I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks.
The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up behind me and very persistently told me that I hadn't scanned something. Annoyed, I pointed on the screen where it showed I had. His eyes went wide, and he spun around, and quickly hurried away, no apology.
If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't code that intervention/confrontation as their mess-up, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still got dinged as suspicious, to cover their butts.
We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. And I have even recently seen a street person in a chain pharmacy here, simply tossing boxes of product off the shelves, into a dingy black trash bag, in the middle of the day. Somehow none of the usual employees around. Yet there's often employees moving to stand behind me at that same store, when I use their self-checkout. (Maybe my N95 mask is triggering some association with masked bandits, yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? But an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go when they have symptoms.)
> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa?
They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.
The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.
>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.
There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)
The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.
Or maybe they just don’t want any violence in their stores at all? I will avoid shopping somewhere that has regular ass whoopings way more than I would avoid shopping somewhere with regular shoplifting.
Are you saying you would continue shopping in a store where you regularly saw violence against people who might be thieves, on the assumption you’d never be mistaken for one?
Yes. Thievery makes everything in the store more expensive. I have no interest in shopping at a store that has thieves in it and law enforcement does nothing to stop thieves in my area.
In the 1970s I saw a security guard or 2 chase a thief out of a store then tackle and detain him right in front of me. Didn't make me hesitate to go back to the store or cause any worry that guards might tackle me.
Generally agree with the sentiment but it can put you in a very hard place.
I was accused of shoplifting by a gigantic dude who moved in to detain me as I was going into my car. Could have gotten Walmart badge or paraphernalia from anywhere (most walmarts aren't that aggressive but this one was). I could have told him to eat shit and it was clear he was willing to get violent. At that point I would have had to decide whether to draw a weapon, because he clearly would have overpowered me and put me in imminent fear of death. I handed him my receipt with one hand while preparing for the possibility to draw a weapon with the other, thankfully he seemed satisfied and turned out to be a real Walmart employee.
I decided I didn't want to ever face that decision again so I never went back
I might be misinterpreting the situation, but the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me. The whole situation is wildly outside my experience.
> the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me
If you ever visit Texas take a look around the entrances to stores, shops, restaurants, bars etc. You should see large white signs with a "gun-buster" and a 30.0* code. or a large "51%" symbol in red. It would be incredibly rare to see a person with an open carry gun thou
30.05 is to tell people that "constitutional carry" (carry without a LTC) is not allowed on the property. A person with a License to Carry may carry on the property.
30.06 says a LTC person may not conceal carry on the property.
30.07 says a LTC person may not open carry on the property.
The 51% lets people who carry know that the establishment has a liquor/beer permit and receives 51% of income from sales of alcohol. Meaning it's a felony to bring a firearm onto the premises. The others are misdemeanor trespass
Then you may see a reminder 46.03 sign at places like schools, sporting venues etc as a reminder that weapons (not just guns) are not allowed.
It reminds me of "Posted"[0] signs that I've seen in lots of places in the southern US. Growing up in the Northeast, we didn't have such things[1].
[0] "Posted" is shorthand for "Private Property. No Trespassing." I get that the word "posted" means "I posted the sign. Pay attention or you might get arrested or shot." But I have no idea how the latter got shortened to the former. It's also an interesting regionalism, although not specifically related to legal codes and their taxonomy.
[1] Where I grew up we just had "No Trespassing" or "Private Property" signs.
The 30.0* signs are basically “no trespassing” sign that property owners (stores shops buildings etc) may elect to refuse entry to persons in various modes of carry. Most commonly will allow people to conceal carry with a license. Most places (in mid-large cities) don’t want people walking around openly carrying a gun in their place of business.
The 51% is alcohol & guns don’t go well together. Conservative Texas would probably like to do away with alcohol altogether, they still only allows beer & wine sales on Sunday and only because Sunday Football. Liquor bottles can only be bought at liquor stores (except on sunday). Unlike California where you can pick up some Johnnie & Jameson with school supplies and toilet paper before church.
Most regulations are on when and how you use the firearm. Having a LTC means you have a little more forgiveness for trespassing because the signs were hidden behind the door or plants etc. Constitutional carry will still be charged. But LTC has more penalties for misuse, such as brandishing to intimidate carries greater penalties
The restrictions on unlicensed open carry of a loaded weapon in a vehicle alone makes the Washington regulation way more of a hassle than in in Texas, although they both have location restrictions.
I said weapon, not gun, but theoretically if it were a gun, it wouldn't feel any different than shopping without one. Put a small watergun down your waistband and walk around for a couple days. After a couple you won't notice it, and no one else is going to notice it either. It will become utterly mundane, it similarly applies to a dagger or whatever concealable weapon one may be able to get ahold of.
That this comment was downvoted (while stating that they live in NZ, a distinctly different culture from the USA), really underlines what a lunatic society those of us in the USA are in. Guns aren’t normal in most of the western world, folks.
The job of a security guard is to observe and report. Let the multi-billion dollar companies like walmart and home depot pay for actual law enforcement to be on hand when a security guard observes a suspected shoplifter. The security guard isn't paid enough or trained enough to get physical with customers.
Shopkeeper’s privilege exists as long-standing common law doctrine for a reason. No business should be forced to tolerate theft, or be forced to pay off-duty police officers to prevent it.
And no one is compelled to be a security guard; if the risks and pay don’t align, they’re free to walk away.
I had never heard of 'shopkeeper's privilege' but looked it up [1] and yes, seems to be a real thing in the United States and nowhere else, according to a quick scan of that wiki article.
More evidence to me that the US was set up to serve corporatist interests over pretty much everything (and everyone) else. Why else provide shopkeepers with some special legal status? (Which again, they don't have in any other country.)
> just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely
Has this actually happened? Or are the chain pharmacies using “shrinkage” as a scapegoat for other deficiencies? I find it incredibly hard to believe that retail theft puts an appreciable dent in profits.
Target closed stores under this excuse last year. One was in downtown Oakland, where I can easily believe it (large unhoused population). Multiple news stories reported that this was only a cover to close underperforming stores and not the primary reason for closures.
The point isn't that businesses are closing profitable stores, but the stores are unprofitable for reasons other than shrinkage. You're being fed a narrative about crime. Why? Who benefits?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities. For instance, the CEO of Walgreens has acknowledged that perhaps retailers “cried too much last year” and overspent on security measures that failed to reflect real needs. And although the National Retail Federation said that “organized retail crime” drove nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021, the group later retracted its claim; it now no longer attaches a dollar amount to money that is lost due to retail theft. And in memorable cases, major retailers have chosen to maintain stores with much higher rates of crime, while closing others.
you can use a reasonable amount of force to prevent people from taking property (or if you're acting as an agent thereof) in Texas. But still you can always be taken to civil court and be at the mercy of whatever judge. I imagine in San Francisco you will almost certainly lose to the criminal who was stealing something if you use any amount of force other than to defend yourself unless you're a cop
> There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security.
Bit of an assumption there.
There is no easy answer for this breakdown. The cat is out of the bag and these losers aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and face real consequences. Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance. Of course that doesn't stop anything and quality of life goes down.
> Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance.
Stores have plenty of incentives to engage in privacy invading surveillance even ignoring shoplifting as a factor. If a store saw zero shoplifting they'd still deploy privacy invading surveillance because it's profitable for them to do it right now and it will only be increasingly profitable for them to do it in the near future.
Plus, like everybody in retail, LP’s measured performance indicator is how busy they look when management is around. The best way to do that without getting in a fight is to annoy people who don’t actually have anything to hide.
That can be seen at many levels of society. ICE also prefers to round up harmless immigrants that show up for court hearings, work in fields, wait at bus stations or deliver their children to day care rather than the "dangerous criminals" that they keep on boasting about. And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal in their view anyway, why bother?
Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.
Illegal is not the same as criminal, but a civil violation is still illegal. Someone without lawful status is subject to detention and deportation. A person who overstayed a visa or is otherwise undocumented is, by definition, here illegally and falls under the legal term “illegal alien.”
Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
If you had read the post you’re responding to, you would have seen that it asserts that the majority of undocumented people in the country actually were documented when they entered the country.
Also it’s poor form to copy/paste the same response over and over, even if you were reading the posts you replied to.
>Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
Yes. The link[0] I posted with my comment cites that specific law:
To be clear, the most common crime associated with illegal immigration is
likely improper entry. Under federal criminal law, it is misdemeanor for an
alien (i.e., a non-citizen) to:
Enter or attempt to enter the United States at any time or place other
than designated by immigration officers;
Elude examination or inspection by immigration officers; or
Attempt to enter or obtain entry to the United States by willfully
concealing, falsifying, or misrepresenting material facts.
The punishment under this federal law is no more than six months of
incarceration and up to $250 in civil penalties for each illegal entry. These
acts of improper entry -- including the mythic "border jumping" -- are
criminal acts associated with illegally immigrating to the United States.
Like all other criminal charges in the United States, improper entry must be
proven beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict.
And in fact, I said:
Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a
crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.
That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US Legally and
overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.
Where did I claim otherwise? Seriously. That's not a rhetorical question.
No. Overstaying a visa or not leaving when temporary protected status is suddenly revoked (or asylum is not granted) is not a criminal offense under US federal law.
Technically it is all about status since a visa is about entry. Like the date on your visa is the window you have to enter the country but you'd have an I-94 or some status forum that dictates the parameters of your stay. (though yeah, everyone just calls this "overstaying your visa") (IANAL but have travel abroad before and well... I was in grad school and conversations about visa and status come up a lot when the majority of students have temporary status and there's a president talking about changing the rules)
Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It's not a crime per se to overstay a visa like say shoplifting or killing someone. It's more like there's a proceeding to determine whether you did overstay and then when there's a finding of fact they basically tell you you have to leave or they remove you from the country forcibly. It would be patently ridiculous to jail someone for overstaying or for working on a tourist visa or for any of a number of these things.
Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
I would love to understand if you truly believed that no such federal statute exists, or we’re just intentionally spreading misinformation.
The visa is your entry document. The I-94 is your status document[0]. The visa outlines the conditions (including dates) you may enter the country. The I-94 is the record of entry/departure and dictate your required date of departure.
> This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
This is a completely different conversation and scenario that what was being previously discussed. There is a pretty significant difference between illegal border crossing vs overstaying your status. The latter never performed an illegal border crossing. These people are documented.
And I believe all of this conflation of entering the country illegally with overstaying a visa or violating the restrictions on a visa having passed through a Border Control checkpoint is at the heart of a lot of what's happening right now. The whole concept of "illegal immigration" was expanded to contain this other category of person who went through Border Control properly, they have a passport from their home country with a stamp or a visa, but they are not complying with the requirements of the visa or for the entry stamp. These people are not criminals and many of them have put down roots here and would be model citizens if they had citizenship.
Because ICE is having a lot of trouble finding enough people who crossed illegally to round up and put in concentration camps, they're scouring the country for people in the other category. And in many cases the threat of visa cancellation is being used to suppress political speech. A lot of people don't know that because they don't understand that there's a way to get here legally that doesn't involve getting citizenship or a green card. I think if you've never left the country it probably doesn't occur to you that there's a whole system of checkpoints that you can use to enter the country but almost zero control after that other than your own good faith efforts. And this is true just about everywhere else in the world.
That is manifestly not the same thing as overstaying a visa. Moreover, not only does it not apply if you’re already found to be in the country illegally you have to be caught in the act of entering - it was amended in 1996 to apply a civil penalty by the same act that created expedited removal (yes, it is not supposed to be in lieu of any statutory criminal penalty that _may_ be applied) and lower court judges have found against the re-entry provisions in 1326 [1]
> This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry
None of which has anything to do with the matter at hand.
It’s not ICE’s opinion about who is illegal, it’s congress’s. Didn’t they create the immigration laws that are on the books? I can never understand why people seem to blame the enforcement agencies for the laws they are enforcing.
But I agree with the sentiment that they are selecting the easiest targets.
ICE can make them un-illegal by granting them parole, without further action from congress. AFAIK they can even do it unilaterally, though congress could choose to check them later.
Don't know how it is in the states but in most places in Europe using violence against a violent person is likely to end up very badly for you, even if you are a guard and have the necessary permits and training. You are not going to risk being fined or jailed to stop some criminal from shoplifting from a store that is not even yours.
What is the role of a security guard if not to wield violence? Their equipment implies a capability for violence. Are they unable to perform their job legally in Europe?
Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.
Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.
If you want to risk hurting someone whilst restraining him… Otherwise, it’s not worth it. What equipment are you talking about anyway, the nightstick? In my language it is formally called the “defensa”, implying that it can’t be used to attack someone.
There's a reason local rent-a-cops here hire almost exclusively seniors: they're _not_ going to go chasing someone down, they're just going to follow instructions, go for their walk around the site every 30 minutes and generally not cause trouble when they get bored.
Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with. A violent person will probably get it out of their system quickly. If you fight them, though, that creates a feedback loop that won't stop until someone is injured or dead. Just let people express themselves and everyone will be fine.
At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.
"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."
That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.
Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.
This mindset is what perpetually allows the violent to abuse the weak. What a violent person needs is a boot in the mouth. Or as many as necessary until he understands that’s not the way to behave. We are talking about people who generally have a low level of intelligence and do not understand anything else.
I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.
(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
It's something I've thought about. It's not totally clear from the police reports. I've read them through several times and the offender had hit about seven stores that day tearing off Rogaine en masse, and the cops seemed to be on their trail already. The hit-n-run certainly would have put a flame up their ass.
The high trust society is "gone" in many segments of society, but I don't see that we've made a decision to forsake it. Forsaking implies renouncing or turning away from it intentionally.
When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.
When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.
Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.
I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.
I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.
The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.
Your theory of urban/rural bifurcation is overly reductive. My city had a population of about 40,000 in the 70s (when guns were left in racks in the backs of trucks in the high school parking lot)—it's about twice that today. (I did however just return from visiting my wife's hometown in northern Idaho, which has a population of about 500, and indeed I did not feel the need to lock my car, despite keeping a firearm inside of it.)
I don't care to propose any solutions here, especially around such politically-volatile topics, because I believe the actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did are worth acknowledging and investigating first.
40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.
Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.
Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.
In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.
I assure you there's quite the difference between a city (that even has “City” it its name!) of 80,000, and a town of 500. It's easy to see conflating the two as “high density population dweller ignorance” for anyone who has lived in or near all three (500, 80,000, 1M+).
I mean yea, I'm from bumfuk nowhere farmland where there was nothing close. Of course that meant a lot in the late 70s where you might get 3 channels on the TV. We were very disconnected from the world back then.
That's no longer true. Everyone has a cellphone pretty much everywhere. You don't think of hoodlum stuff while bored, you watch a livestream of it and think "I could do that too".
There's definitely a rural element to it. I left probably $10,000 worth of construction equipment out for the stealing for 2 years while building my house in the country. Just totally unmonitored vacant property, surrounded by poor people in trailers who badly could have used the money if they cared to steal it. Of course neighbors would never think to steal it because burning your name in a small town is the same thing as banishment or starving to death because you'll never get another job / lover / friend / help.
It would have been gone in 15 minutes at my house in the city.
In a rural area, there’s only a handful of people who would notice the opportunity. Odds are pretty good that they won’t take it, because most people aren’t thieves. In the city, thousands of people will spot the opportunity and odds are good that a few of them are thieves.
> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.
I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.
Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.
Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.
But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.
This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.
People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.
Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.
The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.
For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.
All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.
The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.
50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.
This said, there is something that has change.
24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.
Someone has never worked retail. They know they can get away with it because pretty much any corporate store has a policy that employees can't try to stop them. An employee at a local REI was fired for trying to stop one of the daily thefts they were having.
Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.
Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.
IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.
I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.
self-checkout at a grocery store is so maddening. There are enough edge cases (discounted items, multiples, lack of barcodes, special deals) to make it painful if you have anything more than a few staples. And I'm sure it's also part of the disgusting push to barcode & box produce which is a negative for everyone but the suppliers & stores.
>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss
I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.
I was at a Whole Foods last year and was tired from driving for about 6hrs straight. I scanned one item, set up a paper bag on the right, and then mindlessly bagged every other item in my cart without scanning. I paid probably $3-4 on a $60 purchase.
As soon as I got to the hotel and figured it out, I went back to correct the mistake--but imagine getting harassed or taken to the back for a careless error? I'm sure that happens more often than I hear about.
(PS I am genuinely surprised their weight sensor, that flags an attendant, didn't go off. That thing usually trips if you breathe on it funny.)
The last time I forgot to scan something hiding the back of my cart I caught the mistake as I was leaving and ran to another self-checkout to scan the item. The one employee they had watching over at least 7 self checkout stations thanked me personally because apparently if the cameras caught the error the overworked employee would have been responsible and might have lost her job.
It's funny that you mention CVS. I went to use the human checkout at CVS last time I was there because the line for self-checkout was so long, only to be told "in order to check out at this register, you need to have a CVS extra-care card".
You really have to be able to judge to self checkout ability of the people in line. Some will get stuck for 5 min before a clerk comes to do it for them.
Less relevant, but reminds me of my all-time favorite grocery store LP encounter, near MIT. The chain was running this big promotion with lots of tear-open prize tickets that are either coupons or game board pieces, so I had been visiting often, to buy ramen noodles (one ticket per package!) and I had a small stack of coupons in my wallet. I was checking my coupons for this visit in the middle of a center aisle, and was returning my wallet to my back pocket, when this nice middle-aged probably church-going woman store employee walked up, looked at me, and the "oh!" expression on her face said she was very surprised that I was stealing. She hurried off. When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in, by sprawling across both the lane and the conveyor. The young checkout woman says to him, annoyed, "Not you again." The guy strikes up a conversation with me. "That's a nice backpack. ... If I had a backpack like that, people would think I was stealing something." It was an ordinary cheap bare-bones store-branded backpack. He's getting close to illegally detaining me, which would go extremely badly for him. To de-escalate, I do my best folksy code-switching, and pretend not to know what's going on. My hyperobservant mode also kicked in: there was abnormal maneuvers of multiple people from the other side of the checkouts. One young guy coming up with the others, my eyes dark to him, he sees I see him, and for some reason gets a look like he's noping the f right out of whatever is going down, and he spins 180 and quickly walks away. Eventually, this friendly and sensible person, who I took to be the manager on duty, comes up on the other side of the checkout, and we have a friendly conversation about the ticket promotion. I think she immediately realized that I was a good-natured MIT type, not a shoplifter. And I would guess she thought the LP guy was a clown who risks getting the store sued someday.
Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?
It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.
Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.
> Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?
1. Social media today has strong mob behavior, which is one of the reasons I often default to not naming when you want to talk about a more general problem. In this case, it would probably be OK, but I defaulted to not. Think of it like a blame-free post-mortem for the org to learn from.
2. I don't want to invite more grief from elements the stores and their bureaucratic mechanisms, if the mention of them online percolates up to corporate. The-coverup-is-worse-than-the-crime is a commonplace thing in corporate hierarchies, and if we're talking about a potentially dim/petty/underhanded person with access to power (e.g., the high-tech systems including features like facerec and maintaining profiles of ordinary people, and some data shared between companies) that could be a whole lot of grief for you. You can possibly eventually find out what happened, and sue, but the harm to you will be done, so better to just stay off the radar of sketchy employees of stores you frequent.
I get this and tend to not name names either, but at the same time I also think the mob like behavior is a symptom of the rampant abuse. What's the old MLK Jr quote? So honestly I've been asking myself if not naming names is actually the best strategy here. I tend to also be willing to give benefit of the doubt. But it is clear that people are taking advantage of this behavior as well. So I guess the question is which failure mode is worse: corporations being caught in the cross-fire or corporations taking advantage of good nature? (There's definitely more complexity than this one question)
I should have specified that I worked LP in the early 2000's but I doubt much has changed, since bigotry and racism do not seem to ever go away, especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution.
Lasted a mere 6 months at that job before I decided I could no longer turn a blind eye, since by then it had become clear to me that the problem was not isolated to just a few LP associates.
My observations (Canada, bigger city): The LP people you see (ie in "uniform") are often visible minorities, often women. They're positioned to remind you "we're watching!" not pursue any action. At best they'll call emergency services (a health event as common as theft). The covert LP people seem to be big, white, young males - the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around. Their game seems to typically be stop the known thieves, recover stuff and kick them out of the store. Physical confrontations are limited because of liability and only rarely do they call the cops. I'd expect the experience is different in the US or other environments.
> the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around
Hah, I was in JC Penney and I grabbed a handkerchief for a suit, and I packed it into my fist, to do a magic trick type thing. Went to find my fiancee, felt someone behind me. Except I looked back, and he hurriedly asked a sales associate some benign question about where to find X. I kept walking to my fiancee, who was looking at jewelry, and when I got there he ducked behind the counter, as if he worked there, and was poking at the register and talking to another sales associate. I pulled the handkerchief out of my closed fist, did some lame "ta da" thing to my fiancee, and dude looks disappointed and walks off, no longer pretending to be either an employee or customer.
It’s common sense to avoid putting things in your pocket in stores. What’s with the creepy write up about this? You sound like you were going to spaz out and attack multiple people if this escalated. Why not simply open your backpack and show them what’s inside? A lot of MIT types look like they haven’t been outside in months , school shooter types , so I don’t get that analogy either.
> When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in
Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?
The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda
“new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.
The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.
We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!
Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.
> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).
The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.
It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long.
Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work.
In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.
Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.
There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.
Well, if you're actually paying for delivery. What's happening these days seems to be more of an offloading of that expense onto the deliverypeople. It "works" until a working vehicle becomes too expensive. Then, if you're lucky, you're paying the same amount to get your item in a week, when your house hits their algorithmically-generated route. Alternatively, deliveries could actually be priced marginally above cost (instead of below), and a lot of people can't afford it anymore. Good thing those retailers are still open. /s
These exist in retail space now, but you can't go there. DashMarts are full-service general stores that delivery drivers stop at to pick up orders. It's like a ghost kitchen but for Dollar General. If they'd open up a "civilian" window then I'd visit every day.
The Best Buy near me is halfway there. They split their previous retail location in half. One half is still a walk-in retail store experience, but much smaller than before and more focused on being a showroom for the more expensive things and only a handful of accessories actually around on the floor. The other half is pretty much a warehouse. Outside, one set of doors is now dedicated to curbside pickup from the warehouse side. In between the doors to the showroom area and the curbside, it's a big set of automated lockers to pick up orders 24/7.
At a lot of the stores that offer it, the curbside pickup is hopping. Tons of associates constantly wheeling out cartloads of merchandise to an ever-rotating group of cars. More and more people opt for the curbside experience it seems, which is pretty much the full-service experience just more asynchronously. I do it from time to time, but typically not for grocery items as I usually don't like the experience of substitutions or the app saying they have something when they really don't.
Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.
The vast majority of people believe what the government tells them, and the government tells that that Covid is no longer happening and you have nothing to worry, everyone has returned to work, and masking is now only something that criminals use to hide their identity.
We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.
When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).
The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.
Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).
This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.
Any LP system will have false positive and false negative. If we can have a perfect LP system without false signals, I think self-checkout systems would have been more wide spread by now.
