it being used to manipulate consumers into paying the most they can possibly pay, it's used to give you really transparent, real-time information about what goes into that final pricetag
My local co-op is stupid expensive, like $8 for a box of cereal that costs $4 at my normal grocery store, $7 for a dozen eggs, $8 butter, $8/lb chicken thighs.
There are non-coop but organic and "fancy" grocery stores in the area as well that decimate them on prices.
Admittedly, these items are all very high quality, organic, small batch, hand crafted, local, minority-owned, protecting the rainforest etc. type products, but as a single man living alone, my grocery bill would be probably $800 a month if I bought all of my food from them.
There is something to be said for the power of group purchasing power though. For instance, you can buy a cow for much less than the cost of the individual cuts and have it butchered and split for like, $2-$4/lb of meat you receive.
I think with this openness the problem is there’s so many fluctuations and estimates that average consumer would think you’re being dishonest even if you weren’t. They’d see that you acquired an item for $20 and could never quite understand why they have to pay you $50. They’d see the plethora of line item costs as nickel and diming even if many are absolute hard costs. They’d see the estimated numbers as inflated.
There are coop grocery stores where members get to see the financials at a high level and make price changes that make the market sustainable. This is usually some form of shared ownership but I think this is a better way to achieve similar goals.
Yeah I was imagining this would be more of a co-op situation so the rift between "consumer" and "manager" is lessened. Maybe I just want a more nuanced version of the co-op model or a technologically-enabled model that allows a more intelligent exposure of the subcosts
The reason I used the word "open sourced" is because I think a good goal to shoot for would be to allow anyone else to learn and copy the structure/data/model. It'd be more of an experiment than anything else. Like a "let's teach everyone how a grocery store actually works" thing. Maybe even a non-profit
I have always liked the idea of a company that sits between me and all the other services I engage. Like I am a client of ZipZorp and they negotiate on my behalf rentals, travel, providers, utilities et al. ZipZorp provides value to me by using their size to negotiate better rates, conditions, offer legal protection and as you put it remain hyperinformed in a way that I cannot. I would pay for a service like that.
Yesterday I went to Walmart, and at the self-checkout the system quirked out and an attendant came by. She reviewed some sort of draconian overhead cam video of me trying to locate a tag out for a product to scan. Gave me "guilty until proven" innocent vibes. Are these systems actually effective?
Hey, something I'm somewhat qualified to answer! So, yes, these systems are actually effective. The systems and procedures are designed to look low key, but essentially perform PRISM-like mass surveillance behind the scene. These systems are managed by former US IC personnel.
What happens is that your identity is tied to these purchases and after a certain threshold you get flagged as a thief, essentially. At that point, you will get very increased attention (via checkout, purchases, and floor walkers), and after another threshold, will be trespassed and/or prosecuted.
But, you'll probably get away with a banana or few before you trigger the loss prevention threshold.
Yep, same thing with Walmart. I don't know about Target's systems, but wouldn't be surprised they're on par. Walmart is one of the biggest leaders in loss prevention and customer surveillance.
14 years ago Target had nearly full coverage with digital cameras when I worked loss prevention. I have to imagine with the reduced cost it’s become even more of a panopticon. The biggest risk was employees, and yes, they’d wait until they committed felony levels of theft to apprehend them. Petty theft was hard to prevent since you rely on building up a case. Boosters (someone who fills up a shopping cart with the most expensive items and just pushes out) as well as employees doing things like stealing iPads was a huge source of shrinkage. We had pictures up of known boosters that had hit Targets in the past.
Of course, the smart thieves would just take whatever into a bathroom, open it up, then stuff it somewhere in a coat and walk out the door. Those were really tricky, since we couldn’t “prove” it since we didn’t have full video coverage (for obvious reasons) so we’d just trespass those people. We had a lot of off duty cops because our location was particularly bad, making $30 an hour to mostly sit around and play games on their phones and look intimidating standing at the front door and walking around the store.
It flagged my for entering quantities of an item instead of scanning each individual item. It wouldn't let me pay until a human looked through my bags. There is a quantity key. I used the quantity key.
As a former cashier it kills me to scan one at a time, the self checkouts all have painfully long mandatory wait times between scans. Most of my time is just spent holding back my muscle memory, or getting yelled at for trying to scan at a normal cashier scanning pace.
Interesting, I rarely go to Walmart if I can avoid it, but I've noticed the stores here seem to only have a couple staffed checkouts left. There's 14+ isles of self checkouts.
They're not effective at reducing/preventing shrink. Unsure what the time situation is at scale for the stores. To be sure I'm faster and better at bagging but holy crap some people are not.
But what if you don't steal anything but the system is messed up. I had a case where I bought multiple things at a big hardware store, self checkout of course, and on my ticket was something I didn't notice. Because I bought a lot I didn't notice until a month later when I looked at the ticket and returned something else. Should I tell them or not, will I be some kind of weird situation?
I hate self checkout.
At my grocery store, it very often complains about something when I'm checking out. The person comes over, reviews the video and said you aren't doing anything wrong.
The answer is don't go to places where you self-checkout, and don't go to places with surveillance. There are still a couple of grocery stores in my town like that.
In the fraud/theft detection I had some experience with, everyone learns right away that mistakes happen all the time. Singular incidents are basically not worth investigating unless something about them is highly unusual, like an unusually large dollar amount or aligning with a scam that has become popular.
When I watched movies and TV shows I had this idea that thieves were all clever people who built smart systems to evade detection and steal right out from under big corporations. Some of those people might be out there operating undetected, but the average thief who gets caught is someone trying to abuse something as much as they can until they get caught. Some of them are so brazen (like the scan everything as bananas post above) that they must believe that nobody will ever check and if they do get caught nothing bad will happen.
The staff who watch these things have a good sense of what dollar thresholds the customer must cross before getting law enforcement involved.
Honestly, I trust these systems more than humans to do the same work. While we're all talking anecdotes, this one time at Walmart (how all good stories start) many years ago I was in the music section and these two in-store security guys approached me, saying they had told me to never come back in the store, etc., making a big scene. I so rarely go to Walmart and found the situation kind of humorous and wanted to see where it would go (knowing I had not done anything wrong now or in the past). They had seen me on video evidently and thought I was somebody else - serial shoplifter or public urinator or who knows what. Anyway, I tell them I've never been told to leave prior to this visit, didn't know what they were talking about. They were adamant that I was in the wrong, asked me to come back to the office while they looked into things. I was like, "sure!", more entertained than upset. So there I am sitting in the office while some guy combs through video footage. A guy of authority comes in, tired demeanor, asks these guys - well, did you match his ID? "No", says he. Checks ID, realizes I'm not their guy. Many stressful apologies on their behalf. But that's humans for you.
I've had awkward interactions with the Walmart system. It's clearly using a neural net, and a good one at that. It's only ever flagged me when I did something odd (like put something bagged and paid for in my cart, then take it out, then put it back again). I dress/groom like a thief, so the conversations with the staff are always annoying.
"Clothes make the man", as the idiom says. Clothes don't impugn your character, but they define you in the eyes of others.
Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.
If you dress like your HN username indicates, then yeah, you're probably noticed by humans before you get into the store.
Ironically, some of the store security look exactly like you. They come in all shapes, sizes, grooming standards, styles, and tattoo levels. I've seen some in full-on Juggalo outfits and neck/face tattoos.
One of the AP (asset protection) guys at my local store always wore an eyepatch and a t-shirt reading "A bullet a day keeps the terrorists away". He did NOT look like a typical grocery store employee, and I'm sure that was intentional.
The self checkout at my preferred grocery store (Hy-vee, an upper midwest chain) has started using these overhead cameras to confirm that you're purchasing everything you ostensibly have in your cart. Except it always flags us for the Starbucks drinks we're carrying (Hy-vees usually have a mini Starbucks shop inside them). More annoying though is that it flags us for the 5 gallon water jug refills that we manually punch into the self-checkout kiosk, because the surveillance system isn't satisfied unless the heavy ass jugs of water leave the cart, slide across the scanner and then get placed in the bagging area – anything else is possible theft.
All this has done is train us to keep the carts out of the camera's viewing angle. It doesn't care if you keep pulling handfuls of groceries out of hammer space, as long as there's no cart in the frame.
I don’t use self checkout systems that have weighing scales that require items to be moved from the cart to the bagging area. I either avoid self checkout at these stores or stop going to such stores altogether. I shop at my neighborhood Whole Foods and Home Depot; the self checkout systems don’t have this requirement.
I'm in Australia but similar sounding system is in operation at our two major supermarkets.
I scanned a drink, heard the beep, put it in the bag. I scanned a loaf of bread, heard a beep, put it in the bag.
Now, instead of the typical "Unexpected item in the bagging area" it now shows the overhead replay and locks the system out until an employee comes over to review.
Combined with their exit gates that don't open if they think you've not paid for something, and cameras that track you through the store it's feeling very unfriendly.
Sam's club has 'the arch', and one time when I did self checkout I did miss an item (thought I scanned it and I didn't apparently) and so far that's the only time they've actually checked the cart, the rest I was just waved through.
So seems pretty good. Obviously erring on the side of having an employee double check makes sense when their profit margins are generally single digits. One missed tshirt means they lost money on your $300 cart.
Well, Sam’s Club and Costco are kind of their own things since they’re members only, you sign an explicit agreement with them saying it’s fine for them to look at your cart, and if you refuse they can just revoke your membership and refuse to do further business with you. You’re under no obligation at Walmart or Target to get your receipt checked, although most people are polite and fine with it.