I was accused of not paying for certain items at a grocery store recently, and I explained that I bought those at another store. The LP person didn’t even ask to check the receipt from the other store. I proceeded with packing my groceries and went home.
I wonder if we can recognize that store people would want to reconfirm if we have correctly paid for the things we thought we bought, and we just answer them. No need to assume ill intent.
These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both?
However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.
I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.
No shoplifting enforcement is done through the courts and most importantly, the police. There is a huge difference here.
Courts incur costs between fees and lawyers, and even filing a report with the dept of labor (the typical recourse most people take at first) means you have to wait while you aren't being compensated for that time. Given wage theft in the majority of cases impacts people who can't often afford to go without those lost wages, this is a tough situation to be in, and even if you go through the labor department with a complaint, manage to get it reviewed in a timely manner (it typically takes months before hearing anything), you may still end up in court anyway depending on a number of factors.
You could sue for the lost wages directly, but again, this becomes an issue of cost, getting the case heard and tried in a timely manner etc. This could drag on for months to years, depending.
On the other hand, if a store sees someone shoplifting, they can and do call the police, and they can and will arrest someone for shoplifting. Its dealt with close to or during the incident occurring. Thats a really big difference in the feedback loop.
Imagine now, that you could call the police when you have a verifiable instance of wage theft, and the person(s) responsible was arrested and you given upfront restitution pending trial. That would be the equivalent of how we treat shoplifting vs wage theft. The differences are not minor, and I imagine they're intentional on behalf of lobbying from business groups.
If business owners or their subordinates were being arrested for wage theft I imagine things would change quickly, but there's such a lag time between actual accountability and the instance of it happening - and even when found guilty they simply pay the back wages plus penalties in the best case scenario, and thats if it gets to the point of either a lawsuit or arbitration on behalf of the labor department - that they have done the calculation that paying incorrect compensation (the most common form of wage theft) is overall costing them less than paying out labor disputes, as with anything that has hefty process attached to it without guaranteed results, it discourages the most vulnerable from engaging with that system even though they would benefit most.
They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.
>They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.
Nowhere in my post did I remotely claim equivalence. In actual fact, I was pointing out that they are very different crimes, with different enforcement. Trying to strawman something I didn't actually remotely say is grossly disingenuous.
Whataboutism is grotesque. For any crime, there are always the bores doing the "yeah, but what about worse crime". It's useless noise.
I want both crimes absolutely crushed. If someone is a shoplifting fan because they think wage theft justifes it, they're a garbage person.
Some time ago I had a mild case of cerebral palsy, enough to slightly distort my facial features. And sure enough that made the AI flag me frequently for 'grocery frisking' by suspicious personnel in the supermarket where I am regular customer for years. That means nothing anymore. The supermarket is a factory, and you are a shopping trolley, a wallet, and a potential thief.
Yeah, none of it really works anymore. I'm at the point where my desired approach is, "Give everything away and people be f*cking adults about only taking what's needed, and good stewards of what's taken." It's obvious that all of the socioeconomic guardrails do exactly zero, because downstream of "rich people doing whatever the f*ck they want" is "poor people also doing whatever the f*ck they want, just more desperately". Let there be chaos for a moment, and when everyone realizes that shortages and waste suck, we'll self-organize a better protocol. But these thousand bandages over the festering wound of a culture with a completely disordered relationship to goods can't keep it all together but for so long.
In my teenage years I worked at a k-mart that hired a Loss Prevention guy sometime after they hired me.
The LP guy caught a few non-employee shoplifters, but there kept being more loss until eventually an employee - one who had been there a long time - stole something on camera. It turned out to be the employee who had installed all of the cameras, but apparently he just got brazen/sloppy.
After that he got arrested and I never saw him again, and a few months later the LP guy moved on because the store's losses had dropped to more acceptable levels.
My wife is diabetic, which means she is at higher risk from covid. My parents are old.
I have a duty to my family to protect them, and if that means wearing a mask to reduce my risk of getting covid, then their safety overrules my own comfort.
I have a duty to protect my fellow citizens. Some of them are also vulnerable to covid, though I don't know them personally.
The scientific proof of association between school (esp school start) and the spread of disease goes back over 100 years. I see no reason it would be different for covid, perhaps even stronger for covid where many college age people would be asymptomatic or low symtpoms.
In a town of big-name universities, where people are constantly coming and going from all around the world, and the reality of students living and socializing heavily, in cramped conditions, often with little sleep... Covid still seems to be "in the air".
Most people no longer wear masks in stores here, but there are some. And some employees do as well. Including the person at/near the customer service desk of the grocery I mentioned, I think the last 2 times I was in there.
meh if you don't have kids and really want to experience highly contagious viris then take a stroll through a day care. You'll be feeling symptoms before you get back to your car.
COVID is down from its peak, as I understand. It's just very much not gone, and by no means less nasty. We had the opportunity to wipe it out with a short, synchronised global lockdown, and we squandered it, and now it's like plague.
We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.
The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."
True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?
The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.
Australia managed to keep COVID out for nearly two years, before they ran out of resources. Stop all non-local travel, identify where it's spread to, establish a buffer zone, wait to see if we drew our buffer zone large enough… two weeks later, and most of the world can be business as usual (minus globe-hopping); two months later, and COVID-19 is as dead as smallpox… assuming everything went right. Realistically, it might take four or five months for everyone infected to recover (or die): but it's a lot easier to enforce a quarantine when there are a hundred cases in the whole world.
This would be expensive, but as expensive as what we did was? Surely not! So, other regions providing funding and resources to the regions taking on the burden would be a strictly rational move.
You might say "oh, but people didn't know about the spread!"… but that's a ridiculous claim. The Less Wrong crowd tracked it in near-real-time from open source intelligence, and governments had access to more intelligence than that. The number of governments giving nonsensical advice, like "masks don't work because the respiratory disease is not spread via aerosols", and "replace your soap with dilute alcohol", lampshades a broad coordination problem. (We're not much past the "sweet-smelling herbs will protect from the plague" advice of yore, it seems.)
The things we needed to do were done – but for ridiculous political reasons, nearly everyone waited until after the disease had reached their regions to close their borders: internationally and intranationally, at every level! (The algorithm in Pandemic II's easy mode was more sensible than that.) So much of that effort, that psychological torment, was wasted. Even if the whole world had taken Australia's approach, we still would've brought the disease to manageable levels within a year. But there wasn't the political will… and so it goes. I think we're less prepared for the next novel disease outbreak, now.
New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.
It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.
What it requires is authoritarianism. It requires to do things that are wildly unpopular. I'm happy every time wildly unpopular things fail. It does not matter to me that those who want to implement authoritarianism think they are right. Even if they are, we have to have agency.
Equality among races was wildly unpopular across the entire western hemisphere for a while there.
Forcing business owners to allow people of all races into your business was both unpopular and cited as an example of authoritarianism.
An American example: MLK never had popular support during his life. His approval rating around the time of his assassination was in the 30s or so. It would not be unfair to say that in the places that mattered most, he was wildly unpopular.
Doing the right thing is frequently unpopular at the time that you do it. There is a balance, but if you give everyone agency, you have to figure out how to keep the assholes from using their agency to infringe on another's agency.
A short global lockdown? China pursued the zero COVID policy for two years. Even highly restrictive measures weren't enough to stem it.
COVID is no longer a novel virus and its deadliness has vastly decreased. Yes it is by any reasonable understanding of the phrase, COVID is "less nasty". At its peak, 20,000 people were dying each week due to COVID in the US. Presently that figure sits around 200.
Its immediate deadliness has decreased, but it still causes cardiopulmonary and brain damage, and effects are cumulative with repeated exposure, and now it's endemic and frequently asymptomatic. Differently nasty, but not less nasty.
From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.
COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.
How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.
Not more: sooner (and, as clearly stated in my previous comment, less). By the time most countries were doing lockdowns, it was to prevent their local health systems from completely collapsing, not to contain and eliminate the disease in any real sense.
I think the comparison to plague is accurate, since quarantine and social distancing were effective in reducing mortality during the Black Death, as were plague vaccines.
Home Depot's self-checkouts are using this facial ID to build/maintain their shoplifting database — this tracks thefts by the same person across multiple visits, and is used over time to build up a case against errant self-checkout-ers (i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier).
There is also CCTV AI (whether artificial intelligence, or actually indians) which can intervene with your self-checkout process to "remind" you that you didn't actually scan everything.
Beware that face detection may not be an issue under BIPA if it's not storing biometric markers [1], only a hash. As an engineer, and concerned citizen, I'd say that's a thin line as far as privacy protections go, but apparently the law disagrees and face detection tech suppliers are well-aware on how to monetize on the discrepancy [2]
In any case, the plaintiff will most likely be able to take the case to discovery.
Probably discovery and a settlement to avoid a trial on this. BIPA has statutory payouts which will cripple you (rightly or wrongly). Statutory fines can be an awesome way to vindicate the public's rights and stop companies being assholes. It's way easier to litigate and settle a case than using torts.
I've noticed at supermarkets here that of the dozens of times those 'you haven't scanned something' warnings have come up, only one time the item hadn't actually scanned when I thought it had. Every other time has been a false positive for me. They're pretty dodgy, the workers always seem pretty frustrated with it as they go around clearing them for people (sometimes a handful of people waiting, falsely accused by the machines)...
All of the places around here that had first-gen units with a scale on the packing side (to make sure you actually scanned eg a banana and not a two pound block of cheese, yet were constantly wrong) have replaced them with newer versions that don't have scales or any other way that I can see to validate that what you scanned is what you put into your bag.
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
The horrible scale system of self-checkouts brought my anxiety to a fever pitch. Any slight adjustment to the bag or moving anything around would literally set off an alarm for "assistance." Still gives me low-key ptsd even though I know they don't use them anymore.
Still here at Kroger which consistently calls for assistance.
And then there’s fucking Costco where after the system calling over a rep after I scanned something. apparently I am only to use the scanning gun for things that are staying in the cart, when I bagged it it called them over.
We still have them in the UK. As you say, any attempt to adjust your packing sets the alarm off so I find it's quickest to place everything directly onto the scales and only pack once I've paid.
At my local grocery store, if the item doesn't end up on the scale in about three seconds, the machine locks up and requires an attendant to unlock it. Makes bagging as you go nigh impossible. Infuriating.
There's a smaller grocery store here where the self checkouts actually advertise that you can scan two things before putting them away (and you can!). It really should be standard.
I always go to a cashier. Every damn time the self checkout is open, there are two or three employees standing around doing nothing while one runs around fixing all the errors and does all the ID checks. If those people has just been in a regular checkout area, all those customers waiting at self checkout would have been out of the store already. Self checkout is a fucking joke 90% of the time.
you have to put the item on the scale before it lets yo uscan the next item. So you can scan the same item twice if you scan it once, put the other item on the scale, and scan the item again.
My go-to grocery store does not use a scale in the bagging area. You don't even have to bag anything, you can just scan items and put them back in your cart, which is what I normally do. There is one employee standing there monitoring 7 or 8 self-checkouts, but they've never confronted me about allegedly not scanning something, and I've never heard them confronting anyone else.
Another nearby mega-chain still uses the scales and makes you bag every item before you can scan anything else. I don't ever shop there, almost entirely for that reason alone. I would definitely never knowingly shop at a store that was scanning my face and storing it in a database.
Not necessarily. In my case I will often buy a few bunches of bananas, which don't all fit on the scanner’s scale at once. If I try to weigh them once bunch at a time, I will get a “too many scans of this item” alert and a staff member will have to come unlock the machine for me (and they'll usually scold me for not weighing all of my bananas, which can't all fit on the scale, at once).
Fun fact: the self checkout attendant usually has a button on a portable device that can remotely unlock your session.
They aren't allowed to use it and instead are required to physically walk up, move the customer out of the way, and push the same button on your screen.
I think CostCo's self-checkouts are best designed/staffed. Other than not accepting cash, they are my favorite (even though still verify scanning of each item, verified by bag-area weighing).
WalMart has two popular designs within my city (not sure if one is just un-updated, yet¿) — their type which accepts half dollars is my favorite cash design.
I have seen designs which don't weigh each item, allowing simultaneous scanning... that also call an attendant to verify if it thinks you snuck an item by (then plays a loop/clip of its alleged violation).
Personally, I have a family member that works as attendant to a dozen self-checkouts... and it seems like it would make more corporate sense to have more human checkers and only allow cash with them.
Ok so Ive heard this rumour spread around a lot and I still have yet to hear anyone back this up with anything beyond just speculation and hearsay. It also doesn't make sense.
This premise assumes two things for it to be true:
1. These stores have the technology to detect when you started a checkout transaction with an item, but said item was not scanned.
2. These stores have the additional technology to detect the cost of this item (afterall, if they're aiming for a threshold then they have to have some sort of monetary figure here).
I don't doubt that machine learning object detection can say, track a banana versus an apple. But I sincerely doubt its reliable enough where it can classify Mandarin oranges versus regular oranges.
If the tech was reliable enough to do EITHER of these two technical abilities (let alone both of them at the same time), then the grocery would simply employ this technology as part of the self checkout process itself. Screw prosecuting people, just have them use this wizzbang auto detection self checkout where no scanning is needed.
Finally, I sincerely doubt that even with enough instances that you'd be successful in a prosecution that you actually could prove intent to shoplift versus say the much more likely fact that you forgot to scan an item or poorly scanned it. Again, to prove a serious intent then would subsequently have to build some sort of pattern analysis (i.e. you always stole expensive cheese or something) to make it obvious.
Has there been even a single prosecuted case someone can actually point to? It really doesnt make sense. I also could see this being thrown out because an argument could be made that the company sitting back and letting this continue to occur without intervention is tacitly allowing it to continue and thus sets a precedence that its allowable.
Why guilty? The Indians are doing their job that stupid tech companies pay them for. The phrase has nothing to do with Indians but rather with unmasking the "AI washing" done by companies trying to drive up stock prices.
Without justifying the theft, isn't it weird that they get rid of cashiers at registers which would scan your items, and thus prevent theft, put computers in place and then rely on software to shift the burden of solving theft to the public?
How would that work? If they have video from a year ago that looks like a person pocketing some item, what good is that without them showing that the person actually had possession of the item after they left the store?
I've seen a lot of discovery in these criminal cases from Walmart. They do typically wait until the loss reaches a certain point before acting and then they will come with a mountain of photos and videos showing the offender picking up the items all the way to them leaving the store on each visit.
I remember one I saw where the guy was filling two shopping carts with laptops at each Walmart, each one so high he could barely see over them. Then pushing the two carts out through the tire shop area. Did this at multiple stores. Walmart only called the cops once it was over $60K estimated loss.
I don't recall ever seeing a Wally World where the laptop boxes are just out for the taking, not in a locked cabinet.
That being said, Target stores in Washington do something similar, as the threshold for felony theft is $1,000, they'll pull the trigger on LE / LP involvement if you hit that threshold over multiple events, and bring the receipts for the previous.
I _somewhat_ think that's ripe to be challenged on proving intent in the previous instances, but I also know that serial retail thieves are not likely to be the most sympathetic cause there.
I thought the same thing. I saw photos and videos. I couldn't see any security devices on any of the laptops, but they were piled high on both carts. I saw a spreadsheet Walmart provided of each theft (from a single offender) breaking down how many items were taken and what the total was on each theft. It was like $7000, $13000, $6000 etc etc. The offender got an offer of 6 years DOC, which is served at 50% in Illinois for non-violent. They should get an additional 6 months "good time" on top of that, so maximum 2.5 years. Bearing in mind they were selling the laptops for 50 cents on the dollar from what I understand, they probably took in maybe $30K cash for 2.5 years locked up. (also bear in mind their family will have to support them through this process with a lawyer, about $5K, and probably another $5-10K in commissary and phone calls)
It seems like a good lawyer should be able to win. Evidence that shows a person picking something up on camera and then leaving the store without paying for anything doesn't feel all that strong.
Yeah i feel like there are exact same pictures when i buy something, if you happen to leave out the pictures from when i was standing in line and at the checkout. you could totally make it look like i stole stuff.
I mean, you could, but when walmart sees you walking out the door, they'll go trace your entire route and keep the film off of each of the cameras from entrance to exit of the store.
In the end though, unless they stop you and find the merchandise or have you on video with the stuff outside of the store, there's no proof you stole anything. It's circumstantial which is relatively weak.
Plus, Walmart doesn't prosecute anybody. They hand the evidence over to the police and the the district attorney decides if they want to prosecute. Walmart can file a civil suit which I'm wondering if that's what they actually do. There (as I understand it), they only have to show that you likely stole something vs a criminal case where they have to show beyond reasonable doubt that you stole something. It's a much lower bar.
What Walmart can and does you at the time they file with the state is trespass you. Which counts for all Walmart stores and properties. That's where things like facial identification probably come back in so your caught the moment you walk in a store.
From much experience in this, I've never seen Walmart file a civil suit.
They don't technically prosecute anyone, but in the county where I was witness to prosecutions for Walmart shop-lifting they were putting a lot of pressure on the DA office. They would bring a ton of muscle, investigators, attorneys, print outs, DVDs, etc. They would push their prosecutions hard when they wanted to.
>Walmart works with policy makers and public safety officials to ensure we are providing a safe workspace for our associates and a safe, enjoyable shopping experience for our customers. The nature of retail crime varies across our stores and geographies, and includes complex organized retail crime. Walmart works closely with our trade associations to support efforts to pass laws (such as the Combatting Organized Retail Crime Act) that ensure these crimes incur meaningful penalties, and that law enforcement have resources to appropriately prosecute these crimes.
Needless to say the can help sway local elections based on how they push certain political figures.
If you are on video pushing a cart through the parking lot with the items clearly visible, that could be a pretty strong case.
If all they have is a dozen videos where it looks like you are shoving something in your pocket but no other hard evidence, that wouldn't go anywhere in court.
This is another example of the poor being punished harder. A desperate mother who steals repeatedly will reach felony levels and spend years in prison or face deportation, but a rich teen who steals for fun will stay below felony and get away Scott free.
WOW. Look, being in the country without "authorization" isn't even a crime. It's an administrative matter. Don't go implying that actions are somehow worse when someone who took the risk of moving to a new country does them as opposed to someone who won the birth lottery.
The act of entry without inspection is a misdemeanor crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. Repeat offenses can be felonies. It is just a civil violation if they have once entered with permission but lost it, e.g. a visa overstay or violation, adjustment denial, status expiration or revocation. So the Biden era catch-and-release rules created millions of such cases.
You missed the bigger point to focus on the technical inaccuracy:
> Don't go implying that actions are somehow worse when someone who took the risk of moving to a new country does them as opposed to someone who won the birth lottery.
Im not sure we should allow such premeditated charge stacking, it is just further weaponizing the law and fueling our prison industrial complex for zero gain to society. Who is to say many of those people wouldn't have stopped after being caught and charged the first time? Imagine if cops sat on the side of the road not pulling people over, just recording minor traffic offenses in a file, and then a year or so later drop 10+ charges on a person all at once and turning the collective charges into felony reckless driving charges? People would be outraged and nothing of worth would be gained.
I have yet to see any actual evidence of such a problem, just a bunch of outrage from social media commentators who also claim things like Portland was burnt to the ground by BLM and other hyper-exaggerated crap.
And even if it is true, I still don't see why premeditated charge stacking should be allowed. If someone comes into the store that they know will steal, they should be banned from the store and arrested for trespassing then and there. Shitty criminal justice policies does not justify creative abuses of the law by corporations or prosecutors. Having 25% of the world prison population, along with all the costs that go along with it does not benefit us, it only hurts us. And it has repeatedly been shown that stiffer criminal charges do not prevent crime, if it did the US would be one of the safest 1st world countries, not the most dangerous 1st world country by a large margin that makes countries without actual functioning government seem peaceful.
>I thought it was because the stores can't press charges if it's a small thing, so the only way they can bring any action is to build a case.
Firstly, stores don't "press charges." A store may report a crime, but it is the state that "presses charges" and prosecutes alleged criminal activity, not the store.
Secondly, in the US, we have statutes of limitation[0] which limit the time in which criminal charges can be brought. These vary by state and by offense, but IIUC Petit (sometimes referred to as 'Petty') Theft usually has a one or two year statute of limitations.
I bring that up as, again IIUC, other countries (notably the UK) do not have such limitations.
IANAL, but I'm not sure if multiple petit thefts (usually misdemeanors) can be aggregated into a single charge of grand theft[0] (a felony). I'd expect that also varies by state. YMMV.
[0] Once again, this varies by state, but petit theft (larceny) is typically charged for stuff valued at less than $5,000.00, while grand larceny is for stuff valued at USD5,000.00 or more.
Stores don't decide whether to charge someone with a crime, the prosecutor does. They probably wait for small to become big because shoplifting a small amount doesn't reach a high enough bar to make prosecuting likely.
Or if your dealing with forgetful / tech confused old people. Now your putting 75 year olds in jail when a sooner alerting system would've made them notice if they were not using it correctly.
I'm not a trained cashier, if I forget to scan something it's not the same as theft. Not sure how it would play out in a court situation but this is always my go-to when I get accused of fucking something up in the store; also why I decline the receipt check at the door (legal in my state).
Most professional cashiers are only trained in one merchant's POS. Suddenly, me a layman consumer is supposed to be a flawless operator of every variant of self-checkout POS that I encounter. It's a bit crazy to me that a court would side with a merchant unless some egregious evidence or pattern had could be demonstrated.
> also why I decline the receipt check at the door (legal in my state).
Costco can't enforce the receipt check, but they can terminate your membership - but that's only because they're a membered organization in the first place.
It's thankfully still an option not to use self-checkouts. I sometimes do that if I have one item only, but basically always queue to an actual cashier.
I loved the early days when nobody touched the self-checkouts and it was like an additional choice.
Not surprising that they’ve titrated the cashier lines to always be much longer.
At least it’s not a government again giving you quick service if you sign away your rights with a lineup around the block for those that with to assert their rights.
I’m also thankful that my local grocery store is subject to a massive development proposal, so they’re not bothering with capital improvements like self-checkout.
The option is becoming rare amongst most large retailers I frequent and only exists in my local Home Depots if I go stand through the contractor lines in the lumber section.
I've gotten used to the expectation that I will be my own cashier at most places, but I'm not OK assuming any liability that comes with my lack of cashier skillset/training which is what they want.
Seems like proper punishment is only way to get deterrent effect. Or the courts to do their job. So to me this sounds like workable way, stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
- Punishment works to deter crime when it's immediate and high-likelihood. Particularly, if someone gets caught and faces some immediate consequence on one of the first few times they shoplift (especially the first time) then that makes a huge difference to the probability that they'll become a habitual shoplifter
- The vast majority of shoplifting is done by a small number of essentially lifelong career shoplifters. Imprisoning them is unlikely to set them straight, but taking them off the streets for long periods makes a significant impact on the amount of shoplifting the community experiences
So why we are even using it anymore? Why not then close down all the prisons? If there is no deterrent effect or rehabilitation effect. Wouldn't it be greater savings just to close it all down and let everyone out?
People don't need "rehabilitation", they need help. Nobody would need to shoplift if they could afford what they need. Prices should always be indexed to the customer's income. That's it - make it so everyone can afford things, and crime ends overnight. It works for healthcare. People with insurance pay for those without. Why not for groceries and TVs?
I agree that prisons are literally useless in stopping criminal behavior, and almost certainly accelerate it for most. Prison is only scary the first day on your first bit. The second time you get locked up you already know the system, know all the staff and know all the other inmates. It's less of a deterrent each time.
The issue is that a vast proportion of offenders aren't committing crimes out of necessity. A large proportion are doing it because it appears to be quick, easy money and regular jobs aren't considered manly or cool.
This is only a half-response, but I think one beneficial policy to increase food-access would be to remove regressive sales taxes from grocery purchases. Replace lost revenue with a progressive tax.
Several states tax a considerable amount on even basic foodstuffs (e.g. Tennessee).
It seems like would require every business to be able to directly access every customer's income and credit history and would normalize price discrimination.
I think UBI would be better. Expecting capitalists to work against their own self-interest is doomed to fail.
No. When you look at it that way you need to consider the crime that's never committed due to the risk of being imprisoned poses. Given how shitty people in the US treat each other, just during minor disputes/traffic/misunderstandings/etc, I think it's safe to say we'd be a country overrun by murderous rapists in no time without a prison system. It would devolve into anarchy pretty quick. Think the wild west with cars and ARs and without the sheriffs. GTA becomes reality.
The USA should do, perhaps, four fifths of that. Despite having 4% of the world's population it has 25% of the world's prisoners, and one of the highest crime rates in first-world countries so it'd obviously not working.
They could also consider banning substances that make people more aggressive... There's a particular artificial pesticide whose name I don't remember, which is coincidentally banned in all the places with much lower crime rates, and has been shown to alter behaviour in monkeys.
Rehabilitation and support is not what "people" want. Political parties that want more punishment seldom want to spend money even on punishments. So it becomes impossible to put people on a straight path. Having courts do their job is very expensive as well so instead people build their careers on getting fast convictions of people. The thing that helps is consistently building a society that cares, you have to know that the society will certainly react to your actions.
Having a hidden social credit system hidden and managed by a private actor seems like the worst way of doing it.
>stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
I'm not sure if you have been to an American jail but they do not set folks on the straight path. They are basically Crime University, and the folks on the inside trade all kinds of information about how to crime more effectively, where to crime, what tactics police use and what neighborhoods are safest or most dangerous for police activity.
I was thrown in lockup for a weekend for not changing my tags after moving and letting it escalate out of control and what I saw in that inner city lockup truly shocked me. Folks had incredible amounts of illegal goods on them (despite having been searched and thrown in jail) and were openly performing transactions, sharing "industry secrets" and coordinating for future work once they were out.
If you have spent any time in an American jail or prison, I think you would be disabused of the notion that you can simply lock a criminal up for a few months and "fix" them. I would suggest that it's the opposite, a few months in jail turns a newbie criminal into a true amateur or journeyman with networking, education and future opportunities.
No, that's been disproved. Most people don't consider that they'll be caught and so the penalty isn't relevant to their thought process. What does deter is a high likelihood of being caught - so a small fine will be more effective if the detection/enforcement is sufficient. Also, it's often not feasible to tie up the courts and jails with minor offenders (e.g. speeding, using a bus lane etc).
I feel like if the rules are going to change like this, they should change fairly. A few months in jail for what would have been petty crime if not for the repetition seems excessive. If right now there's a lower cash value threshold for prosecution, the fair thing is that there should be a lower rate threshold. For example, someone shouldn't be jailed for stealing a thousand dollars worth of batteries over the course of ten years, I don't think.
What you're describing is essentially the exact point system used for traffic infractions in many countries over the world. Driving 10 km/h above the speed limit? No biggie, you pay a fine. Do it three times? We take your license.
No, not "do it three times". "Get fined for it three times." That's the key difference; there's feedback from the system that's supposed to act as a corrective. What's being discussed here would be taking away someone's license sight unseen, with no previous lesser punishment having been administered.
In the U.K. you get points on a license for being caught speeding (and other offence). Typically 3.
Knock 12 points up over 3 years and you lose your license.
The problem is the time it takes from being caught to getting the letter can be a couple of weeks. You could literally go from 0 points to license loss for driving 10 miles on an empty road with changeable speed limits and have no idea until a week or two later when you get 4 letters arrive.
Now until the court takes away your license you’re still allowed to drive, but it gives you no chance to change your behaviour.
That's an imperfection of the system, not a designed feature of it. It's also possible you sometimes go over the speed limit and there are no sensors around to detect that condition.
I mean, if they walked out with a felony amount of stuff the first time the system would have tossed them directly in jail.
I can understand why the stores will do it this way. Each prosecution is very expensive. If you're going to go though the effort with the legal system bring a case that stops the culprit. More so, doing this tends to scare the hell out of people that think they've gotten away with something. Kinda like the thievery version of the Santa Claus song.
"Walmart knows when you are sleeping. Walmart knows when your away, Walmart knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake".
Well, maybe there should be some sort of public registry where this sort of in process evidence would be publicly viable for you and others. Then you could regularly check it.
If the store is going to be tracking this information, it could just as easily show a message to the offender. "Hey, we're on to you. Knock it off, or else." Going straight for the jugular is just rude.
How about stealing is just rude. Theft is terrible. Trying to justify stealing power tools “bec it’s a big corporation” further degrades society and creates a dishonest low-trust culture.
I live in Illinois and look forward to collecting my $2k check for this but the reality is that the only person to blame for the theft is the person committing the theft. The same way we don’t blame women for how they dress or just because someone is trusting that doesn’t make it right to attempt to steal.
If the company prefers to allow the theft to continue as long they get to press charges, instead of taking more immediate measures that would stop the theft outright, such as banning the person (which must be feasible if they're tracking the person by facial features), somehow I don't think it must be having much of an impact. Note that I'm not defending the thieves here. I'm just saying that this approach seems unnecessarily vindictive and not useful to solve the problem which, let's remember, is "people steal", not "thieves go unpunished".
you, I, and probably most people on HN have the privilege of seeing it this way. for others, it's sometimes not a moral question, but a question of survival or at least dignity.
The difference is that you are informed and penalised each time, rightly giving you the option to change your behaviour. A police officer following a speeder to deliberately have enough offences to take their license immediately would be at least frowned upon in most jurisdictions.
Time to change your laws and/or prosecutors I'd say so those 'minor thefts' can and will be prosecuted resulting in fines which need to be paid - no ifs and buts. Get them early and get them (hopefully not that) often and you may be able to keep the majority of 'proletarian shoppers' on a somewhat less crooked path. If crime pays more people commit crimes, if shoplifting is not dealt with more people shoplift.
> i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier
This feels like it should be illegal. Holding back on reporting or prosecuting until you think you're more likely to get a conviction or a bigger conviction, feels close to entrapment.
To do otherwise is just unnecessarily vindictive, showing that it's the punishment that matters more than the prevention.
The issue is that in many states now prosecutors refuse to prosecute for crimes under a certain threshold, cops often won’t even bother taking a report.
A year ago my wallet was stolen. The guy went on a shopping spree until my cc companies started denying charges. In each store he made sure to spend less than $500, so individually there was no crime worth reporting. I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
The point is that from the store’s point of view the only way to prevent it is to wait for it to be a crime the SA will prosecute. It’s honestly shocking to me that people in these comments rush to defend thieves stealing power tools and stuff from Home Depot. There’s no argument to be made about them “stealing food for their staving families” this is very clearly purely about crimes of opportunity by selfish degenerates who have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of society.
And btw, it’s possible that Home Depot does report every crime, but the only time anything happens is once it reaches that threshold that progressive SAs determine is worth prosecuting.
> I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
Hah. I had pretty good evidence when it came to my stolen laptop and iPhone when I was given a lead to the person selling them on eBay (essentially, someone bought the phone on eBay, tried to convince me to unlock it, and when I refused and the seller refused to take it as a return, he said "I know the real owners info and I'm giving him your info").
His eBay page was a treasure trove. Probably 100+ phones for sale, most "without charger". Same, 50+ laptops, "no chargers or accessories".
Contacted the police.
"He probably didn't steal them himself" - Uhh, isn't selling knowingly stolen property still a crime?
Crime itself is 100% political issue as well, and you show a case of that.
Someone steals enough from big box store, and the cops DO RESPOND and charge etc.
Individual has proof of multiple thefts, and cops don't give one fuck, as in your case.
Now speaking of retail theft, by far the biggest retail theft is time-theft against employees. Do you know wwhat happens when you report that? You're told its a civil matter.
but it's been proven time and time again, that any form of fraud of theft, leads to at least 3x more in the future.
If they get away with it, they never stop, and just keep stealing more and more. Most never hit any repercussions. Yet in amount of actual numbers of people committing those acts, it's a very small number compared to the number of thefts.
So stopping it early is just smarter. Better to stop someone stealing 250 euro, rather than wait a year, let that same person steal more and more, just until they steal 5000 euro and it's worth it to prosecute. It's still the same person, same amount of effort. Just more damage to society.
Is it really any different than the thief who steals things just under the felony limit...but does it every day?
In Texas the felony limit is $2,500. Is stealing $1000 on Monday, $1000 on Tuesday, and $1000 on Wednesday really so much better than stealing $3,000 on Monday?
The delay gives you time to arrange a refund from Visa/Mastercard or to make an insurance claim, if you're a business. You don't really have to lose anything from theft. It's just a business expense for your insurance or card issuer.
Maybe you could argue they aren't doing their best to minimise losses and such aren't eligible for a full recovery of their losses, but not that the perpetrator didn't commit the offense.
I make it a point not to use self-checkout systems because I want to support human interaction even if basic, and contribute to jobs for humans. And cash (most self-checkouts here are card-only).
Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
You don’t want to pay people to do that and put yourself in a higher theft situation, then you haggle the customer even more by treating them like a criminal.
I had one of these happen at a self checkout the other day where the system did object tracking and it turns out I had many duplicate items to scan so I used the same item scan code to save time even though its weight system forces me to do one at a time I can at least have a prealigned code handy. I ended up doing some tricky hand switching between items (crossing over) while doing it quickly and that tripped up the object tracking system, so an employee came over and reviewed the video of my checkout right in front of me… at a grocery store for a $2 item.
The anti consumer sentiment is high for an economy based so highly off consumerism.
> Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
I've seen this sentiment in recent years, but with respect to time, self-checkout was always faster than human cashiers. You didn't need to wait while the cashiers did procedures like counting the money in the drawer and waiting for a supervisor to sign-off on it. The lines were unified so that your line was served by 4-8 checkouts rather than 1 cashier (or 2 as is the case with walmart). That meant that any issue with a particular customer e.g. arguing over pricing presented on the shelf vs on the system, needing to send someone out to verify the shelf, didn't affect the time you needed to wait as much. They were a very positive thing for customers when they were introduced.
Basically, instead of having to get in a line of 3-6 people and having to wait for each of those to be served before you by one cashier, you just instantly check-out with usually no line.
With respect to labor, it's basically the same. That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
> That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
Where I am there is a limit that many people ignore and I have almost never seen any employee try to enforce
Also, self-checkout itself is faster here anyway. We don't have baggers, so in the cashier lanes you have to unload onto the conveyor and put your items into the bags yourself, with some awkward maneuvering since the register is between the conveyor and the bagging area. In self-checkout unloading and bagging is combined into one action: Lift item from cart, pass over scanner on the way to the bags, place in bag, and pay at the end without even having to move. No real additional work on the customer's part.
Also like the other response, I hadn't heard of explicit limits either, as long as everything fits on the bagging scale.
I think self check-out is only faster if you compare it to really, really slow checkout clerks with no dedicated bagger. I've been in grocery stores with fantastic checkout staff where 100 items were checked out and bagged in a minute and a half. Ain't no way I'm going to achieve that rate standing by myself there over a tiny kiosk where I need to find a bag, put every item into bags before scanning the next one.
They don't make a race of it, but I think they go at a reasonable "marathon" pace. There are also dedicated baggers. I should note that cashiers also accommodate other services like paying utility bills, or making withdrawals from one's checking account.
It's not just about speed, though, it's particularly about the unified lane and the fact that 2 self-checkout stations easily fit in the space of a single human cashier station (that may be unoccupied because of a store's hiring budget). It's also about peoples' patience. If a store hires less cashiers and enough people are still willing to wait in line such that there's profit, well...
If the self check out is configured to trust you, it is faster. Each store seems to implement this differently. It's good that you shop at a store that lets you do this yourself. There's one grocery store near me where I have to wait for an attendant to confirm each item because it doesn't like the weight of it, or I scanned it too fast, or something. That one is very much noticeably slower. I avoid shopping there.
The trust is the key. If we are trusted, Home Depot should not be secretly keeping tabs on us...
>Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
Yikes, the entitlement. Should they also have someone push your cart around the store and load it for you?
If you don't like it, you have the freedom of association to use a different store.
Same. And indeed a losing battle. Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend. Maybe it is because it is a means to face away of all the big challenges humanity faces. Being social in complex society requires skill and effort, causes stress. Facing life challenges, and the doom and gloom. The easy way is to flee that, to extract oneself, and technology is bliss here.
Why would I want to wait in line for 5 minutes, when I could be on my way?
Life goes by fast. I’d rather spend those small minutes lost with my loved ones or back to doing things I enjoy more. Over my lifetime that’s a lot of time.
I only shop in person at Whole Foods because it’s two blocks away. Every Tuesday they have some nice discounts and it’s fun to walk the aisles. Otherwise I just deliver groceries from Costco every 2 weeks or my Amazon prime subscriptions.
Why continue purposefully at a disadvantage? Makes no sense.
The bigger point I wanted to make is how pervasively small social interactions with other people are automated away all across the board. At the McDonalds you go through the menu on the monitor at the entrance, or used your mobile. No social exchange at the counter anymore. In the cinema you do the same. AI is going to break the bonds online by indirect agent intermediaries. People become isolated in small in-groups. Until in your local community you sail lonely with your family through a sea full of strangers. You probably can't talk about community anymore then. What is the societal impact of the loss of all these micro interactions? How can we have a tolerant society if we are so separate and individualist?
What genuine connections are you making waiting in line to get movie tickets and popcorn?
Why not just walk to the theater to your seats and actually get excited for the movie? That ticket seller is doing their job and Gtfo.
I think people are so doom and gloom about this stuff.
Isn’t it better to just like go sit at the seats with your family or friends and enjoy the trailers and talk about the movie before it starts? Idk. That’s actual connection building.
I saw Avengers in Japan and my friends and I were talking to Japanese people about the movie at our seats.. using google translate. Actual connection building.
I don’t think anyone goes to the movies to enjoy waiting in line to ask some college student who doesn’t give a shit for 4 tickets to Dune.
The background noise that those social interactions constitute is valuable and important of itself. Bonded relationships are important, but it's a separate matter entirely. Otherwise relationships lived out over the internet would be equal and interchangeable with those lived out in person. It wouldn't matter if you talked to someone face-to-face or over email. The human experience shouldn't be picked apart piece meal with overrationalization and naive maximalism.
The point is that it's not about connection in the slightest. There's more to community than friendship.
> You like having middlemen?
Consider this, there still has to be someone to maintain that machine. What's the point then, exactly, except to pretend like the people around us don't exist? And just because they're not the closest people to us? I'm afraid I don't see the upside, actually.
You wait in line because there weren't enough checkout points in the first place. Poor customer service by your supermarket. It is funny, in the supermarket near me people are coralled into a kind of scan barracks where underage teen guardians frisk their shoppings regularly. There is only one checkout with personnel still operating it. What regularly happens now is that there's a big crowd waiting for a free scan point, like cattle, while that one patient cashier is waiting idle. And will process the groceries much faster than any self-scanner can. Brave new world.
Myeah I think you're just going to badly managed stores. Here I just scan my groceries while putting them in my bag. Then I go to self checkout, put back the scanner and pay. It takes about one minute from entering the self checkout to leaving it and there is never any line.
I think that there's more than just a productivity angle, and that those 3 lines of friendly and casual social exchange with the checkout clerk on every visit are meaningful and valuable, even though on themself only in a small way. These small social exchange form part of the lubricant of a well-functioning society.
In the context of the parent post, don't miss the forest for the trees. 5 minutes away from your loved ones here or there is nothing if, for one example, your loved ones can't find jobs locally (working the till in retail is a common first job for kids, after all...) or otherwise disconnect, going out of our way to avoid interacting with anyone, because of the stress everyday life now requires, doom and gloom, etc. Plus, there's the option of bringing your loved ones with you, if that's your concern.
Even setting that aside, if you're so into min-maxing your free time that you can list waiting in line at the grocery store as one of your biggest regrets in life, then you gotta recognize how privileged a life you lead.
> Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend.
Well... that's because capitalism incentivizes us to do it wrong. Instead of the dreams of the early sci-fi writers getting real - aka, robots and automation do the majority of the work, leaving humans time to socialize - we have it even worse nowadays, with even with the work force of women added to the labor pool, there still are constant political pushes to expand working hours or to even make it legal to hire children again.
If the profits from productivity gains over the last decades would have been distributed to the workers, either in terms of purchasing power or in free time, we wouldn't be in this entire mess.
Same, I refuse to use them. I'm not going to support making cashiers redundant.
On top of that I don't want to be in a position where I get accused of shoplifting when I forgot to scan something. I'm simply not trained on the 7+ different self-checkout terminals they have around here.
Not sure if this is the same for the USA, but worker shortage is the main reason why self-checkout became popular here in Europe at least. Aging population, very low birthrate and higher educated people all contributed to this problem (although not for all countries in the EU).
At least in the US our unemployment rates have been very low. Higher demand for labor leads to higher labor costs which allows more expensive automation to be economical.
You can say "Well pay them more", but that doesn't get you out of a labor shortage. That just ensures you get the labor rather than someone else.
This is only true because of having to wait in line for the checkout personnel. Once you get to the person, if they're even reasonably skilled, they can check out your groceries faster than you can.
My local grocery store has something like 15 checkout aisles, and usually only have one or two open. If they manned each aisle, there would be no wait and self checkout would be pointless. But they are not going to staff properly because the CEO needs another yacht.
In Germany, the entire self-checkout section moves as fast as one human cashier (they're very skilled, this is no joke). And they have one human supervising it at all times. And it takes the space of two human cashier lines, so they double up one of the other lanes. At the end nothing is really gained except a little bit of privacy (but not really because the supervisor's terminal still shows everything you scan)
This is why I don't understand people who support mandatory online / one-click subscription cancellation. Support jobs and require people to call-in to a human to cancel. That's a human-centred system that contributes to jobs.
Self-checkouts are not the only place where facial recognition is used. Of course overhead cameras have long been present at actual staffed checkout counters. The new risk today is that every credit card POS device has a camera built into it as well. I go around and put little black stickers over them when I encounter them. These cameras are well-hidden and not disclosed at all.
Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
Like imagine being in the era when electricity was becoming more prevalent and I’m sure some people were complaining about some ideal then as well.
That said I do agree that self checkouts should not be using methods beyond what’s reasonably necessary.
>Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
I'm all for more efficiency. Me fumbling with self-checkout is the opposite of efficiency.
What's that? I should learn to do it better? How much would that cost in terms of both time and money? Multiply that by several hundred million, as compared with a few hundred thousand cashiers.
You're saying that (x)250,000,000 < (x)500,000, where x = the cost in time and money to become proficient in checking stuff out. Is that correct?
If so, your math seems a little off. AFAICT, the only folks who get the benefit of this "efficiency" are the store owners who, instead of paying folks to do the job, makes the customer do it instead.
What's that? Those savings are passed along to the customer? Give me even one example of this being the case. I've certainly never seen it.
>Peak efficiency is having someone else shop for you or just getting things delivered.
I do that as well. In fact, I have deliveries coming today.
But some things I prefer to get from West Side Market and/or H-Mart, which are right nearby me because of the superior selection and my ability to choose specific products for myself.
The green box around his face in the image is evidence that it detected a face, but not that it had collected or stored identifying biometrics. It would be legal for a POS device to detect any face, e.g. to help decide when to reset for the next customer. But as I understand it, this would usually be enough to trigger discovery, where he could learn the necessary technical details.
Even if this suit fails, the store is vulnerable to continuous repeats by other parties. Written consent from each customer is the only viable protection. So the BIPA law may mean that face detection, not just recognition, is not practical in Illinois.
I'm pretty sure just like free speech, innocent until proven guilty is for the government/court, not a random person on the street. If you want to assume someone is guilty of something you are allowed to do so and you can sue too. Otherwise the prosecution would have to go to jail every time the defense wins.
I was wondering this as well. The green box could simply indicate it detected a face, using something like YOLO, or even a simpler technique like some point-and-shoot cameras use to decide where to focus (on faces, obviously).
Detecting a face is not the same as recognizing a face in either engineering parlance or typical usage.
If I don't determine this is a face that I've seen before, I've not recognized the face (maybe I have recognized that there is a face there).
To recognize entails re-cognizing: knowing again what was previously known. Simply noticing that something is a face does not satisfy that; it is only detecting. Without linking it to prior knowledge, recognition hasn’t occurred.
Because, one of the valid dictionary definitions of "recognition" is simply acknowledging something exists. No prior knowledge needed for that, other than the generic training the facial detection software has undergone.
The total options for dictionary terms for "recognition" does not mean that you can select any among them, decide that that's what "facial recognition" means, and expect anyone else to understand you.
"Facial recognition" refers to seeing a face and knowing whose face it is. It's the difference between "that's a face" and "that's my friend Jeff".
That some constituent word has some other definition is not relevant. What you're doing is equivalent to reading "my nose is running" and thinking "egads! This person's nose has sprouted legs and taken off down the track!"
Sure it does. I can use words any way I want. But there are agreed upon legal definitions and there are agreed upon industry terms/definition; you are talking about one of them (which sounds like industry not legal). If there's no legal definition, that means it's not defined and the court could interpret it any way they choose.
Edit: it seems the law defined the term "facial recognition" so that was the only answer I was seeking
My or Humpty’s ability to choose meaning doesn’t ensure the listener will understand it the same way though. Even if you do expect someone to understand and feel appropriate context is present, misunderstandings occur regularly in all types of communications due to this very thing.
I have no idea what you just said. If I look up each of the words you just typed in the dictionary, they all have multiple meanings. Multiply that together, there are literally billions of combinations. There's no way for me to know which you meant.
In other words, to put the burden on the listener rather than the speaker to be clear about meaning, is bad communication.
Words have a definition and a connotation, and meaning is inferred from context cues. What a word means is based on its prevailing word in this context.
No one reasonably uses "facial recognition" or "I recognized a face" to mean "I detected that there was, indeed, a face there."
In this case, the statute doesn't even say "facial recognition". It discusses storing a "scan of face geometry" such that it identifies an individual, and clarifies that an ordinary photograph doesn't count.