Personally, I always just say “no thank you!” and walk past the receipt checker at non members stores. They know me at Walmart and know I’ll refuse the receipt check and stopped bothering me.
I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout.
I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…
That video was staged, at Target electronics need to be paid for in the electronics department where there is no self-check out. In addition Target has the best Loss Prevention in the business, including let shoplifters continue until they accumulate enough goods that their crime is a felony.
Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology.
Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir
> Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology.
Can confirm - my wife called in a complaint about some graffiti / vandalism or something that was obscene in a target, and when she got a call back from a rep they were able to pinpoint everywhere she went in the store to determine which sign she was talking about...
Every self checkout around here has an employee staffing ~6 terminals. They're supposed to be watching for things like that. Usually theyre just staring vacantly into space, which I get, that job pays nothing and provides 0 mental stimulation.
When you see a TV being purchased, though, it wouldn't be hard to just watch that it in fact got checked in as such.
That's far from my experience. Usually they're overworked with a backlog of customers having some kind of issue needing attention. It usually takes a few minutes to flag one down when I need them to take a coupon or check and ID, because they're already busy doing something for another customer.
Same experience here. The one "monitor" employee is busy nearly full time helping out with some issue some customer is having, such that they simply can't be monitoring that everyone's items are ringing up as the actual item instead of "bananas".
But every terminal also has a spycam hanging above it to either "give the appearance" of a big-brother overlord watching to encourage honesty, or is recording everything so that someone can review footage later if some issue is discovered.
Depending on the store those cameras are definitely processing the feed locally to flag shady stuff. I've had a few times I've done something "odd" (not stealing anything but definitely not the normal flow of scan a single item and put in a bag) and have had those systems freak out on me, and the only part of it being weird it would have known was the camera feed.
At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.
And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
Systems like Everseen make that approach significantly riskier than it used to be. A live video of you checking out is run through image classification software, so if you scan a steak as 4011, it'll pause the checkout flow and call the SCO (self-checkout) attendant to watch the video of you scanning the item. They then have to approve the scan, at best leaving you publicly humiliated.
The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart.
The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.
Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.
That is something you can do in cahoots with a regular cashier and the reason places like Costco check your receipt. The cashier just has to fake scan an item, and nobody would notice. Receipt checking makes it possible to get caught.
There's a tiktok literally floating around right now where somebody sticks a banana band on a cyberpower PC at Walmart and checks out at the self-checkout.
Then the receipt checker at the door checks his receipt and waves him on through.
trust goes both ways. you can be cynical about people who take things without paying, i guess. i prefer to be cynical about the corporations who run and stock these grocery stores with substandard products at artificially inflated prices that benefit shareholders and disadvantage people who need to eat food to live.
Think about blaming the grocery store replacing workers with no one in particular before you blame some college pranksters.
Grocery stores in general consolidating, laying off workers, leaving them without pay/benefits, taking advantage of greedflation, etc., is a bigger drain on society.
Shadowy? Kroger's and Albertsons weren't allowed to merge due to anticompetitive practices, price hikes, etc. This was only a couple years ago & is out in the open. You can point all your fingers and toes at the boards of these companies if you need to.
Is it possible that grocery stores are reducing positions to save money? Is it not possible that it is a feedback loop? Why are we blaming the grocery store for replacing labor with machines? Why don't we decry the grocery that hires only 2 people instead of 3?
It's entirely possible that both can be wrong. Shoplifting is bad, but "big corporations pocketing the saved money after understaffing and passing their labor off to the customer" is also bad. We should decry the grocery that hires 2 people instead of 3 just to profit more.
All grocery stores are introducing self-checkout as a way to reduce staffing. It's not a shadowy conspiracy, it's a legitimate fact. Many customers would much rather check out with a person.
> Many customers would much rather check out with a person.
I'm like 50/50 on that. If I've got a lot of stuff it's nice having the space of a full lane for bagging along with another set of hands helping (even more if they still have dedicated baggers!). But if I'm just getting a handful of items a self checkout is faster than waiting in a queue for a full service lane. But if there's a long queue for the self checkout then forget it. If I have to wait I'll wait for service.
I still just prefer the scan and go stuff the most though. Scan with my phone as I shop, check out with a confirmation on the phone, roll on through to the car. I wish all my shopping was that smooth.
I mean, it isn’t really a prank, it is just small scale stealing. It’s fine to not care about that sort of thing, or think it is morally defensible for people who can’t afford food to steal it. But there’s no punchline to make it a prank.
Are you me? I also did this at university in Britain circa 2010. I went for onions and carrots mostly. I'd go to the meat or fish counter and get lovely bits of fillet, then check them out weighed as onions.
Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up.
On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.
This was I think effective early on but now there are many systems to detect this "fraud". I say "fraud" because I honestly have zero sympathy for these companies who are doing anything but paying people a living wage to do a job and that goes for Walmart in particular.
I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute.
Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do.
Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.