This is not how dictionaries work. When multiple definitions are given, it does not follow - and in many cases, it is not even possible - that they are all applicable in any context.
Decent dictionaries give some guidance as to the contexts in which each each definition is applicable, but for thoroughness you probably cannot beat the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.
The relevant definition here is neither legal nor technical, but from common usage, where recognizing a face, if not qualified, is taken to mean recognizing an individual by their face, not recognizing that you are seeing a face.
The courts may disagree. That's why I'm curious if the comment was from a legal context. If we had prior case law of them distinguishing one definition in favor of another, I'd feel more certain about all the assertations being made. If there are no cases, then the courts could interpret however they want in conflict of your entire comment.
> ...the courts could interpret however they want in conflict of your entire comment.
Courts sometimes adopt tendentious, cotroversial or disputed definitions in their rulings, and law-makers sometimes (and more frequently) do so when writing the law, but that in no way invalidates what I have written, which is about how to use a dictionary.
The lawsuit alleges that they also collect the facial details, of which the green rectangle is no evidence. But maybe they'll look into it and find that this is indeed the case.
If it's not clearly defined then it would be subject to debate in court, and you could admit expert evidence of what facial recognition is to define it
My understanding of these systems is that the green box just detects a face to a) make it easier to scan hours of footage later looking for faces b) add a subtle intimidation factor against crime.
Is a picture of a face count as "biometric" information? I strongly doubt it and suspect this case will be thrown out.
It’s “face detection blocking” built into the camera/display. Otherwise, the video footage is just straight sent as ONVIF to the main DVR for whatever processing is done there (which could be a lot more nefarious).
Wren Solutions / Costar seem to be the main vendors of these “public view monitors” — such as the PVM10-B-2086.
Yes I think it is likely security theatre - "smile you're on camera!" type things.
In some stores here in the UK they have CCTV with a sort of attention getting dancing LED light ring around the lens which I assume is there to a) trick you into looking straight at it (and so get a clear shot of your face) and b) remind people that cameras are there doing something.
I highly doubt they stopped there. If they're doing that already, they're taking the time/expense to scan hours of footage later and they would absolutely go further and assign each face a risk score based on what they think happened during your visits. They will flag you next time so the LP person can know to watch you closer in real time. I personally don't think they are sitting on evidence to charge you with a bigger crime later like some comments suggest, but I do think they would like to know which of the 10 busy self-checkout registers are most important to watch in real time at any given moment.
Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off.
Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?
Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.
This might fool the gait analysis, but they will come up with more metrics to analyze you by. You can't beat it. IMO, the only way to stop this is government
Most policy decisions should put people in prison, laws be damned. We have to reign in corporate overreach while we still have a government to do it with.
The trick is to shop at a high-shrinkage Home Depot where their self-checkout stations are all staffed by cashiers and you get concierge escort service whenever you purchase something locked in a cage.
I almost always prefer a staffed checkout vs. self checkout.
One time at the grocery store I watched a cashier clock out, shop for herself, then check out at the self checkout (!). I wonder if she recognized the irony.
The people at the checkouts are typically not the ones stealing things.
There is a bit of a spate here in the UK where just walk in, literally empty shelves into bags and walk out. Some security guards or assistants try to intervene, but apparently some security guards (e.g. ones at apple stores) are told not to try and intervene so really what's the point?
The plot twist for this though is that the police are increasingly using "facial recognition vans" to spot people walking around in town centers and apprehending them for thefts from stores, sometimes months previously since they have CCTV footage of them doing it. One hopes there is more evidence than just a hit on the facial ID database as we all know how inaccurate and biased they can be.
you'd be surprised how many people steal small valuable items and hide it by doing normal shopping and having a normal shopping cart for their other items.
That expensive 30 dollar bottle of shampoo for example, in the handbag, and just checkout the other items like normal.
I worked at a place where we could easily track people through the store. Not ID them, but if at any point we clicked on a person, and we could see from entering the store until exiting the store everywhere they passed. shoplifting is super easy to prove after the fact, just hard to do whilst they are still in the store
So, we're talking a 30 dollar bottle of shampoo vs. people walking in, dumping the whole shelf into a trash bag and walking out. And yet we're putting all this technology, surveillance and loss prevention staff in place to catch the shampoo guy rather than trash bag man.
Sounds like the guy is fishing here. Theres no proof in the article that Home Depot is actually storing his information. I'm personally pretty suspicious about the cameras at self checkouts and at the entrance of supermarkets, but this lawsuit looks like a waste of time, or this is a really badly written article.
Yes, he probably is fishing. But the lawsuit is how you fish. It is how you force a company to share information about what they do or do not store. If they don't store your data, it will be dropped. If they do store your data, it will proceed. Even if it gets dropped, it was not a waste of time because someone is making an effort to find out what is going on.
So you are 100% correct - the article is badly written because it doesn't give that context to how people use the legal system to determine whether or not there is a case to be had.
You can't prove something is not happening, nor even provide evidence. So that would be a quite unreasonable standard if that truly is what you think we should enact.
Well, you can if you're suing a company or entity and there is a complete picture of the situation collected. This isn't a criminal case - I would not be surprised if this isn't about setting a precedent. The result clarifying boundaries for what can and what can't be done.
This is similar to the time that ASDA (in the UK) was accused by a customer of violating the GDPR by using face detection in their self-checkouts. ASDA's statement was that the face detection was for the purpose of preventing theft (GDPR allows exceptions for the purpose of law enforcement) and that the information was not stored or used for any other purpose.
Increase deterrence effect to scare away shoplifters.
Home depot goes out of the way to make its cameras visible. There is a large "camera" sign, bright light to catch your attention, a visible display to show it's not a fake, and sometimes even a motion activated chime. I assume the green square around the face is the next step in a game.
Ironically, Home Depot is the only store I ever shoplifted from because of a bad UX on their app. They have/had a "shop in store" mode, where you can scan an item and pay for it in the app. So I scan and pay and leave.
A few days later I get an email "your item hasn't been picked up and you've been refunded."
Apparently if you scan an item and pay for it in the store they still expect you to wait for their staff to approve you, or something. It wasn't clear.
This was also only necessary because they didn't accept Apple pay so I had no way of paying for my items except through the app.
Around here they have been deploying parking lot camera systems with a blinking blue light. Some sources have suggested these sorts of "made you look" attention grabbers are being deployed near cameras in order to get people to reflexively look at the camera, giving the system a better shot at capturing face biometrics.
The shoplifters don’t care. Look at any hardware section at homedepot. Half the bags are ripped open. Try and find some stock they say is there online. Its not it already got stolen. The registers is not where they need to be combatting theft. It is everywhere else in that store.
Often happens in the UK for things like bags of screws or bathroom/plumbing fittings.
The charitable view is someone is opening the packaging to e.g. make sure that the thread is the right size (in the UK especially we suffer from annoying mixture of old legacy imperial measurement era pipes/threads/etc as well as metric).
The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the bit they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.
This could be a by-product of bad merchandising too.
The local Home Depot sells some types of screws only in pre-packed bags.
The Ace Hardware a block over (a franchise of independently owned shops) sells the same screws from cabinets with several hundred types of loose parts, and you can select as many as you need and bag yourself. You can even put multiple types and prices of items in one bag
So if you need one, HD makes you buy four. If you need sixteen, HD makes you buy a bunch of extra plastic waste. That might create an unexpected nudge towards just ripping the bag and pocketing the rest.
Depends on where you are at. Shrinkage runs around 1.6% on average in the US, but it can vary quite a bit by location. If you are in a rich quiet suburb, you will probably not see it. If you are in a rough neighborhood, or a very dense urban area, you probably will.
I have lived in neighborhoods where theft is unheard of, and I have lived in neighborhoods where I checked to make sure each item hadn't been opened before putting them in my cart.
Nope, I've never seen anything like that. To be fair, I'm sure some stores have higher crime rates than others, and just knowing human nature, people whose experiences are pleasant and uneventful probably aren't taking time to share anecdotes about their local stores.
Came here hoping someone would mention those absolutely cursed cameras - the ones with the pre-canned video of a guy in a back office "monitoring" the feeds?
Gets to me the worst when I'm on my 3rd Home Depot trip of the day BEEP looking through a box of pipe fittings that is filled with everything _except_ the fitting matching the label on the box BEEP okay.. the Home Depot website says it's in stock at the one 20 minutes up the store BEEP but, that's what it said about BEEP the stock at this store so.. but hmm BEEP maybe I could combine these two other fittings and save a BEEP ... trip to the other store, okay I'll look here for... BEEP hmm, the two fittings I would need to combine also aren't in the right BEEP box, but... it looks like maybe there's some that someone put back into a BEEP different box? Oh, wait BEEP _none_ of these fittings are in their correct box? What!? BEEP
Sorry I've just never had anybody to talk with this about. I hate those things with a passion. Let me know if you'd like to start a support group.
There are fewer and fewer physical stores left that sell non-food for reasonable prices. Home Depot is often the only choice (at least in my area, the competitors, Lowes and Ace Hardwares, are more expensive, sell fewer things, and sometimes worse quality too)
It could a psychological trick: Look the camera is filming and we got your face specifically, so don't try to steal.
In my local supermarket, the screen turns on and shows the face of the customer when they select "finish and pay", which I suspect is to give a "honesty nudge".
They are individually slow but highly multithreaded. The single cashier that stores hire these days may have a 10% higher clock speed, but their queue length is high.
Sounds like the problem is that we aren't hiring enough cashiers.
Using a Kroger self-checkout is tantamount to waterboarding. Hesitate for a quarter of a second before placing your item on the scale? Angry prompt. Put an item on the scanner (which itself is another scale) but it doesn't scan within half a second? Angry prompt. Get three angry prompts? Now you get a fourth angry prompt, except this one can only be dismissed by a staff member, and we've already established that they're few and far between.
I've given up on actually bagging my items while checking out. I can't rearrange anything in the bags, or move the bags, without the checkout machine throwing a hissy fit. So no, it's not actually faster, because I have to bag everything after paying for it. It totally breaks the pipeline of the checkout.
- Real estate: Self-checkout takes minimal floor space. Stores can fit ~10 stations in the area of 2 cashier lanes. Even if you hire more cashiers, there’s no room to add lanes.
- Demand vs. staffing: Checkout demand is dynamic, staffing is static. You can’t instantly add cashiers during a rush, and you don’t want them idle when it’s slow. Self-checkout stations are basically ~free to run.
- Cart size: Trader Joe’s works without self-checkout because their stores are small, carts are tiny, and checkouts max ~20 items. Their cashier lanes are smaller but occupy a bigger share of store space than Walmart or Kroger. In big stores with huge carts, no one wants to be stuck behind a full cart. Once you pick a lane, you’re locked in even if another line moves faster, whereas self checkout lanes are serviced by all machines.
But in the big stores with huge inventories, no one wants to wait behind a person with a huge cart and once you commit to a lane, you're stuck, even if someone else finishes faster.
The ones without scales are the quickest and generally fast. One queue for 10-12 checkouts etc...its fast unless you get some luddite infront of you who seem to enjoy proving some point to no one about how they can't "work the machine" etc.
I have developed an extreme distrust of self-checkout systems generally, in part because of the risk of this sort of thing. As a result, I simply don't use them at all anymore.
I don't use them when it's an option - but Home Depot in particular often has zero actual cashiers. They've always got a couple people standing around in self checkout to assist when the system (inevitably?) doesn't work properly, though...
HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.
It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.
I bet it works better for Costco because they don't stock any items with weights low enough not to be registered by the scale.
Also, the last time I went to my local Costco, you were no longer permitted to check yourself out at the self-checkouts. They didn't remove them, but they had started using them as cashier-staffed checkouts.
That was the old NCR Fastlane implementation, done wrong. They left the item security feature enabled and left the bag scales turned on. This also happened at IKEA US (which lead to them being pulled out for a long while).
A lot of retailers have dumped NCR and gone in-house for their self checkout software packages now and made it so much better. Home Depot took their custom point-of-sale and built their own self checkout frontend on top of it to allow all checkout lanes to “convert” to self checkout.
Target also did the same, dumping NCR’s software and rolling in-house software on top of the hardware to make it Not Suck.
... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.
I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
When I am being abused by a faceless corporation I simply withdraw my business entirely and direct my capital towards a competitor. Sometimes this is very inconvenient for me, but change has to start somewhere, right?
Exactly this, last time I went to HD I had a cart with maybe 20 items, NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands. Now I decided that if a place doesn’t have human cashiers I just don’t shop there and give priority to small stores, I might pay more but at least I know the profits are for a neighbor.
> NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands.
I'm pretty sure this is illegal. All businesses need to accept cash somewhere, somehow. I am curious what would happen if you forced the issue and announced to the attendant that you intend to pay in cash.
As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
>As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
That depends on where you are. In NYC, businesses have been required to accept cash in person since 2020[0]. In 2025, New York State[1] followed suit.
You're right. And I'm surprised. There are states and cities that mandate a cash option, but most don't, including my own. I now side with the OP. There was a time I carried $50 around at all times to avoid being tracked by my card data, but then got lazy. Need to return to this habit.
The only store where I insist on paying cash is (maybe not surprisingly) Home Depot, because they have this odd, shameless practice of tying your in-store purchases with your web account, and sending emails in response. No thank you.
In the HDs I've seen the customer service counter has a couple cash registers and is staffed. I assume the registers are there so they can check out people who are there to pick up an item that they ordered for pickup, but they will also handle regular checkouts.
Isn't it safe to assume there's face or gait recognition all around stores though? In general, if not most places yet then inevitably soon. It's only an issue here because of an Illinois law, how many states don't have that?
Well, I do try to choose where I shop in part to reduce the amount of spying I'm subjected to, but yes, this is of course a risk.
However, where a store might be spying on me when I'm just doing my shopping, it's guaranteed they're spying on me if I'm using self-checkout.
Honestly, though, the privacy invasion is only part of why I don't do self-checkout. Another major part is that I don't want to risk the store thinking that I stole something from them.
I exclusively use self-checkout because the lines move faster because one line feeds multiple self-checkouts vs each regular checkout having its own line. This leads to head of line blocking from very customers with a lot more items than you.
I see it most often at independant or franchise retailers. Places where providing a pleasant customer experience still seems to have an impact on their bottom line.
Similar here. If you want me to deal with your dystopian self-checkout, how about you pay me?
(Conveniently, I live in a large-enough city for there to be plenty of other options. Including small or high-touch stores, which do not have self-checkout.)
I don't see the point in campaigning against things like this, because it only protects bad people. If the government wants to get you, they won't use home depot to do it, they'll just take you from your house or shoot you in the street. If they want to spy on you, they'll break into your house and put microphones under your carpet and cameras in your walls.
If we actually had cameras like this everywhere, there would be so much less crime. Instead of the drug addict robbing twenty shops a day, they'd be arrested in the second shop.
I am of the firm opinion that if big corps want to outsource their labor to me, the customer, then it is my right to treat myself to a few free items here and there as compensation for the work being done.
If you don't want that to happen, give cashiers their jobs back, you greedy bastards.
I don't condone theft... but I do remember a day before self checkouts existed, and stores had to hire enough cashiers to be faster than their competitors. Those dozens of checkout lanes at the front of big-box stores weren't always decorative, they used to all be staffed during busy periods.
Why am I waiting in line to check myself out? That is what drives me nuts. "But they take up space" you say. There's lots of wasted space with the 8 standard checkout lines that are unmanned every time I come in the store.
I have never experienced a faster checkout with self checkout.
If it's super fast, it's just for a few items, and a cashier would've been just as fast. If it's for a lot of items, there's a decent chance I have to look up some codes or something; which a cashier is better and faster at.
The trade off of self checkout is cost savings for the business. These savings are not passed on to me. Therefore, I don't give a flying rat's ass about them.
I'm with OP. If I'm working for the business, they will compensate me. Willingly or unwillingly.
IME it's faster because the queue is shorter. You can fit about 2.5 self checkout machines in the same space, enabling more people to checkout in parallel.
Don't use self-checkouts. You do all the work, slower than the cashier, and are treated like cattle. Often there is a supervisor breathing down your neck and demanding the receipt before the exit doors open. Now there is facial recognition.
At my Walmart there is roughly 10-15 self checkouts vs 3 cashiers where people with full carts are waiting in line. Self checkout is great if you have a few items. Also cashiers aren’t that fast considering they have to scan, bag (in some places) and then take your payment.
Some self checkouts are better than others the worst ones are the ones that don’t let you take your items off the scale after scanning and then they throw an error for you to put them back.
I’ve also never felt treated like cattle but I’d figure a checkout with a cashier is more cattle like since you are being funneled through a tight space one after the other vs an open space like self checkouts.
In my experience usually there is 10+ self checkout lines of which maybe half of them are open, only 2 accept cash and the line for self checkout is 3x longer coupled with the fact that people take roughly 10-15secs per item + 10-15secs to find the “finish and pay” button, 15-20secs to pull out their card, or phone, 5-6 secs to get the receipt and leave. If there is a single elderly person on the line or somebody buying an item that needs the employee “blessing” then then that time might reach the full minute.
There is no evidence anecdotal or otherwise to back this assertion.
Many stores near me appeared to cut cashiers before they added self-checkouts. If anything, adding self-checkouts increased the number of available options to get out of the store faster.
I'd place my bets on curbside pickup getting pushed more before cashiers get added given how popular it's become as an option.
Germany's discounters (ie, nearly all grocery stores) have long been hyper-efficient about checkouts. There is exactly one lane open until the line gets too long, then they open another. When the number of customers subsides, the second lane closes and the employee goes back to other tasks.
Only in recent years have self-checkouts started appearing in any significant number, and the formula hasn't changed. I guess theoretically stores might be able to cut back on employees, but it would be literally one or two people at most.
My anecdotal evidence is that one of the supermarkets I go to had 4-7 active cashiers and no self-checkout. After a complete redesign and renovation they have two active cashiers and self-checkouts. The self-checkout is closed unless there is a supervisor.
No, there wouldn't be. Having to have 15 people on staff and manage them and pay them is a big cost to the store owners. Self checkout machine costs $xx,000, amortized over 10 years, vs $15/hr and other overhead for a human being.
I drive to the store, pick things up off the shelf, carry them all around the store, take them to my car, drive home, bring them into the house, but moving the items twelve inches across a bar code reader is "work"? I need some low paid worker to do that trivial part so I can feel some sort of status of having been served?
No, it's to offload the burden/liability of being accused of shoplifting. If a cashier messes up, it's on the store. If you do, it's on you. Thanks but I'm not willing to assume that liability with little benefit to me.
I use self checkout all the time and have never been accused of shoplifting. Other stores in other neighborhoods might be different, and I wouldn't be surprised if skin color makes a difference too.
What do you mean "all the work"? Grocery shopping is preparation, logistics, actually to the place(s), handling the items from shelf to cart, cart to register, checking and paying at register, move from register to own container, container to vehicle, vehicle to home, unpack at home.
Of all of this hassle, the cashier merely handles a single step. You already do all the work.
I'm not sure what you mean by "treated like cattle". I haven't really had a bad experience with self-checkout, granted, we probably don't live in the same country / culture.
The receipt checking happens with the cashier as well, just implicitly. If anything, they are treated badly, with having to stand most of the time in the US. Absolutely unnecessary.
Facial recognition I don't like either, but stores (and others) will do that anyways, with self-checkout being, at most, an excuse to develop/improve/deploy such systems. Theft would be a problem/excuse anyways for stores, and advertising is a pretty big trojan horse in this regard as well. Self-checkout doesn't make a difference here.
Try unloading an entire cart and scanning each one individually and putting it back, after spending a tiring hour shopping. I will be very surprised if you still feel the same.
(This is getting tangential, but I do exactly what you describe, and I really appreciate that I can do it on my terms, without having to accommodate three other people: the one in front of me, the cashier, and the one next in line.)
Ah, I see. I don't live in the US, so I never experienced that. In Hungary, there is zero service, the cashier sits behind a counter, the shopper unloads everything to a conveyor, cashier beeps every item, shopper puts them back into their cart. For heavy items, the cashier comes out with a portable beeper, and does the job with that. And now with self-service, it's on the shopper to do the exact same.
Uh, no? Ralphs absolutely has a full order and pay online thing, then you just drive to the store and get your groceries delivered to your car. I used it just yesterday as I can't go anywhere after my oral surgery.
When I first started using self-checkout that was my experience, slow and annoying. That went away after about ten times. I'll trade a little annoyance for an extra 5-10 minutes of my time.
I was a trained cashier many years ago because I didn't grow up privileged so I had to work retail (and dishwasher and waiter) jobs.
Not only do I have the muscle memory, still after 30 years, I also have the added incentive of knowing the value of my own time, not being fatigued from hours of work, the ability pre-position items in the cart at an optimal orientation for handling and scanning, and foreknowledge of what items I have and a plan for how best to bag them that was made prior to my arrival at self-checkout.
So, yeah, I scan faster.
Much faster.
edit: oh man this has brought up a bunch of frustrations. Why do customers just pile shit on the counter? When I interact with a cashier, like at a gas station on a long road trip, every item I place on the counter has the barcodes oriented towards the person, so they can just "zap zap zap zap" the items rapid-fire without handling them. My bag (I live in a civilized state that has banned plastic bags) is ready and waiting, items are organized and presented in an order that make sense for ease of bagging. My payment method is ready. The experience is efficient and quick.
It takes no mental effort to do any of this and yet I am constantly stuck behind people who act as though they are purchasing things for the first time in their entire lives and the process is as foreign to them as communicating in the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence is to me.
Awesome, what do you do with all the full 20secs saved?
Jokes apart I’ve made the decision, after a near-death experience, to never rush anywhere for any reason, to live every minute and to enjoy even stupid moments like waiting in line, I might be wrong but I’m sure happier than before.
Rushing leads to errors. I don't rush. I also don't anti-rush. Dawdle?
But to answer your question, after a year I use those 30 extra minutes to play Sonic the Hedgehog six or seven times, nibbling on an ice cream sandwich between acts and zones, a sandwich that eventually melts and makes a great mess of things including all over my Genesis controller, which I clean in the kitchen while looking out the window over the sink.
Even a trained cashier cannot scan as fast as a trained cashier on these systems; they're slow by design. I got reasonably fast (but not cashier fast) on Safeway's and hit a wall: I kept running into false positive "unidentified item in bagging area", followed by clerk overrides. I eventually figured out that you can't place the item into the bagging area until the computer has processed it — there's a delay between the "beep" of the barcode scanner recognizing a barcode and the computer adding the item to the tab & then announcing the purchase, and you cannot hit the scale prior to that or it gets out of sync with you.
Also the only place truly training cashiers, AFAICT, is Aldi's.
In the U.S., particularly the Walmarts I've been to, cashiers are usually slower than the self-checkouts now.
Their self-checkouts used to be slow because the registers would verify the weight of items on the scale (the surface where you bag it) before letting you put it in the cart. If it didn't like the weight it would force you to put it back in the bag. I don't think they do this anymore. Asset protection can view a camera pointed at the scanner and bags if they think you're stealing.
Furthermore, it's hard for Walmart to retain people, so cashiers are treated like a dump stat. They won't really dedicate people to checking out anymore unless that's all they can do, e.g. elderly, so someone who's a cashier all day tends to be slow because they're accomodating that person. So you could be the fastest cashier in the world but it won't mean anything as far as raises, etc. Your fast cashiers are often pulled off and stocking unless its super busy.
Last week I went to Walmart and went through self checkout. Probably about $100 of groceries. After paying and clicking to print the receipt there was an error with the receipt printer. They changed the paper but the error remained. They gave me a “trust me bro” you won’t get stopped and sent me on my way. I could have made a fuss but didn’t have anything I would have returned anyways. A bit off putting in how they handled it though.
I spend less time in the self-checkout queue than in the cashier queue. Overall much faster. And I don't think that's just because the shops have chosen to have more self-checkouts, it's a matter of floor space - self checkouts are much denser so they can get much more throughput.
In the specific case of Walmart I use the "scan and go" feature of their app, so I scan the items using my phone's camera as I take them off the shelf.
If the option is waiting in line for a cashier versus going to an open self checkout (this is almost always the case where I shop), then yes, self checkout is faster.
Even aside from the line, the only thing clerks are sometimes faster at in my experience is ringing up fresh produce where codes have to be typed in (these codes are usually on a label on the produce, but if not you have to go through a lookup procedure if you haven't memorized the code).
Trained cashier? The local Lowe's and HD have little old ladies running the checkouts. They can't even lift most of the things I am buying, and have to scan them myself.
Supermarkets usually have old slow people running them. The only time I don't use self checkout is when I have alcohol, and it is slower every single time than doing it myself.
I have no doubt that you've experienced all of the above but I'd hazard that it's the exception and not the rule.
Personally, I'm faster at scanning items than most cashiers are. I used to work in retail, though, so maybe that's just me.
I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me. To my partner's chagrin, it's one of the reasons I won't go into Costco.
While self-checkout is less private in a lot of ways (see article) I value it because I have social anxiety and would prefer to avoid too much (or too little!) smalltalk with cashiers -- especially about the items I'm buying.
> I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me.
Not self checkout related, but the Kroger stores by me have all started having security guards check receipts before you can leave the store. They do this whether or not you do self checkout. Accordingly, I have stopped patronizing those stores because I refuse to spend my money at a business that treats me like a criminal. I sympathize in that they are trying to stop theft, but I'm not going to put up with that particular method of deterrence.
I was boycotting Kroger for a long time over a different thing they were doing. The self-checkouts (and a lot of the time there isn't another option) had a camera that watched what you put in your bag. If you didn't move what you scanned very slowly (the camera seemed to be running at <10 FPS) over the exact trajectory it expects it would demand an employee make sure you weren't stealing the thing you scanned. So every few items you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for an employee to notice you, be free to come over, decide they can be bothered, and go through everything.
They got rid of it eventually and I started shopping there again, but if they start doing receipt checks they're back on the shit list.
I'll keep using self-checkouts because they're fine and frequently faster than using a non-self-checkout. There are a few minor headaches like hair-trigger sensitivity of the weight sensors. I don't care in the slightest that a camera is filming to try to deter thieves - don't consider that a downside. The security measures are a bit depressing but only in what they say about where society is going with respect to theft from shops.
When I used a credit card at home depot self checkout I was asked if I wanted to have the receipt sent to a specific email address I entered previously online. Creepy. So I started using cash only.
Last year I went to get some low voltage wire. I walked for several aisles in both directions to find someone to open the cage. Not a soul. So I reached behind the cage and pulled it out, went to self checkout, began paying with cash. The machine said it couldn't issue change and to see an associate. Seemed odd as it was early in the day. Associate casually went to another register and got me change. When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental.
I discovered a smaller local hardware store and go there. The employees constantly ask you if you need help which is the complete opposite of home depot.
Under no circumstance will I shop at Home Depot again.
(And, today I drove by that HD and noticed they installed multiple ALPR.)
>When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental.
The remote parts of the car park are usually where the least desirable sorts hang out. (I park in the same areas due to an oversized vehicle, so notice them.)
So you paid by cash and as a result home depot secretly called the cops on you, and the cops knew where you were parked and sent a car to passive aggressively harass you by parking nearby?
Maybe the cop was parked out of the way eating his lunch.
> When I used a credit card at home depot self checkout I was asked if I wanted to have the receipt sent to a specific email address I entered previously online. Creepy. So I started using cash only.
A lot of retailers do that now. They match first 6/last 4 in store against your online account to match receipts up. Walmart is a big one now with that implemented across their self-checkouts (and eventually pushed onto the registers with their new software/hardware upgrade push).
> The machine said it couldn't issue change and to see an associate. Seemed odd as it was early in the day.
Slightly makes sense if they haven’t loaded every machine up with a full cash load. Plus some lanes might “accidentally” be turned on without any cash in them and not put into a “cards only” state.
It's very tempting to assume what people will or are doing, and it's so, so easy to get it so wrong.
Picture this. Guy comes home late at night. Outdoor light is on. He goes in and presses he light switch. No lights come on but the fuse blows and now the outdoor light is gone.
What does he do?
The answer is that you have no idea based on only that information. It's tempting to think he'll do what my friends and I would do: find the fusebox and investigate.
But the thing is, his crazy ex's crazy boyfriend threatened yesterday to kill him. This guy is bolting, not looking for the fusebox.
I frequent the Home Despot and Lowe Life's, until recently, traditionally favoring the Home Despot.
The last two visits revealed the complete elimination of checkout lines and the appearance of a new cluster of self service registers with a new orientation perpendicular to the old lines. As I stood before the register, looking at the large monitor, I watched my dehumanized face beleaguered by green lines. I realized it had no other purpose but to foist an impression of my dirty face toward me, conveying my position as a filthy, groveling consumer pestering them with my petty needs. The camera could easily do its work without the hostile display, but then the customer may get away with a sense of dignity, which to them would be a form of shoplifting, or squandered neuromarketing potential.
During each visit, I make it a point to express my contempt for this to any ostensibly human employees nearby. I do so respectfully, yet their pride as high priests of home improvement and the glorious providence of private equity that blesses their sacred mission always results in perceived offense. Despite prefacing my grievance as not directed personally at them, the allure of indignance prevails and I always walk away as the bad guy who dared piss on their holy gilded ground.
Their use of cameras bothers me for different reasons, but I'm glad to fan the flames.
>I realized it had no other purpose but to foist an impression of my dirty face toward me, conveying my position as a filthy, groveling consumer pestering them with my petty needs.
I look at myself and go "damn that's one sexy dude I'm gonna jut out my chin and stand up straight so if anyone looks at this, they fall in love with me".
Also, the staff doesn't identify as anything except someone trying to make it through their day.
I think a bit of Peter Principle and role enmeshment is at play here. Halo effect? Moral disengagement?
Or perhaps it's truly pure gratitude and warm hearted loyalty for having a job, any job, which our future suggests won't be very common soon.
On a more serious note, I don't think it's terribly valid to dismiss these behaviors (Home Despot mug shaming, not zealous employee bots) as nothing more than a fun opportunity to admire one's reflection. It may not by itself be a keystone stride on the path of anomie, but it's a stride indeed and I don't want that kind of society. Maybe you do. Home Depot and Blackrock certainly do. I don't.
If you think the company has contempt for you then you might try to see what they put new employees through. If you feel lucky just to be able to complete your transaction then you shouldn't have to wonder hard what it's like to feel lucky just to receive a paycheck without any notes or veiled corporate threats attached.
The gamification of society has reduced us all to cattle.
I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks.
The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up behind me and very persistently told me that I hadn't scanned something. Annoyed, I pointed on the screen where it showed I had. His eyes went wide, and he spun around, and quickly hurried away, no apology.
If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't code that intervention/confrontation as their mess-up, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still got dinged as suspicious, to cover their butts.
We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. And I have even recently seen a street person in a chain pharmacy here, simply tossing boxes of product off the shelves, into a dingy black trash bag, in the middle of the day. Somehow none of the usual employees around. Yet there's often employees moving to stand behind me at that same store, when I use their self-checkout. (Maybe my N95 mask is triggering some association with masked bandits, yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? But an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go when they have symptoms.)
> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa?
They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.
The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.
>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.
There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)
The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.
Or maybe they just don’t want any violence in their stores at all? I will avoid shopping somewhere that has regular ass whoopings way more than I would avoid shopping somewhere with regular shoplifting.
What are they supposed to do, just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely?
I’d rather shop at a store that actually prevents theft, deterring future thieves from stealing. It will be a safer place to shop with lower prices.
Are you saying you would continue shopping in a store where you regularly saw violence against people who might be thieves, on the assumption you’d never be mistaken for one?
Yes. Thievery makes everything in the store more expensive. I have no interest in shopping at a store that has thieves in it and law enforcement does nothing to stop thieves in my area.
In the 1970s I saw a security guard or 2 chase a thief out of a store then tackle and detain him right in front of me. Didn't make me hesitate to go back to the store or cause any worry that guards might tackle me.
No, I’m saying that I would prefer to shop at a store that uses shopkeeper’s privilege to detain thieves using reasonable force.
The legal limits are very clear and simply enacting violence “against people who might be thieves” is not within them.
Generally agree with the sentiment but it can put you in a very hard place.
I was accused of shoplifting by a gigantic dude who moved in to detain me as I was going into my car. Could have gotten Walmart badge or paraphernalia from anywhere (most walmarts aren't that aggressive but this one was). I could have told him to eat shit and it was clear he was willing to get violent. At that point I would have had to decide whether to draw a weapon, because he clearly would have overpowered me and put me in imminent fear of death. I handed him my receipt with one hand while preparing for the possibility to draw a weapon with the other, thankfully he seemed satisfied and turned out to be a real Walmart employee.
I decided I didn't want to ever face that decision again so I never went back
I might be misinterpreting the situation, but the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me. The whole situation is wildly outside my experience.
I live in New Zealand.
> the idea of going on a shopping expedition with a gun is absolutely foreign to me
If you ever visit Texas take a look around the entrances to stores, shops, restaurants, bars etc. You should see large white signs with a "gun-buster" and a 30.0* code. or a large "51%" symbol in red. It would be incredibly rare to see a person with an open carry gun thou
30.05 is to tell people that "constitutional carry" (carry without a LTC) is not allowed on the property. A person with a License to Carry may carry on the property.
30.06 says a LTC person may not conceal carry on the property.
30.07 says a LTC person may not open carry on the property.
The 51% lets people who carry know that the establishment has a liquor/beer permit and receives 51% of income from sales of alcohol. Meaning it's a felony to bring a firearm onto the premises. The others are misdemeanor trespass
Then you may see a reminder 46.03 sign at places like schools, sporting venues etc as a reminder that weapons (not just guns) are not allowed.
That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
It reminds me of "Posted"[0] signs that I've seen in lots of places in the southern US. Growing up in the Northeast, we didn't have such things[1].
[0] "Posted" is shorthand for "Private Property. No Trespassing." I get that the word "posted" means "I posted the sign. Pay attention or you might get arrested or shot." But I have no idea how the latter got shortened to the former. It's also an interesting regionalism, although not specifically related to legal codes and their taxonomy.
[1] Where I grew up we just had "No Trespassing" or "Private Property" signs.
Edit: expanded footnote [0].
If I'm understanding this correctly then, ultra-conservative Texas has more local regulation on open carry than ultra-progressive Washington?
The 30.0* signs are basically “no trespassing” sign that property owners (stores shops buildings etc) may elect to refuse entry to persons in various modes of carry. Most commonly will allow people to conceal carry with a license. Most places (in mid-large cities) don’t want people walking around openly carrying a gun in their place of business.
The 51% is alcohol & guns don’t go well together. Conservative Texas would probably like to do away with alcohol altogether, they still only allows beer & wine sales on Sunday and only because Sunday Football. Liquor bottles can only be bought at liquor stores (except on sunday). Unlike California where you can pick up some Johnnie & Jameson with school supplies and toilet paper before church.
Most regulations are on when and how you use the firearm. Having a LTC means you have a little more forgiveness for trespassing because the signs were hidden behind the door or plants etc. Constitutional carry will still be charged. But LTC has more penalties for misuse, such as brandishing to intimidate carries greater penalties
The restrictions on unlicensed open carry of a loaded weapon in a vehicle alone makes the Washington regulation way more of a hassle than in in Texas, although they both have location restrictions.
I said weapon, not gun, but theoretically if it were a gun, it wouldn't feel any different than shopping without one. Put a small watergun down your waistband and walk around for a couple days. After a couple you won't notice it, and no one else is going to notice it either. It will become utterly mundane, it similarly applies to a dagger or whatever concealable weapon one may be able to get ahold of.
That this comment was downvoted (while stating that they live in NZ, a distinctly different culture from the USA), really underlines what a lunatic society those of us in the USA are in. Guns aren’t normal in most of the western world, folks.
The job of a security guard is to observe and report. Let the multi-billion dollar companies like walmart and home depot pay for actual law enforcement to be on hand when a security guard observes a suspected shoplifter. The security guard isn't paid enough or trained enough to get physical with customers.
Shopkeeper’s privilege exists as long-standing common law doctrine for a reason. No business should be forced to tolerate theft, or be forced to pay off-duty police officers to prevent it.
And no one is compelled to be a security guard; if the risks and pay don’t align, they’re free to walk away.
I had never heard of 'shopkeeper's privilege' but looked it up [1] and yes, seems to be a real thing in the United States and nowhere else, according to a quick scan of that wiki article.
More evidence to me that the US was set up to serve corporatist interests over pretty much everything (and everyone) else. Why else provide shopkeepers with some special legal status? (Which again, they don't have in any other country.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege
Don't forget people used to live in shops and castle doctrine also applies
> just let people steal with impunity until they decide the costs are too high, and they have to close the store entirely
Has this actually happened? Or are the chain pharmacies using “shrinkage” as a scapegoat for other deficiencies? I find it incredibly hard to believe that retail theft puts an appreciable dent in profits.
Target closed stores under this excuse last year. One was in downtown Oakland, where I can easily believe it (large unhoused population). Multiple news stories reported that this was only a cover to close underperforming stores and not the primary reason for closures.
I have a hard time imagining why they would close profitable stores otherwise. They’re generally not in the business of turning down profit.
The point isn't that businesses are closing profitable stores, but the stores are unprofitable for reasons other than shrinkage. You're being fed a narrative about crime. Why? Who benefits?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities. For instance, the CEO of Walgreens has acknowledged that perhaps retailers “cried too much last year” and overspent on security measures that failed to reflect real needs. And although the National Retail Federation said that “organized retail crime” drove nearly half of all inventory losses in 2021, the group later retracted its claim; it now no longer attaches a dollar amount to money that is lost due to retail theft. And in memorable cases, major retailers have chosen to maintain stores with much higher rates of crime, while closing others.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities...
So I guess you've never frequented Waffle House ;-)
You will also go to jail. It’s not self-defense:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-walgreens-manager-co...
That's gonna depend where the jury is coming from. SF, yes. "Try that in a small town" hicks probably not.
more like "try that in a small town" police will see what happened, "atta boy" and get on with other things. never even reaches the courts.
you can use a reasonable amount of force to prevent people from taking property (or if you're acting as an agent thereof) in Texas. But still you can always be taken to civil court and be at the mercy of whatever judge. I imagine in San Francisco you will almost certainly lose to the criminal who was stealing something if you use any amount of force other than to defend yourself unless you're a cop
Why don't people from SF also get a pejorative?
Because they are here to defend themselves.
> There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security.
Bit of an assumption there.
There is no easy answer for this breakdown. The cat is out of the bag and these losers aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and face real consequences. Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance. Of course that doesn't stop anything and quality of life goes down.
> Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance.
Stores have plenty of incentives to engage in privacy invading surveillance even ignoring shoplifting as a factor. If a store saw zero shoplifting they'd still deploy privacy invading surveillance because it's profitable for them to do it right now and it will only be increasingly profitable for them to do it in the near future.
Plus, like everybody in retail, LP’s measured performance indicator is how busy they look when management is around. The best way to do that without getting in a fight is to annoy people who don’t actually have anything to hide.
That can be seen at many levels of society. ICE also prefers to round up harmless immigrants that show up for court hearings, work in fields, wait at bus stations or deliver their children to day care rather than the "dangerous criminals" that they keep on boasting about. And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal in their view anyway, why bother?
Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.
> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...
Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?
>> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...
>Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?
It is not[0].
Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.
That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US legally and overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.
Those who made an (whether valid or not) asylum claim are legally in the United States until their asylum claim can be adjudicated.
[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
Illegal is not the same as criminal, but a civil violation is still illegal. Someone without lawful status is subject to detention and deportation. A person who overstayed a visa or is otherwise undocumented is, by definition, here illegally and falls under the legal term “illegal alien.”
That's as may be. But that's not what GP said.
It is not the case that "every illegal immigrant is already a criminal," which is what GP claimed.
Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
If you had read the post you’re responding to, you would have seen that it asserts that the majority of undocumented people in the country actually were documented when they entered the country.
Also it’s poor form to copy/paste the same response over and over, even if you were reading the posts you replied to.
Repeating the same irrelevant statute doesn't make it relevant.
>Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
Yes. The link[0] I posted with my comment cites that specific law:
And in fact, I said: Where did I claim otherwise? Seriously. That's not a rhetorical question.[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
No. Overstaying a visa or not leaving when temporary protected status is suddenly revoked (or asylum is not granted) is not a criminal offense under US federal law.
Technically it is all about status since a visa is about entry. Like the date on your visa is the window you have to enter the country but you'd have an I-94 or some status forum that dictates the parameters of your stay. (though yeah, everyone just calls this "overstaying your visa") (IANAL but have travel abroad before and well... I was in grad school and conversations about visa and status come up a lot when the majority of students have temporary status and there's a president talking about changing the rules)
Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It's not a crime per se to overstay a visa like say shoplifting or killing someone. It's more like there's a proceeding to determine whether you did overstay and then when there's a finding of fact they basically tell you you have to leave or they remove you from the country forcibly. It would be patently ridiculous to jail someone for overstaying or for working on a tourist visa or for any of a number of these things.
You cannot be more wrong.
Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.
I would love to understand if you truly believed that no such federal statute exists, or we’re just intentionally spreading misinformation.
The visa is your entry document. The I-94 is your status document[0]. The visa outlines the conditions (including dates) you may enter the country. The I-94 is the record of entry/departure and dictate your required date of departure.
This is a completely different conversation and scenario that what was being previously discussed. There is a pretty significant difference between illegal border crossing vs overstaying your status. The latter never performed an illegal border crossing. These people are documented.[0] https://www.uscis.gov/forms/all-forms/form-i-94-arrivaldepar...
And I believe all of this conflation of entering the country illegally with overstaying a visa or violating the restrictions on a visa having passed through a Border Control checkpoint is at the heart of a lot of what's happening right now. The whole concept of "illegal immigration" was expanded to contain this other category of person who went through Border Control properly, they have a passport from their home country with a stamp or a visa, but they are not complying with the requirements of the visa or for the entry stamp. These people are not criminals and many of them have put down roots here and would be model citizens if they had citizenship.
Because ICE is having a lot of trouble finding enough people who crossed illegally to round up and put in concentration camps, they're scouring the country for people in the other category. And in many cases the threat of visa cancellation is being used to suppress political speech. A lot of people don't know that because they don't understand that there's a way to get here legally that doesn't involve getting citizenship or a green card. I think if you've never left the country it probably doesn't occur to you that there's a whole system of checkpoints that you can use to enter the country but almost zero control after that other than your own good faith efforts. And this is true just about everywhere else in the world.
That is manifestly not the same thing as overstaying a visa. Moreover, not only does it not apply if you’re already found to be in the country illegally you have to be caught in the act of entering - it was amended in 1996 to apply a civil penalty by the same act that created expedited removal (yes, it is not supposed to be in lieu of any statutory criminal penalty that _may_ be applied) and lower court judges have found against the re-entry provisions in 1326 [1]
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/163419/miranda-du-unconstitu...
> This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry
None of which has anything to do with the matter at hand.
It. Is. Not. A. Crime. To. Overstay. A. Visa.
It’s not ICE’s opinion about who is illegal, it’s congress’s. Didn’t they create the immigration laws that are on the books? I can never understand why people seem to blame the enforcement agencies for the laws they are enforcing.
But I agree with the sentiment that they are selecting the easiest targets.
ICE can make them un-illegal by granting them parole, without further action from congress. AFAIK they can even do it unilaterally, though congress could choose to check them later.
Don't know how it is in the states but in most places in Europe using violence against a violent person is likely to end up very badly for you, even if you are a guard and have the necessary permits and training. You are not going to risk being fined or jailed to stop some criminal from shoplifting from a store that is not even yours.
What is the role of a security guard if not to wield violence? Their equipment implies a capability for violence. Are they unable to perform their job legally in Europe?
Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.
Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.
If you want to risk hurting someone whilst restraining him… Otherwise, it’s not worth it. What equipment are you talking about anyway, the nightstick? In my language it is formally called the “defensa”, implying that it can’t be used to attack someone.
There's a reason local rent-a-cops here hire almost exclusively seniors: they're _not_ going to go chasing someone down, they're just going to follow instructions, go for their walk around the site every 30 minutes and generally not cause trouble when they get bored.
They are there to intervene when there is violence against a person, not property.
observe and report. That's it.
Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with. A violent person will probably get it out of their system quickly. If you fight them, though, that creates a feedback loop that won't stop until someone is injured or dead. Just let people express themselves and everyone will be fine.
At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.
"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."
That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.
Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.
I don't think you'd feel at home here.
This mindset is what perpetually allows the violent to abuse the weak. What a violent person needs is a boot in the mouth. Or as many as necessary until he understands that’s not the way to behave. We are talking about people who generally have a low level of intelligence and do not understand anything else.
Does that mean the boot-weirder is also a violent person in need of a boot to the mouth?
Or is it not “real” violence if it’s justified? In which case, pretty much all violent people will tell you they are justified.
Which means it reduces to “it’s ok for me to be violent because I’m righteous, unlike those thugs”
I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.
(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
If a hit and run hadn't been involved they wouldn't have gotten caught.
It's something I've thought about. It's not totally clear from the police reports. I've read them through several times and the offender had hit about seven stores that day tearing off Rogaine en masse, and the cops seemed to be on their trail already. The hit-n-run certainly would have put a flame up their ass.
Maybe there was something to the high-trust society we once had.
Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.
The high trust society is "gone" in many segments of society, but I don't see that we've made a decision to forsake it. Forsaking implies renouncing or turning away from it intentionally.
And how did we 'forsake' it?
When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.
When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.
Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.
I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.
I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.
The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.
Your theory of urban/rural bifurcation is overly reductive. My city had a population of about 40,000 in the 70s (when guns were left in racks in the backs of trucks in the high school parking lot)—it's about twice that today. (I did however just return from visiting my wife's hometown in northern Idaho, which has a population of about 500, and indeed I did not feel the need to lock my car, despite keeping a firearm inside of it.)
I don't care to propose any solutions here, especially around such politically-volatile topics, because I believe the actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did are worth acknowledging and investigating first.
40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.
Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.
Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.
In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.
I assure you there's quite the difference between a city (that even has “City” it its name!) of 80,000, and a town of 500. It's easy to see conflating the two as “high density population dweller ignorance” for anyone who has lived in or near all three (500, 80,000, 1M+).
I mean yea, I'm from bumfuk nowhere farmland where there was nothing close. Of course that meant a lot in the late 70s where you might get 3 channels on the TV. We were very disconnected from the world back then.
That's no longer true. Everyone has a cellphone pretty much everywhere. You don't think of hoodlum stuff while bored, you watch a livestream of it and think "I could do that too".
We live in a much different world now.
> actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did
Well go on then. Let's hear your theory out loud.
Feel free to assume whatever you'd like and ascribe whatever implicit outgroup labels you'd like as well.
There's definitely a rural element to it. I left probably $10,000 worth of construction equipment out for the stealing for 2 years while building my house in the country. Just totally unmonitored vacant property, surrounded by poor people in trailers who badly could have used the money if they cared to steal it. Of course neighbors would never think to steal it because burning your name in a small town is the same thing as banishment or starving to death because you'll never get another job / lover / friend / help.
It would have been gone in 15 minutes at my house in the city.
In a rural area, there’s only a handful of people who would notice the opportunity. Odds are pretty good that they won’t take it, because most people aren’t thieves. In the city, thousands of people will spot the opportunity and odds are good that a few of them are thieves.
> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.
I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.
Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.
I think it’s the news.
Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.
But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.
This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.
People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.
Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.
The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.
For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.
All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.
The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.
50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.
This said, there is something that has change.
24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.
I'm going guess that at some point between the 70s and in 00s a lot of children were murdered in schools by people with guns.
Someone has never worked retail. They know they can get away with it because pretty much any corporate store has a policy that employees can't try to stop them. An employee at a local REI was fired for trying to stop one of the daily thefts they were having.
Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.
Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.
IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.
I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.
> A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.
I've been to like 4 different Dollar Generals in the last year. Every single one of them had the self checkout turned off.
This is a crazy take imo. Grocery stores are way better with self checkout. No more lines, and Im legitimately faster than the cashiers ever were.
self-checkout at a grocery store is so maddening. There are enough edge cases (discounted items, multiples, lack of barcodes, special deals) to make it painful if you have anything more than a few staples. And I'm sure it's also part of the disgusting push to barcode & box produce which is a negative for everyone but the suppliers & stores.
>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss
I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.
I was at a Whole Foods last year and was tired from driving for about 6hrs straight. I scanned one item, set up a paper bag on the right, and then mindlessly bagged every other item in my cart without scanning. I paid probably $3-4 on a $60 purchase.
As soon as I got to the hotel and figured it out, I went back to correct the mistake--but imagine getting harassed or taken to the back for a careless error? I'm sure that happens more often than I hear about.
(PS I am genuinely surprised their weight sensor, that flags an attendant, didn't go off. That thing usually trips if you breathe on it funny.)
The last time I forgot to scan something hiding the back of my cart I caught the mistake as I was leaving and ran to another self-checkout to scan the item. The one employee they had watching over at least 7 self checkout stations thanked me personally because apparently if the cameras caught the error the overworked employee would have been responsible and might have lost her job.
Given that Prime now displays itemized orders purchased at Whole Foods, imagine getting your Amazon account flagged/banned for your mistake...
Depending on jurisdiction, they record everything and do nothing until you pass a felony amount. Then, they respond.
Target is well known in doing exactly this. A lot of shoplifters stay away from target past a 1 time hit.
It’s not a universal replacement for a clerk, but it can be very useful.
I can be through the whole process at CVS (with some random item like a birthday card) in about 30 seconds.
It's funny that you mention CVS. I went to use the human checkout at CVS last time I was there because the line for self-checkout was so long, only to be told "in order to check out at this register, you need to have a CVS extra-care card".
I no longer shop at CVS.
I also refuse to go into a CVS. They are trash. It's a shame there as so many more of them than walgreens.
lol
You really have to be able to judge to self checkout ability of the people in line. Some will get stuck for 5 min before a clerk comes to do it for them.
Less relevant, but reminds me of my all-time favorite grocery store LP encounter, near MIT. The chain was running this big promotion with lots of tear-open prize tickets that are either coupons or game board pieces, so I had been visiting often, to buy ramen noodles (one ticket per package!) and I had a small stack of coupons in my wallet. I was checking my coupons for this visit in the middle of a center aisle, and was returning my wallet to my back pocket, when this nice middle-aged probably church-going woman store employee walked up, looked at me, and the "oh!" expression on her face said she was very surprised that I was stealing. She hurried off. When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in, by sprawling across both the lane and the conveyor. The young checkout woman says to him, annoyed, "Not you again." The guy strikes up a conversation with me. "That's a nice backpack. ... If I had a backpack like that, people would think I was stealing something." It was an ordinary cheap bare-bones store-branded backpack. He's getting close to illegally detaining me, which would go extremely badly for him. To de-escalate, I do my best folksy code-switching, and pretend not to know what's going on. My hyperobservant mode also kicked in: there was abnormal maneuvers of multiple people from the other side of the checkouts. One young guy coming up with the others, my eyes dark to him, he sees I see him, and for some reason gets a look like he's noping the f right out of whatever is going down, and he spins 180 and quickly walks away. Eventually, this friendly and sensible person, who I took to be the manager on duty, comes up on the other side of the checkout, and we have a friendly conversation about the ticket promotion. I think she immediately realized that I was a good-natured MIT type, not a shoplifter. And I would guess she thought the LP guy was a clown who risks getting the store sued someday.
Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?
It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.
Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.
> Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?
1. Social media today has strong mob behavior, which is one of the reasons I often default to not naming when you want to talk about a more general problem. In this case, it would probably be OK, but I defaulted to not. Think of it like a blame-free post-mortem for the org to learn from.
2. I don't want to invite more grief from elements the stores and their bureaucratic mechanisms, if the mention of them online percolates up to corporate. The-coverup-is-worse-than-the-crime is a commonplace thing in corporate hierarchies, and if we're talking about a potentially dim/petty/underhanded person with access to power (e.g., the high-tech systems including features like facerec and maintaining profiles of ordinary people, and some data shared between companies) that could be a whole lot of grief for you. You can possibly eventually find out what happened, and sue, but the harm to you will be done, so better to just stay off the radar of sketchy employees of stores you frequent.
I get this and tend to not name names either, but at the same time I also think the mob like behavior is a symptom of the rampant abuse. What's the old MLK Jr quote? So honestly I've been asking myself if not naming names is actually the best strategy here. I tend to also be willing to give benefit of the doubt. But it is clear that people are taking advantage of this behavior as well. So I guess the question is which failure mode is worse: corporations being caught in the cross-fire or corporations taking advantage of good nature? (There's definitely more complexity than this one question)
> I was repeatedly told to target black women
not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.
I should have specified that I worked LP in the early 2000's but I doubt much has changed, since bigotry and racism do not seem to ever go away, especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution.
Lasted a mere 6 months at that job before I decided I could no longer turn a blind eye, since by then it had become clear to me that the problem was not isolated to just a few LP associates.
My observations (Canada, bigger city): The LP people you see (ie in "uniform") are often visible minorities, often women. They're positioned to remind you "we're watching!" not pursue any action. At best they'll call emergency services (a health event as common as theft). The covert LP people seem to be big, white, young males - the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around. Their game seems to typically be stop the known thieves, recover stuff and kick them out of the store. Physical confrontations are limited because of liability and only rarely do they call the cops. I'd expect the experience is different in the US or other environments.
> the same type you see at popular gyms. They're still easy to spot because you see a young dude putting the oddest selection of products in their basket (always a basket) as the follow a "suspicious" person around
Hah, I was in JC Penney and I grabbed a handkerchief for a suit, and I packed it into my fist, to do a magic trick type thing. Went to find my fiancee, felt someone behind me. Except I looked back, and he hurriedly asked a sales associate some benign question about where to find X. I kept walking to my fiancee, who was looking at jewelry, and when I got there he ducked behind the counter, as if he worked there, and was poking at the register and talking to another sales associate. I pulled the handkerchief out of my closed fist, did some lame "ta da" thing to my fiancee, and dude looks disappointed and walks off, no longer pretending to be either an employee or customer.
> what's the hangup about naming these companies?
Without snark I think we're on a site where being anti-corporate could hurt someones stock investments, naming companies is seen as rude.
It’s common sense to avoid putting things in your pocket in stores. What’s with the creepy write up about this? You sound like you were going to spaz out and attack multiple people if this escalated. Why not simply open your backpack and show them what’s inside? A lot of MIT types look like they haven’t been outside in months , school shooter types , so I don’t get that analogy either.
> When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in
Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?
The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda “new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.
The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.
We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!
Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.
> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).
The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.
Good point.
It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long.
Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work.
In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.
Amazon still does lockers and other collection points.
There is a whole business model built around being a package receiver for folks who don't want deliveries left on their doorstep. Most private PO box companies will receive packages for you, and there are apps that allow any business with a physical location to act as a package receiver for a fee per delivery. Often it is more convenient than residential delivery since you won't get delivery drivers falsely claiming they attempted delivery. When I used to travel a lot, I had a service that would receive mail and packages, and hold them until I was back in town. I think it was ~$10 month and well worth it.
Well, if you're actually paying for delivery. What's happening these days seems to be more of an offloading of that expense onto the deliverypeople. It "works" until a working vehicle becomes too expensive. Then, if you're lucky, you're paying the same amount to get your item in a week, when your house hits their algorithmically-generated route. Alternatively, deliveries could actually be priced marginally above cost (instead of below), and a lot of people can't afford it anymore. Good thing those retailers are still open. /s
These exist in retail space now, but you can't go there. DashMarts are full-service general stores that delivery drivers stop at to pick up orders. It's like a ghost kitchen but for Dollar General. If they'd open up a "civilian" window then I'd visit every day.
The Best Buy near me is halfway there. They split their previous retail location in half. One half is still a walk-in retail store experience, but much smaller than before and more focused on being a showroom for the more expensive things and only a handful of accessories actually around on the floor. The other half is pretty much a warehouse. Outside, one set of doors is now dedicated to curbside pickup from the warehouse side. In between the doors to the showroom area and the curbside, it's a big set of automated lockers to pick up orders 24/7.
At a lot of the stores that offer it, the curbside pickup is hopping. Tons of associates constantly wheeling out cartloads of merchandise to an ever-rotating group of cars. More and more people opt for the curbside experience it seems, which is pretty much the full-service experience just more asynchronously. I do it from time to time, but typically not for grocery items as I usually don't like the experience of substitutions or the app saying they have something when they really don't.
> have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years.
Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.
https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...
> spontaneous looting
Go outside and touch grass
I mean, who even steals anymore? These people are so out of touch.
The vast majority of people believe what the government tells them, and the government tells that that Covid is no longer happening and you have nothing to worry, everyone has returned to work, and masking is now only something that criminals use to hide their identity.
We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.
When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).
The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.
Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).
This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.
Any LP system will have false positive and false negative. If we can have a perfect LP system without false signals, I think self-checkout systems would have been more wide spread by now.
I was accused of not paying for certain items at a grocery store recently, and I explained that I bought those at another store. The LP person didn’t even ask to check the receipt from the other store. I proceeded with packing my groceries and went home.
I wonder if we can recognize that store people would want to reconfirm if we have correctly paid for the things we thought we bought, and we just answer them. No need to assume ill intent.
Wage theft is the largest form of theft in retail, out numbering shoplifting by a good margin.
Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money
These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both?
However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.
I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.
>Maybe we should have max enforcement in both?
You can't, resources are limited.
>Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded.
I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.
https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...
>You can't, resources are limited.
Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses.
>Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data.
https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...
No shoplifting enforcement is done through the courts and most importantly, the police. There is a huge difference here.
Courts incur costs between fees and lawyers, and even filing a report with the dept of labor (the typical recourse most people take at first) means you have to wait while you aren't being compensated for that time. Given wage theft in the majority of cases impacts people who can't often afford to go without those lost wages, this is a tough situation to be in, and even if you go through the labor department with a complaint, manage to get it reviewed in a timely manner (it typically takes months before hearing anything), you may still end up in court anyway depending on a number of factors.
You could sue for the lost wages directly, but again, this becomes an issue of cost, getting the case heard and tried in a timely manner etc. This could drag on for months to years, depending.
On the other hand, if a store sees someone shoplifting, they can and do call the police, and they can and will arrest someone for shoplifting. Its dealt with close to or during the incident occurring. Thats a really big difference in the feedback loop.
Imagine now, that you could call the police when you have a verifiable instance of wage theft, and the person(s) responsible was arrested and you given upfront restitution pending trial. That would be the equivalent of how we treat shoplifting vs wage theft. The differences are not minor, and I imagine they're intentional on behalf of lobbying from business groups.
If business owners or their subordinates were being arrested for wage theft I imagine things would change quickly, but there's such a lag time between actual accountability and the instance of it happening - and even when found guilty they simply pay the back wages plus penalties in the best case scenario, and thats if it gets to the point of either a lawsuit or arbitration on behalf of the labor department - that they have done the calculation that paying incorrect compensation (the most common form of wage theft) is overall costing them less than paying out labor disputes, as with anything that has hefty process attached to it without guaranteed results, it discourages the most vulnerable from engaging with that system even though they would benefit most.
They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.
>They aren't equivalent, and its disingenuous to see them as such.
Nowhere in my post did I remotely claim equivalence. In actual fact, I was pointing out that they are very different crimes, with different enforcement. Trying to strawman something I didn't actually remotely say is grossly disingenuous.
Whataboutism is grotesque. For any crime, there are always the bores doing the "yeah, but what about worse crime". It's useless noise.
I want both crimes absolutely crushed. If someone is a shoplifting fan because they think wage theft justifes it, they're a garbage person.
Some time ago I had a mild case of cerebral palsy, enough to slightly distort my facial features. And sure enough that made the AI flag me frequently for 'grocery frisking' by suspicious personnel in the supermarket where I am regular customer for years. That means nothing anymore. The supermarket is a factory, and you are a shopping trolley, a wallet, and a potential thief.
I'm assuming you mean Bells Palsy, not Cerebral Palsy.
I haven't heard of a short-term Cerebral Palsy, but then again I'm not an expert.
You are correct, it was Bells Palsy, thanks for correcting me.
Yeah, none of it really works anymore. I'm at the point where my desired approach is, "Give everything away and people be f*cking adults about only taking what's needed, and good stewards of what's taken." It's obvious that all of the socioeconomic guardrails do exactly zero, because downstream of "rich people doing whatever the f*ck they want" is "poor people also doing whatever the f*ck they want, just more desperately". Let there be chaos for a moment, and when everyone realizes that shortages and waste suck, we'll self-organize a better protocol. But these thousand bandages over the festering wound of a culture with a completely disordered relationship to goods can't keep it all together but for so long.
> at one upscale grocery chain > a chain pharmacy
so you're complaining, but also defending the position of the companies and intentionally refusing to name them.
its like you dont know you're in a class war here, and you'll be sick of these increasingly authoritarian practices until you fight back.
In my teenage years I worked at a k-mart that hired a Loss Prevention guy sometime after they hired me.
The LP guy caught a few non-employee shoplifters, but there kept being more loss until eventually an employee - one who had been there a long time - stole something on camera. It turned out to be the employee who had installed all of the cameras, but apparently he just got brazen/sloppy.
After that he got arrested and I never saw him again, and a few months later the LP guy moved on because the store's losses had dropped to more acceptable levels.
A couple of years later, the store closed down.
Any idea (besides the mask) why they picked you? Are you part of a visible minorty group?
>an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go
Did I just step into a time portal to 2022? Have you... been in a coma for the past several years? haha
My wife is diabetic, which means she is at higher risk from covid. My parents are old.
I have a duty to my family to protect them, and if that means wearing a mask to reduce my risk of getting covid, then their safety overrules my own comfort.
I have a duty to protect my fellow citizens. Some of them are also vulnerable to covid, though I don't know them personally.
The scientific proof of association between school (esp school start) and the spread of disease goes back over 100 years. I see no reason it would be different for covid, perhaps even stronger for covid where many college age people would be asymptomatic or low symtpoms.
In a town of big-name universities, where people are constantly coming and going from all around the world, and the reality of students living and socializing heavily, in cramped conditions, often with little sleep... Covid still seems to be "in the air".
Most people no longer wear masks in stores here, but there are some. And some employees do as well. Including the person at/near the customer service desk of the grocery I mentioned, I think the last 2 times I was in there.
meh if you don't have kids and really want to experience highly contagious viris then take a stroll through a day care. You'll be feeling symptoms before you get back to your car.
Wearing a mask when in a building of sick people remains a good idea
Peak COVID never ended. It's more important now than ever to stay vaccinated, maintain social distance, and mask up.
COVID is down from its peak, as I understand. It's just very much not gone, and by no means less nasty. We had the opportunity to wipe it out with a short, synchronised global lockdown, and we squandered it, and now it's like plague.
We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals.
The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."
True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?
The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.
Australia managed to keep COVID out for nearly two years, before they ran out of resources. Stop all non-local travel, identify where it's spread to, establish a buffer zone, wait to see if we drew our buffer zone large enough… two weeks later, and most of the world can be business as usual (minus globe-hopping); two months later, and COVID-19 is as dead as smallpox… assuming everything went right. Realistically, it might take four or five months for everyone infected to recover (or die): but it's a lot easier to enforce a quarantine when there are a hundred cases in the whole world.
This would be expensive, but as expensive as what we did was? Surely not! So, other regions providing funding and resources to the regions taking on the burden would be a strictly rational move.
You might say "oh, but people didn't know about the spread!"… but that's a ridiculous claim. The Less Wrong crowd tracked it in near-real-time from open source intelligence, and governments had access to more intelligence than that. The number of governments giving nonsensical advice, like "masks don't work because the respiratory disease is not spread via aerosols", and "replace your soap with dilute alcohol", lampshades a broad coordination problem. (We're not much past the "sweet-smelling herbs will protect from the plague" advice of yore, it seems.)
The things we needed to do were done – but for ridiculous political reasons, nearly everyone waited until after the disease had reached their regions to close their borders: internationally and intranationally, at every level! (The algorithm in Pandemic II's easy mode was more sensible than that.) So much of that effort, that psychological torment, was wasted. Even if the whole world had taken Australia's approach, we still would've brought the disease to manageable levels within a year. But there wasn't the political will… and so it goes. I think we're less prepared for the next novel disease outbreak, now.
New Zealand had about 5 million people, and PM Ardern successfully implemented a total lockdown that drove new COVID cases to effectively zero. Then she was voted out, and per Aurynn Shaw the plague ships were let back in.
It can be done. It just requires leadership, discipline, and the willingness to take strict, decisive, politically unpopular measures against violators and spreaders of misinformation. As Schwarzenegger said, when there's a pandemic on, screw your freedoms.
What it requires is authoritarianism. It requires to do things that are wildly unpopular. I'm happy every time wildly unpopular things fail. It does not matter to me that those who want to implement authoritarianism think they are right. Even if they are, we have to have agency.
Equality among races was wildly unpopular across the entire western hemisphere for a while there.
Forcing business owners to allow people of all races into your business was both unpopular and cited as an example of authoritarianism.
An American example: MLK never had popular support during his life. His approval rating around the time of his assassination was in the 30s or so. It would not be unfair to say that in the places that mattered most, he was wildly unpopular.
Doing the right thing is frequently unpopular at the time that you do it. There is a balance, but if you give everyone agency, you have to figure out how to keep the assholes from using their agency to infringe on another's agency.
A short global lockdown? China pursued the zero COVID policy for two years. Even highly restrictive measures weren't enough to stem it.
COVID is no longer a novel virus and its deadliness has vastly decreased. Yes it is by any reasonable understanding of the phrase, COVID is "less nasty". At its peak, 20,000 people were dying each week due to COVID in the US. Presently that figure sits around 200.
Its immediate deadliness has decreased, but it still causes cardiopulmonary and brain damage, and effects are cumulative with repeated exposure, and now it's endemic and frequently asymptomatic. Differently nasty, but not less nasty.
From all accounts, it appears to be "less nasty". Espically with the advent of vaccines.
COVID is also nothing like the plague, that is a major illogical jump. Early pandemics, such that in the Sasanian Empire, had a 25-50 million deaths (depending what century you draw the line). The Black Death was particularly deadly, with an estimated mortality rate of 70%.
How you can suggest COVID is now the plague is just absurd. You also make a very unfounded conclusion that if we "just stayed in doors a little bit more guys!" we would of solved it. Delusional.
Not more: sooner (and, as clearly stated in my previous comment, less). By the time most countries were doing lockdowns, it was to prevent their local health systems from completely collapsing, not to contain and eliminate the disease in any real sense.
I think the comparison to plague is accurate, since quarantine and social distancing were effective in reducing mortality during the Black Death, as were plague vaccines.
sarcasm detector broken
Home Depot's self-checkouts are using this facial ID to build/maintain their shoplifting database — this tracks thefts by the same person across multiple visits, and is used over time to build up a case against errant self-checkout-ers (i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier).
There is also CCTV AI (whether artificial intelligence, or actually indians) which can intervene with your self-checkout process to "remind" you that you didn't actually scan everything.
Beware that face detection may not be an issue under BIPA if it's not storing biometric markers [1], only a hash. As an engineer, and concerned citizen, I'd say that's a thin line as far as privacy protections go, but apparently the law disagrees and face detection tech suppliers are well-aware on how to monetize on the discrepancy [2]
In any case, the plaintiff will most likely be able to take the case to discovery.
[1] https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/2024-bipa-de...
[2] https://alcatraz.ai/blog/face-authentication-vs-face-recogni...
Probably discovery and a settlement to avoid a trial on this. BIPA has statutory payouts which will cripple you (rightly or wrongly). Statutory fines can be an awesome way to vindicate the public's rights and stop companies being assholes. It's way easier to litigate and settle a case than using torts.
I've noticed at supermarkets here that of the dozens of times those 'you haven't scanned something' warnings have come up, only one time the item hadn't actually scanned when I thought it had. Every other time has been a false positive for me. They're pretty dodgy, the workers always seem pretty frustrated with it as they go around clearing them for people (sometimes a handful of people waiting, falsely accused by the machines)...
All of the places around here that had first-gen units with a scale on the packing side (to make sure you actually scanned eg a banana and not a two pound block of cheese, yet were constantly wrong) have replaced them with newer versions that don't have scales or any other way that I can see to validate that what you scanned is what you put into your bag.
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
The horrible scale system of self-checkouts brought my anxiety to a fever pitch. Any slight adjustment to the bag or moving anything around would literally set off an alarm for "assistance." Still gives me low-key ptsd even though I know they don't use them anymore.
Still here at Kroger which consistently calls for assistance.
And then there’s fucking Costco where after the system calling over a rep after I scanned something. apparently I am only to use the scanning gun for things that are staying in the cart, when I bagged it it called them over.
We still have them in the UK. As you say, any attempt to adjust your packing sets the alarm off so I find it's quickest to place everything directly onto the scales and only pack once I've paid.
At my local grocery store, if the item doesn't end up on the scale in about three seconds, the machine locks up and requires an attendant to unlock it. Makes bagging as you go nigh impossible. Infuriating.
The worst part for me is when they prevent you from scanning the same item twice.
Yes, I want 2 boxes of cereal.
I just find it easier to go to a cashier.
There's a smaller grocery store here where the self checkouts actually advertise that you can scan two things before putting them away (and you can!). It really should be standard.
We should all go to the cashier anyway. I’m not a store employee and I don’t do their work. Besides, if the cashier fucks up it isn’t my problem.
I've watched too many cashiers put their fingers in their nose right before someone came to their line. I'd rather skip out on their gross fingers.
Yeah, use the touchscreen instead.
You should mention that to the store manager, wtf
I always go to a cashier. Every damn time the self checkout is open, there are two or three employees standing around doing nothing while one runs around fixing all the errors and does all the ID checks. If those people has just been in a regular checkout area, all those customers waiting at self checkout would have been out of the store already. Self checkout is a fucking joke 90% of the time.
Or the ones that prevent you from scanning item2 until you bag item1.
Wastes a lot of time for those of us working with >=2 hands.
Thank god Aldi’s just let you scan and go about your day.
you have to put the item on the scale before it lets yo uscan the next item. So you can scan the same item twice if you scan it once, put the other item on the scale, and scan the item again.
My go-to grocery store does not use a scale in the bagging area. You don't even have to bag anything, you can just scan items and put them back in your cart, which is what I normally do. There is one employee standing there monitoring 7 or 8 self-checkouts, but they've never confronted me about allegedly not scanning something, and I've never heard them confronting anyone else.
Another nearby mega-chain still uses the scales and makes you bag every item before you can scan anything else. I don't ever shop there, almost entirely for that reason alone. I would definitely never knowingly shop at a store that was scanning my face and storing it in a database.
Not necessarily. In my case I will often buy a few bunches of bananas, which don't all fit on the scanner’s scale at once. If I try to weigh them once bunch at a time, I will get a “too many scans of this item” alert and a staff member will have to come unlock the machine for me (and they'll usually scold me for not weighing all of my bananas, which can't all fit on the scale, at once).
Fun fact: the self checkout attendant usually has a button on a portable device that can remotely unlock your session.
They aren't allowed to use it and instead are required to physically walk up, move the customer out of the way, and push the same button on your screen.
I think CostCo's self-checkouts are best designed/staffed. Other than not accepting cash, they are my favorite (even though still verify scanning of each item, verified by bag-area weighing).
WalMart has two popular designs within my city (not sure if one is just un-updated, yet¿) — their type which accepts half dollars is my favorite cash design.
I have seen designs which don't weigh each item, allowing simultaneous scanning... that also call an attendant to verify if it thinks you snuck an item by (then plays a loop/clip of its alleged violation).
Personally, I have a family member that works as attendant to a dozen self-checkouts... and it seems like it would make more corporate sense to have more human checkers and only allow cash with them.
This is an important observation as you now have a mechanism to obtain free things from the megacorp of your choosing.
Ok so Ive heard this rumour spread around a lot and I still have yet to hear anyone back this up with anything beyond just speculation and hearsay. It also doesn't make sense.
This premise assumes two things for it to be true:
1. These stores have the technology to detect when you started a checkout transaction with an item, but said item was not scanned. 2. These stores have the additional technology to detect the cost of this item (afterall, if they're aiming for a threshold then they have to have some sort of monetary figure here).
I don't doubt that machine learning object detection can say, track a banana versus an apple. But I sincerely doubt its reliable enough where it can classify Mandarin oranges versus regular oranges. If the tech was reliable enough to do EITHER of these two technical abilities (let alone both of them at the same time), then the grocery would simply employ this technology as part of the self checkout process itself. Screw prosecuting people, just have them use this wizzbang auto detection self checkout where no scanning is needed.
Finally, I sincerely doubt that even with enough instances that you'd be successful in a prosecution that you actually could prove intent to shoplift versus say the much more likely fact that you forgot to scan an item or poorly scanned it. Again, to prove a serious intent then would subsequently have to build some sort of pattern analysis (i.e. you always stole expensive cheese or something) to make it obvious.
Has there been even a single prosecuted case someone can actually point to? It really doesnt make sense. I also could see this being thrown out because an argument could be made that the company sitting back and letting this continue to occur without intervention is tacitly allowing it to continue and thus sets a precedence that its allowable.
> There is also CCTV AI (whether artificial intelligence, or actually indians)
That's a new one. It's clever but I feel guilty having laughed.
Why guilty? The Indians are doing their job that stupid tech companies pay them for. The phrase has nothing to do with Indians but rather with unmasking the "AI washing" done by companies trying to drive up stock prices.
¿Por qué no los dos?
It's not new. The term dates to at least 2024; probably earlier.
Not just easier, they’re probably waiting until the cumulative value leads to felony theft charges.
Without justifying the theft, isn't it weird that they get rid of cashiers at registers which would scan your items, and thus prevent theft, put computers in place and then rely on software to shift the burden of solving theft to the public?
How would that work? If they have video from a year ago that looks like a person pocketing some item, what good is that without them showing that the person actually had possession of the item after they left the store?
I've seen a lot of discovery in these criminal cases from Walmart. They do typically wait until the loss reaches a certain point before acting and then they will come with a mountain of photos and videos showing the offender picking up the items all the way to them leaving the store on each visit.
I remember one I saw where the guy was filling two shopping carts with laptops at each Walmart, each one so high he could barely see over them. Then pushing the two carts out through the tire shop area. Did this at multiple stores. Walmart only called the cops once it was over $60K estimated loss.
I don't recall ever seeing a Wally World where the laptop boxes are just out for the taking, not in a locked cabinet.
That being said, Target stores in Washington do something similar, as the threshold for felony theft is $1,000, they'll pull the trigger on LE / LP involvement if you hit that threshold over multiple events, and bring the receipts for the previous.
I _somewhat_ think that's ripe to be challenged on proving intent in the previous instances, but I also know that serial retail thieves are not likely to be the most sympathetic cause there.
I thought the same thing. I saw photos and videos. I couldn't see any security devices on any of the laptops, but they were piled high on both carts. I saw a spreadsheet Walmart provided of each theft (from a single offender) breaking down how many items were taken and what the total was on each theft. It was like $7000, $13000, $6000 etc etc. The offender got an offer of 6 years DOC, which is served at 50% in Illinois for non-violent. They should get an additional 6 months "good time" on top of that, so maximum 2.5 years. Bearing in mind they were selling the laptops for 50 cents on the dollar from what I understand, they probably took in maybe $30K cash for 2.5 years locked up. (also bear in mind their family will have to support them through this process with a lawyer, about $5K, and probably another $5-10K in commissary and phone calls)
It seems like a good lawyer should be able to win. Evidence that shows a person picking something up on camera and then leaving the store without paying for anything doesn't feel all that strong.
Yeah i feel like there are exact same pictures when i buy something, if you happen to leave out the pictures from when i was standing in line and at the checkout. you could totally make it look like i stole stuff.
I mean, you could, but when walmart sees you walking out the door, they'll go trace your entire route and keep the film off of each of the cameras from entrance to exit of the store.
They tend to put up a very good prosecution.
In the end though, unless they stop you and find the merchandise or have you on video with the stuff outside of the store, there's no proof you stole anything. It's circumstantial which is relatively weak.
Plus, Walmart doesn't prosecute anybody. They hand the evidence over to the police and the the district attorney decides if they want to prosecute. Walmart can file a civil suit which I'm wondering if that's what they actually do. There (as I understand it), they only have to show that you likely stole something vs a criminal case where they have to show beyond reasonable doubt that you stole something. It's a much lower bar.
In that sense you're correct.
What Walmart can and does you at the time they file with the state is trespass you. Which counts for all Walmart stores and properties. That's where things like facial identification probably come back in so your caught the moment you walk in a store.
Trespass is very easy to prove.
From much experience in this, I've never seen Walmart file a civil suit.
They don't technically prosecute anyone, but in the county where I was witness to prosecutions for Walmart shop-lifting they were putting a lot of pressure on the DA office. They would bring a ton of muscle, investigators, attorneys, print outs, DVDs, etc. They would push their prosecutions hard when they wanted to.
Walmart is pretty political too.
https://corporate.walmart.com/purpose/esgreport/governance/e...
>Walmart works with policy makers and public safety officials to ensure we are providing a safe workspace for our associates and a safe, enjoyable shopping experience for our customers. The nature of retail crime varies across our stores and geographies, and includes complex organized retail crime. Walmart works closely with our trade associations to support efforts to pass laws (such as the Combatting Organized Retail Crime Act) that ensure these crimes incur meaningful penalties, and that law enforcement have resources to appropriately prosecute these crimes.
Needless to say the can help sway local elections based on how they push certain political figures.
If you are on video pushing a cart through the parking lot with the items clearly visible, that could be a pretty strong case.
If all they have is a dozen videos where it looks like you are shoving something in your pocket but no other hard evidence, that wouldn't go anywhere in court.
This is another example of the poor being punished harder. A desperate mother who steals repeatedly will reach felony levels and spend years in prison or face deportation, but a rich teen who steals for fun will stay below felony and get away Scott free.
Rich kid can also keep stealing and face felony. Don't defend stealing.
Also if you're stealing as an immigrant, you should be deported without any questions asked.
WOW. Look, being in the country without "authorization" isn't even a crime. It's an administrative matter. Don't go implying that actions are somehow worse when someone who took the risk of moving to a new country does them as opposed to someone who won the birth lottery.
The act of entry without inspection is a misdemeanor crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. Repeat offenses can be felonies. It is just a civil violation if they have once entered with permission but lost it, e.g. a visa overstay or violation, adjustment denial, status expiration or revocation. So the Biden era catch-and-release rules created millions of such cases.
You missed the bigger point to focus on the technical inaccuracy:
> Don't go implying that actions are somehow worse when someone who took the risk of moving to a new country does them as opposed to someone who won the birth lottery.
Im not sure we should allow such premeditated charge stacking, it is just further weaponizing the law and fueling our prison industrial complex for zero gain to society. Who is to say many of those people wouldn't have stopped after being caught and charged the first time? Imagine if cops sat on the side of the road not pulling people over, just recording minor traffic offenses in a file, and then a year or so later drop 10+ charges on a person all at once and turning the collective charges into felony reckless driving charges? People would be outraged and nothing of worth would be gained.
I thought it was because the stores can't press charges if it's a small thing, so the only way they can bring any action is to build a case.
I have yet to see any actual evidence of such a problem, just a bunch of outrage from social media commentators who also claim things like Portland was burnt to the ground by BLM and other hyper-exaggerated crap.
And even if it is true, I still don't see why premeditated charge stacking should be allowed. If someone comes into the store that they know will steal, they should be banned from the store and arrested for trespassing then and there. Shitty criminal justice policies does not justify creative abuses of the law by corporations or prosecutors. Having 25% of the world prison population, along with all the costs that go along with it does not benefit us, it only hurts us. And it has repeatedly been shown that stiffer criminal charges do not prevent crime, if it did the US would be one of the safest 1st world countries, not the most dangerous 1st world country by a large margin that makes countries without actual functioning government seem peaceful.
>Shitty criminal justice policies does not justify creative abuses of the law by corporations or prosecutors.
As we say over here, bless. your. heart.
...if you only knew how bad things really are [deadpan.face]
We are nations of loopholes, inside and out.
>I thought it was because the stores can't press charges if it's a small thing, so the only way they can bring any action is to build a case.
Firstly, stores don't "press charges." A store may report a crime, but it is the state that "presses charges" and prosecutes alleged criminal activity, not the store.
Secondly, in the US, we have statutes of limitation[0] which limit the time in which criminal charges can be brought. These vary by state and by offense, but IIUC Petit (sometimes referred to as 'Petty') Theft usually has a one or two year statute of limitations.
I bring that up as, again IIUC, other countries (notably the UK) do not have such limitations.
IANAL, but I'm not sure if multiple petit thefts (usually misdemeanors) can be aggregated into a single charge of grand theft[0] (a felony). I'd expect that also varies by state. YMMV.
[0] Once again, this varies by state, but petit theft (larceny) is typically charged for stuff valued at less than $5,000.00, while grand larceny is for stuff valued at USD5,000.00 or more.
Stores don't decide whether to charge someone with a crime, the prosecutor does. They probably wait for small to become big because shoplifting a small amount doesn't reach a high enough bar to make prosecuting likely.
Pedantics aside, it's more or less the same thing. Prosecutors in some places aren't charging misdemeanor theft. Stores know this.
Or if your dealing with forgetful / tech confused old people. Now your putting 75 year olds in jail when a sooner alerting system would've made them notice if they were not using it correctly.
I'm not a trained cashier, if I forget to scan something it's not the same as theft. Not sure how it would play out in a court situation but this is always my go-to when I get accused of fucking something up in the store; also why I decline the receipt check at the door (legal in my state).
Most professional cashiers are only trained in one merchant's POS. Suddenly, me a layman consumer is supposed to be a flawless operator of every variant of self-checkout POS that I encounter. It's a bit crazy to me that a court would side with a merchant unless some egregious evidence or pattern had could be demonstrated.
> also why I decline the receipt check at the door (legal in my state).
Costco can't enforce the receipt check, but they can terminate your membership - but that's only because they're a membered organization in the first place.
I've heard this but also I've never shopped there
It's thankfully still an option not to use self-checkouts. I sometimes do that if I have one item only, but basically always queue to an actual cashier.
That's not always the case.
Lowes got rid of all cashiers and went to 0 armed bandits (self checkouts).
Menard's has hidden policies which you don't find out until you're at the receiving end. Hut they have human cashiers.
I loved the early days when nobody touched the self-checkouts and it was like an additional choice.
Not surprising that they’ve titrated the cashier lines to always be much longer.
At least it’s not a government again giving you quick service if you sign away your rights with a lineup around the block for those that with to assert their rights.
I’m also thankful that my local grocery store is subject to a massive development proposal, so they’re not bothering with capital improvements like self-checkout.
The option is becoming rare amongst most large retailers I frequent and only exists in my local Home Depots if I go stand through the contractor lines in the lumber section.
I've gotten used to the expectation that I will be my own cashier at most places, but I'm not OK assuming any liability that comes with my lack of cashier skillset/training which is what they want.
If we weren't making shoplifting not a crime, then we wouldn't be having that worry right now.
Seems like proper punishment is only way to get deterrent effect. Or the courts to do their job. So to me this sounds like workable way, stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
Do you have ANY evidence that sending someone to jail for a few months to a few years sets people on a straight path?
I am pretty sure the evidence shows the opposite.
Best available evidence is that:
- Punishment works to deter crime when it's immediate and high-likelihood. Particularly, if someone gets caught and faces some immediate consequence on one of the first few times they shoplift (especially the first time) then that makes a huge difference to the probability that they'll become a habitual shoplifter
- The vast majority of shoplifting is done by a small number of essentially lifelong career shoplifters. Imprisoning them is unlikely to set them straight, but taking them off the streets for long periods makes a significant impact on the amount of shoplifting the community experiences
So why we are even using it anymore? Why not then close down all the prisons? If there is no deterrent effect or rehabilitation effect. Wouldn't it be greater savings just to close it all down and let everyone out?
People don't need "rehabilitation", they need help. Nobody would need to shoplift if they could afford what they need. Prices should always be indexed to the customer's income. That's it - make it so everyone can afford things, and crime ends overnight. It works for healthcare. People with insurance pay for those without. Why not for groceries and TVs?
It's more complicated than this.
I agree that prisons are literally useless in stopping criminal behavior, and almost certainly accelerate it for most. Prison is only scary the first day on your first bit. The second time you get locked up you already know the system, know all the staff and know all the other inmates. It's less of a deterrent each time.
The issue is that a vast proportion of offenders aren't committing crimes out of necessity. A large proportion are doing it because it appears to be quick, easy money and regular jobs aren't considered manly or cool.
source: a lot of time spent inside
>prisons are literally useless in stopping criminal behavior
"Con College" — where you learn tricks of the trade, and further divide with racism / hatred.
>stealing ... [because] regular jobs aren't considered manly or cool.
This, but also too many lazier-mindset people think this will be an easy lifestyle to sustain long-term (it's not).
So if I report less income, prices for me go down and no penalty if I get caught.
This is only a half-response, but I think one beneficial policy to increase food-access would be to remove regressive sales taxes from grocery purchases. Replace lost revenue with a progressive tax.
Several states tax a considerable amount on even basic foodstuffs (e.g. Tennessee).
It seems like would require every business to be able to directly access every customer's income and credit history and would normalize price discrimination.
I think UBI would be better. Expecting capitalists to work against their own self-interest is doomed to fail.
No. When you look at it that way you need to consider the crime that's never committed due to the risk of being imprisoned poses. Given how shitty people in the US treat each other, just during minor disputes/traffic/misunderstandings/etc, I think it's safe to say we'd be a country overrun by murderous rapists in no time without a prison system. It would devolve into anarchy pretty quick. Think the wild west with cars and ARs and without the sheriffs. GTA becomes reality.
Yes.
Lol, I'm all for letting them all out in whatever county you live in, at least.
Because private for profit prison businesses can make money off them. Public is paying for private profits.
Doubly so since the 13th amendment enshrined slavery as a sole ownership by the state, if found guilty of a crime.
And who's the group who is overpoliced in this country? And who up-thread said to target black women? Yep.
The 13th amendment was terrible. It should have never had an exception for punishment for a crime. Instead, we have a states controlled slave state.
The USA should do, perhaps, four fifths of that. Despite having 4% of the world's population it has 25% of the world's prisoners, and one of the highest crime rates in first-world countries so it'd obviously not working.
They could also consider banning substances that make people more aggressive... There's a particular artificial pesticide whose name I don't remember, which is coincidentally banned in all the places with much lower crime rates, and has been shown to alter behaviour in monkeys.
It's shocking at times to see such these ideas parroted in a community that prides itself on critical thinking. Punishment isn't rehabilitation!
Rehabilitation and support is not what "people" want. Political parties that want more punishment seldom want to spend money even on punishments. So it becomes impossible to put people on a straight path. Having courts do their job is very expensive as well so instead people build their careers on getting fast convictions of people. The thing that helps is consistently building a society that cares, you have to know that the society will certainly react to your actions.
Having a hidden social credit system hidden and managed by a private actor seems like the worst way of doing it.
Pro money/business party wants/needs more people in prison so their private for profit prison businesses can make more money on legal slavery.
>stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
I'm not sure if you have been to an American jail but they do not set folks on the straight path. They are basically Crime University, and the folks on the inside trade all kinds of information about how to crime more effectively, where to crime, what tactics police use and what neighborhoods are safest or most dangerous for police activity.
I was thrown in lockup for a weekend for not changing my tags after moving and letting it escalate out of control and what I saw in that inner city lockup truly shocked me. Folks had incredible amounts of illegal goods on them (despite having been searched and thrown in jail) and were openly performing transactions, sharing "industry secrets" and coordinating for future work once they were out.
If you have spent any time in an American jail or prison, I think you would be disabused of the notion that you can simply lock a criminal up for a few months and "fix" them. I would suggest that it's the opposite, a few months in jail turns a newbie criminal into a true amateur or journeyman with networking, education and future opportunities.
No, that's been disproved. Most people don't consider that they'll be caught and so the penalty isn't relevant to their thought process. What does deter is a high likelihood of being caught - so a small fine will be more effective if the detection/enforcement is sufficient. Also, it's often not feasible to tie up the courts and jails with minor offenders (e.g. speeding, using a bus lane etc).
cut off their hands as a punishment
I feel like if the rules are going to change like this, they should change fairly. A few months in jail for what would have been petty crime if not for the repetition seems excessive. If right now there's a lower cash value threshold for prosecution, the fair thing is that there should be a lower rate threshold. For example, someone shouldn't be jailed for stealing a thousand dollars worth of batteries over the course of ten years, I don't think.
Blame jurisdictions that made shoplifting up to $900 or similarly large amounts practically not-a-crime.
What you're describing is essentially the exact point system used for traffic infractions in many countries over the world. Driving 10 km/h above the speed limit? No biggie, you pay a fine. Do it three times? We take your license.
No, not "do it three times". "Get fined for it three times." That's the key difference; there's feedback from the system that's supposed to act as a corrective. What's being discussed here would be taking away someone's license sight unseen, with no previous lesser punishment having been administered.
In the U.K. you get points on a license for being caught speeding (and other offence). Typically 3.
Knock 12 points up over 3 years and you lose your license.
The problem is the time it takes from being caught to getting the letter can be a couple of weeks. You could literally go from 0 points to license loss for driving 10 miles on an empty road with changeable speed limits and have no idea until a week or two later when you get 4 letters arrive.
Now until the court takes away your license you’re still allowed to drive, but it gives you no chance to change your behaviour.
That's an imperfection of the system, not a designed feature of it. It's also possible you sometimes go over the speed limit and there are no sensors around to detect that condition.
*loicense
You are correct, I didn't realize this nuance.
I mean, if they walked out with a felony amount of stuff the first time the system would have tossed them directly in jail.
I can understand why the stores will do it this way. Each prosecution is very expensive. If you're going to go though the effort with the legal system bring a case that stops the culprit. More so, doing this tends to scare the hell out of people that think they've gotten away with something. Kinda like the thievery version of the Santa Claus song.
"Walmart knows when you are sleeping. Walmart knows when your away, Walmart knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake".
Well, maybe there should be some sort of public registry where this sort of in process evidence would be publicly viable for you and others. Then you could regularly check it.
If the store is going to be tracking this information, it could just as easily show a message to the offender. "Hey, we're on to you. Knock it off, or else." Going straight for the jugular is just rude.
How about stealing is just rude. Theft is terrible. Trying to justify stealing power tools “bec it’s a big corporation” further degrades society and creates a dishonest low-trust culture.
I live in Illinois and look forward to collecting my $2k check for this but the reality is that the only person to blame for the theft is the person committing the theft. The same way we don’t blame women for how they dress or just because someone is trusting that doesn’t make it right to attempt to steal.
If the company prefers to allow the theft to continue as long they get to press charges, instead of taking more immediate measures that would stop the theft outright, such as banning the person (which must be feasible if they're tracking the person by facial features), somehow I don't think it must be having much of an impact. Note that I'm not defending the thieves here. I'm just saying that this approach seems unnecessarily vindictive and not useful to solve the problem which, let's remember, is "people steal", not "thieves go unpunished".
> stealing is just rude. Theft is terrible.
you, I, and probably most people on HN have the privilege of seeing it this way. for others, it's sometimes not a moral question, but a question of survival or at least dignity.
I know, how terrible the thieves are so hard-up they have to eat that pair of Jordans. Or those Milwaukee power tools. Oh my, what a terrible world...
I’m not familiar with any stores that have Jordans that can be purchased via self checkout.
how easy the world is if you limit the examples to the ones which reinforce your way of seeing things.
You realize goods can be exchanged for money right? Also tools can be used for jobs which earn money.
The difference is that you are informed and penalised each time, rightly giving you the option to change your behaviour. A police officer following a speeder to deliberately have enough offences to take their license immediately would be at least frowned upon in most jurisdictions.
Target is also known for building cases over time until more serious charges can be used.
Time to change your laws and/or prosecutors I'd say so those 'minor thefts' can and will be prosecuted resulting in fines which need to be paid - no ifs and buts. Get them early and get them (hopefully not that) often and you may be able to keep the majority of 'proletarian shoppers' on a somewhat less crooked path. If crime pays more people commit crimes, if shoplifting is not dealt with more people shoplift.
> i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier
This feels like it should be illegal. Holding back on reporting or prosecuting until you think you're more likely to get a conviction or a bigger conviction, feels close to entrapment.
To do otherwise is just unnecessarily vindictive, showing that it's the punishment that matters more than the prevention.
The issue is that in many states now prosecutors refuse to prosecute for crimes under a certain threshold, cops often won’t even bother taking a report.
A year ago my wallet was stolen. The guy went on a shopping spree until my cc companies started denying charges. In each store he made sure to spend less than $500, so individually there was no crime worth reporting. I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
The point is that from the store’s point of view the only way to prevent it is to wait for it to be a crime the SA will prosecute. It’s honestly shocking to me that people in these comments rush to defend thieves stealing power tools and stuff from Home Depot. There’s no argument to be made about them “stealing food for their staving families” this is very clearly purely about crimes of opportunity by selfish degenerates who have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of society.
And btw, it’s possible that Home Depot does report every crime, but the only time anything happens is once it reaches that threshold that progressive SAs determine is worth prosecuting.
> I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
Hah. I had pretty good evidence when it came to my stolen laptop and iPhone when I was given a lead to the person selling them on eBay (essentially, someone bought the phone on eBay, tried to convince me to unlock it, and when I refused and the seller refused to take it as a return, he said "I know the real owners info and I'm giving him your info").
His eBay page was a treasure trove. Probably 100+ phones for sale, most "without charger". Same, 50+ laptops, "no chargers or accessories".
Contacted the police.
"He probably didn't steal them himself" - Uhh, isn't selling knowingly stolen property still a crime?
"..."
They could not possibly have cared less.
Crime itself is 100% political issue as well, and you show a case of that.
Someone steals enough from big box store, and the cops DO RESPOND and charge etc.
Individual has proof of multiple thefts, and cops don't give one fuck, as in your case.
Now speaking of retail theft, by far the biggest retail theft is time-theft against employees. Do you know wwhat happens when you report that? You're told its a civil matter.
Individual wronged == civil matter
Big company == criminal matter
I doubt it has anything to do with "progressive". It has to do with limited resources and spending them where they think they will do the most good.
but it's been proven time and time again, that any form of fraud of theft, leads to at least 3x more in the future.
If they get away with it, they never stop, and just keep stealing more and more. Most never hit any repercussions. Yet in amount of actual numbers of people committing those acts, it's a very small number compared to the number of thefts.
So stopping it early is just smarter. Better to stop someone stealing 250 euro, rather than wait a year, let that same person steal more and more, just until they steal 5000 euro and it's worth it to prosecute. It's still the same person, same amount of effort. Just more damage to society.
Is it really any different than the thief who steals things just under the felony limit...but does it every day?
In Texas the felony limit is $2,500. Is stealing $1000 on Monday, $1000 on Tuesday, and $1000 on Wednesday really so much better than stealing $3,000 on Monday?
The delay gives you time to arrange a refund from Visa/Mastercard or to make an insurance claim, if you're a business. You don't really have to lose anything from theft. It's just a business expense for your insurance or card issuer.
It's pretty sad that it's so normalized in our society that it's just a business expense
It shouldn't be. It's a crime
> feels close to entrapment
It doesn't feel close to entrapment at all.
Maybe you could argue they aren't doing their best to minimise losses and such aren't eligible for a full recovery of their losses, but not that the perpetrator didn't commit the offense.
I make it a point not to use self-checkout systems because I want to support human interaction even if basic, and contribute to jobs for humans. And cash (most self-checkouts here are card-only).
I understand it’s a losing battle on all fronts.
Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
You don’t want to pay people to do that and put yourself in a higher theft situation, then you haggle the customer even more by treating them like a criminal.
I had one of these happen at a self checkout the other day where the system did object tracking and it turns out I had many duplicate items to scan so I used the same item scan code to save time even though its weight system forces me to do one at a time I can at least have a prealigned code handy. I ended up doing some tricky hand switching between items (crossing over) while doing it quickly and that tripped up the object tracking system, so an employee came over and reviewed the video of my checkout right in front of me… at a grocery store for a $2 item.
The anti consumer sentiment is high for an economy based so highly off consumerism.
> Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
I've seen this sentiment in recent years, but with respect to time, self-checkout was always faster than human cashiers. You didn't need to wait while the cashiers did procedures like counting the money in the drawer and waiting for a supervisor to sign-off on it. The lines were unified so that your line was served by 4-8 checkouts rather than 1 cashier (or 2 as is the case with walmart). That meant that any issue with a particular customer e.g. arguing over pricing presented on the shelf vs on the system, needing to send someone out to verify the shelf, didn't affect the time you needed to wait as much. They were a very positive thing for customers when they were introduced.
Basically, instead of having to get in a line of 3-6 people and having to wait for each of those to be served before you by one cashier, you just instantly check-out with usually no line.
With respect to labor, it's basically the same. That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
> That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
Where I am there is a limit that many people ignore and I have almost never seen any employee try to enforce
Also, self-checkout itself is faster here anyway. We don't have baggers, so in the cashier lanes you have to unload onto the conveyor and put your items into the bags yourself, with some awkward maneuvering since the register is between the conveyor and the bagging area. In self-checkout unloading and bagging is combined into one action: Lift item from cart, pass over scanner on the way to the bags, place in bag, and pay at the end without even having to move. No real additional work on the customer's part.
Also like the other response, I hadn't heard of explicit limits either, as long as everything fits on the bagging scale.
I think self check-out is only faster if you compare it to really, really slow checkout clerks with no dedicated bagger. I've been in grocery stores with fantastic checkout staff where 100 items were checked out and bagged in a minute and a half. Ain't no way I'm going to achieve that rate standing by myself there over a tiny kiosk where I need to find a bag, put every item into bags before scanning the next one.
They don't make a race of it, but I think they go at a reasonable "marathon" pace. There are also dedicated baggers. I should note that cashiers also accommodate other services like paying utility bills, or making withdrawals from one's checking account.
It's not just about speed, though, it's particularly about the unified lane and the fact that 2 self-checkout stations easily fit in the space of a single human cashier station (that may be unoccupied because of a store's hiring budget). It's also about peoples' patience. If a store hires less cashiers and enough people are still willing to wait in line such that there's profit, well...
If the self check out is configured to trust you, it is faster. Each store seems to implement this differently. It's good that you shop at a store that lets you do this yourself. There's one grocery store near me where I have to wait for an attendant to confirm each item because it doesn't like the weight of it, or I scanned it too fast, or something. That one is very much noticeably slower. I avoid shopping there.
The trust is the key. If we are trusted, Home Depot should not be secretly keeping tabs on us...
FWIW I have never encountered or even heard about a limit for self checkout here in Denmark.
>Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
Yikes, the entitlement. Should they also have someone push your cart around the store and load it for you?
If you don't like it, you have the freedom of association to use a different store.
Same. And indeed a losing battle. Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend. Maybe it is because it is a means to face away of all the big challenges humanity faces. Being social in complex society requires skill and effort, causes stress. Facing life challenges, and the doom and gloom. The easy way is to flee that, to extract oneself, and technology is bliss here.
Why would I want to wait in line for 5 minutes, when I could be on my way?
Life goes by fast. I’d rather spend those small minutes lost with my loved ones or back to doing things I enjoy more. Over my lifetime that’s a lot of time.
I only shop in person at Whole Foods because it’s two blocks away. Every Tuesday they have some nice discounts and it’s fun to walk the aisles. Otherwise I just deliver groceries from Costco every 2 weeks or my Amazon prime subscriptions.
Why continue purposefully at a disadvantage? Makes no sense.
The bigger point I wanted to make is how pervasively small social interactions with other people are automated away all across the board. At the McDonalds you go through the menu on the monitor at the entrance, or used your mobile. No social exchange at the counter anymore. In the cinema you do the same. AI is going to break the bonds online by indirect agent intermediaries. People become isolated in small in-groups. Until in your local community you sail lonely with your family through a sea full of strangers. You probably can't talk about community anymore then. What is the societal impact of the loss of all these micro interactions? How can we have a tolerant society if we are so separate and individualist?
What genuine connections are you making waiting in line to get movie tickets and popcorn?
Why not just walk to the theater to your seats and actually get excited for the movie? That ticket seller is doing their job and Gtfo.
I think people are so doom and gloom about this stuff.
Isn’t it better to just like go sit at the seats with your family or friends and enjoy the trailers and talk about the movie before it starts? Idk. That’s actual connection building.
I saw Avengers in Japan and my friends and I were talking to Japanese people about the movie at our seats.. using google translate. Actual connection building.
I don’t think anyone goes to the movies to enjoy waiting in line to ask some college student who doesn’t give a shit for 4 tickets to Dune.
The background noise that those social interactions constitute is valuable and important of itself. Bonded relationships are important, but it's a separate matter entirely. Otherwise relationships lived out over the internet would be equal and interchangeable with those lived out in person. It wouldn't matter if you talked to someone face-to-face or over email. The human experience shouldn't be picked apart piece meal with overrationalization and naive maximalism.
Why not go straight to the movie and actually connect with people there?
I don’t get it. You like having middlemen? lol
The point is that it's not about connection in the slightest. There's more to community than friendship.
> You like having middlemen?
Consider this, there still has to be someone to maintain that machine. What's the point then, exactly, except to pretend like the people around us don't exist? And just because they're not the closest people to us? I'm afraid I don't see the upside, actually.
You wait in line because there weren't enough checkout points in the first place. Poor customer service by your supermarket. It is funny, in the supermarket near me people are coralled into a kind of scan barracks where underage teen guardians frisk their shoppings regularly. There is only one checkout with personnel still operating it. What regularly happens now is that there's a big crowd waiting for a free scan point, like cattle, while that one patient cashier is waiting idle. And will process the groceries much faster than any self-scanner can. Brave new world.
Myeah I think you're just going to badly managed stores. Here I just scan my groceries while putting them in my bag. Then I go to self checkout, put back the scanner and pay. It takes about one minute from entering the self checkout to leaving it and there is never any line.
They had such system but it led to too much grocery theft, that they put the scan barracks in place instead.
At least at my Whole Foods there are two cashiers and 6 self checkouts. Tuesdays are usually busy.
Both have lines and the self is always faster. I’m that guy and I timed it myself when I was curious. Like I said. I don’t get it.
They run a business. I just need some stuff and I’m outta there. I don’t really care beyond that exchange.
I think that there's more than just a productivity angle, and that those 3 lines of friendly and casual social exchange with the checkout clerk on every visit are meaningful and valuable, even though on themself only in a small way. These small social exchange form part of the lubricant of a well-functioning society.
In the context of the parent post, don't miss the forest for the trees. 5 minutes away from your loved ones here or there is nothing if, for one example, your loved ones can't find jobs locally (working the till in retail is a common first job for kids, after all...) or otherwise disconnect, going out of our way to avoid interacting with anyone, because of the stress everyday life now requires, doom and gloom, etc. Plus, there's the option of bringing your loved ones with you, if that's your concern.
Even setting that aside, if you're so into min-maxing your free time that you can list waiting in line at the grocery store as one of your biggest regrets in life, then you gotta recognize how privileged a life you lead.
Of course I live a "privileged" life. I grew up without running water, a flushable toilet, and a tube light that worked 1/4 of the day at night.
I optimize my life because I get one life.
The actual privileged people are those who were born in first world and still manage to lose somehow.
> Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend.
Well... that's because capitalism incentivizes us to do it wrong. Instead of the dreams of the early sci-fi writers getting real - aka, robots and automation do the majority of the work, leaving humans time to socialize - we have it even worse nowadays, with even with the work force of women added to the labor pool, there still are constant political pushes to expand working hours or to even make it legal to hire children again.
If the profits from productivity gains over the last decades would have been distributed to the workers, either in terms of purchasing power or in free time, we wouldn't be in this entire mess.
Same, I refuse to use them. I'm not going to support making cashiers redundant.
On top of that I don't want to be in a position where I get accused of shoplifting when I forgot to scan something. I'm simply not trained on the 7+ different self-checkout terminals they have around here.
Do you also wish that elevators would go back to having attendants that drive you to your floor?
When a job doesn't need people, keeping a person there is not some kind of noble gesture. It's annoying.
Or those backward states where you must let the gas station attendant pump your gas.
There's only one of those, New Jersey.
There are whole countries like that.
The experience of interacting with the checkout people makes me long for a future of less human interaction
Order online for delivery. Stop leaving your house.
Delivery drivers are marginally better - but then the interaction has to occur on my doorstep.
Not sure if this is the same for the USA, but worker shortage is the main reason why self-checkout became popular here in Europe at least. Aging population, very low birthrate and higher educated people all contributed to this problem (although not for all countries in the EU).
> worker shortage is the main reason why self-checkout became popular here in Europe at least
What exactly do you mean?
That the companies moved to self checkout because they couldn't get the staff?
Or people prefer self checkout because the manned tills are few in number?
The first is very very hard to believe
>The first is very very hard to believe
Why?
At least in the US our unemployment rates have been very low. Higher demand for labor leads to higher labor costs which allows more expensive automation to be economical.
You can say "Well pay them more", but that doesn't get you out of a labor shortage. That just ensures you get the labor rather than someone else.
In the USA, the self checkout line is easily 5x faster than the human line. Cities are growing, but the size or number of grocery stores is not.
This is only true because of having to wait in line for the checkout personnel. Once you get to the person, if they're even reasonably skilled, they can check out your groceries faster than you can.
My local grocery store has something like 15 checkout aisles, and usually only have one or two open. If they manned each aisle, there would be no wait and self checkout would be pointless. But they are not going to staff properly because the CEO needs another yacht.
In Germany, the entire self-checkout section moves as fast as one human cashier (they're very skilled, this is no joke). And they have one human supervising it at all times. And it takes the space of two human cashier lines, so they double up one of the other lanes. At the end nothing is really gained except a little bit of privacy (but not really because the supervisor's terminal still shows everything you scan)
This is why I don't understand people who support mandatory online / one-click subscription cancellation. Support jobs and require people to call-in to a human to cancel. That's a human-centred system that contributes to jobs.
For English, press one...
There are - currently - three-hUndred-and--fifty-seven -- people - inthequeue. Please wait
Self-checkouts are not the only place where facial recognition is used. Of course overhead cameras have long been present at actual staffed checkout counters. The new risk today is that every credit card POS device has a camera built into it as well. I go around and put little black stickers over them when I encounter them. These cameras are well-hidden and not disclosed at all.
Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
Like imagine being in the era when electricity was becoming more prevalent and I’m sure some people were complaining about some ideal then as well.
That said I do agree that self checkouts should not be using methods beyond what’s reasonably necessary.
>Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
I'm all for more efficiency. Me fumbling with self-checkout is the opposite of efficiency.
What's that? I should learn to do it better? How much would that cost in terms of both time and money? Multiply that by several hundred million, as compared with a few hundred thousand cashiers.
You're saying that (x)250,000,000 < (x)500,000, where x = the cost in time and money to become proficient in checking stuff out. Is that correct?
If so, your math seems a little off. AFAICT, the only folks who get the benefit of this "efficiency" are the store owners who, instead of paying folks to do the job, makes the customer do it instead.
What's that? Those savings are passed along to the customer? Give me even one example of this being the case. I've certainly never seen it.
Peak efficiency is having someone else shop for you or just getting things delivered.
That's what I do. I only go to whole Foods on Tue for the fun of seeing what’s on sale.
>Peak efficiency is having someone else shop for you or just getting things delivered.
I do that as well. In fact, I have deliveries coming today.
But some things I prefer to get from West Side Market and/or H-Mart, which are right nearby me because of the superior selection and my ability to choose specific products for myself.
This is exactly why I love to leave my carts out in front of the entrance and in the parking lot.
Without me, there'd be no cart gatherer jobs.
I once said this without stating it as a joke, but was surprised to find people enthusiastically agreeing with me. /s
The green box around his face in the image is evidence that it detected a face, but not that it had collected or stored identifying biometrics. It would be legal for a POS device to detect any face, e.g. to help decide when to reset for the next customer. But as I understand it, this would usually be enough to trigger discovery, where he could learn the necessary technical details.
Even if this suit fails, the store is vulnerable to continuous repeats by other parties. Written consent from each customer is the only viable protection. So the BIPA law may mean that face detection, not just recognition, is not practical in Illinois.
How does one find out whether Home Depot is merely detecting faces or storing biometrics?
Answer: File a lawsuit and use discovery to find out.
this means you're guilty until proven otherwise, does it not?
I'm pretty sure just like free speech, innocent until proven guilty is for the government/court, not a random person on the street. If you want to assume someone is guilty of something you are allowed to do so and you can sue too. Otherwise the prosecution would have to go to jail every time the defense wins.
I was wondering this as well. The green box could simply indicate it detected a face, using something like YOLO, or even a simpler technique like some point-and-shoot cameras use to decide where to focus (on faces, obviously).
It still "recognizes a face" and shows this. Legal terms do not have to be scientific or engineering terms.
Detecting a face is not the same as recognizing a face in either engineering parlance or typical usage.
If I don't determine this is a face that I've seen before, I've not recognized the face (maybe I have recognized that there is a face there).
To recognize entails re-cognizing: knowing again what was previously known. Simply noticing that something is a face does not satisfy that; it is only detecting. Without linking it to prior knowledge, recognition hasn’t occurred.
Is this coming from legal definitions?
Because, one of the valid dictionary definitions of "recognition" is simply acknowledging something exists. No prior knowledge needed for that, other than the generic training the facial detection software has undergone.
The total options for dictionary terms for "recognition" does not mean that you can select any among them, decide that that's what "facial recognition" means, and expect anyone else to understand you.
"Facial recognition" refers to seeing a face and knowing whose face it is. It's the difference between "that's a face" and "that's my friend Jeff".
That some constituent word has some other definition is not relevant. What you're doing is equivalent to reading "my nose is running" and thinking "egads! This person's nose has sprouted legs and taken off down the track!"
Sure it does. I can use words any way I want. But there are agreed upon legal definitions and there are agreed upon industry terms/definition; you are talking about one of them (which sounds like industry not legal). If there's no legal definition, that means it's not defined and the court could interpret it any way they choose.
Edit: it seems the law defined the term "facial recognition" so that was the only answer I was seeking
> Sure it does. I can use words any way I want.
You can do that, but I hedged my statement with:
> and expect anyone else to understand you
under which constraint, you're incorrect.
There's a relevant quote from Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass:
> "When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
My or Humpty’s ability to choose meaning doesn’t ensure the listener will understand it the same way though. Even if you do expect someone to understand and feel appropriate context is present, misunderstandings occur regularly in all types of communications due to this very thing.
I have no idea what you just said. If I look up each of the words you just typed in the dictionary, they all have multiple meanings. Multiply that together, there are literally billions of combinations. There's no way for me to know which you meant.
In other words, to put the burden on the listener rather than the speaker to be clear about meaning, is bad communication.
Words have a definition and a connotation, and meaning is inferred from context cues. What a word means is based on its prevailing word in this context.
No one reasonably uses "facial recognition" or "I recognized a face" to mean "I detected that there was, indeed, a face there."
In this case, the statute doesn't even say "facial recognition". It discusses storing a "scan of face geometry" such that it identifies an individual, and clarifies that an ordinary photograph doesn't count.
Ok if the law defines the term, that answers my question. I wasn't sure what level of grey area connotation was being discussed.
This is not how dictionaries work. When multiple definitions are given, it does not follow - and in many cases, it is not even possible - that they are all applicable in any context.
Ignoring context leads to things like "English as She is Spoke" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
Decent dictionaries give some guidance as to the contexts in which each each definition is applicable, but for thoroughness you probably cannot beat the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.
The relevant definition here is neither legal nor technical, but from common usage, where recognizing a face, if not qualified, is taken to mean recognizing an individual by their face, not recognizing that you are seeing a face.
The courts may disagree. That's why I'm curious if the comment was from a legal context. If we had prior case law of them distinguishing one definition in favor of another, I'd feel more certain about all the assertations being made. If there are no cases, then the courts could interpret however they want in conflict of your entire comment.
> ...the courts could interpret however they want in conflict of your entire comment.
Courts sometimes adopt tendentious, cotroversial or disputed definitions in their rulings, and law-makers sometimes (and more frequently) do so when writing the law, but that in no way invalidates what I have written, which is about how to use a dictionary.
but just think about other things.
Like the google 'incognito' mode that wasn't private browsing, and google was found guilty.
engineers might say "of course it's not private" but the court opinion differed.
common sense to a normal person might not match engineer thinking.
The lawsuit alleges that they also collect the facial details, of which the green rectangle is no evidence. But maybe they'll look into it and find that this is indeed the case.
If it's not clearly defined then it would be subject to debate in court, and you could admit expert evidence of what facial recognition is to define it
My understanding of these systems is that the green box just detects a face to a) make it easier to scan hours of footage later looking for faces b) add a subtle intimidation factor against crime.
Is a picture of a face count as "biometric" information? I strongly doubt it and suspect this case will be thrown out.
It’s “face detection blocking” built into the camera/display. Otherwise, the video footage is just straight sent as ONVIF to the main DVR for whatever processing is done there (which could be a lot more nefarious).
Wren Solutions / Costar seem to be the main vendors of these “public view monitors” — such as the PVM10-B-2086.
https://6473609.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6473609...
“Face Detection Boxes (Neon Green, Front and Side Detection)”
Yes I think it is likely security theatre - "smile you're on camera!" type things.
In some stores here in the UK they have CCTV with a sort of attention getting dancing LED light ring around the lens which I assume is there to a) trick you into looking straight at it (and so get a clear shot of your face) and b) remind people that cameras are there doing something.
I highly doubt they stopped there. If they're doing that already, they're taking the time/expense to scan hours of footage later and they would absolutely go further and assign each face a risk score based on what they think happened during your visits. They will flag you next time so the LP person can know to watch you closer in real time. I personally don't think they are sitting on evidence to charge you with a bigger crime later like some comments suggest, but I do think they would like to know which of the 10 busy self-checkout registers are most important to watch in real time at any given moment.
Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off.
Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?
Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.
They've still got your gait analysis.
Wear different size shoes and put them on the wrong foot. Your brain will be struggling to have a consistent gait
This might fool the gait analysis, but they will come up with more metrics to analyze you by. You can't beat it. IMO, the only way to stop this is government
No, the only way to stop this is to simply get the CEOs arrested using the same technology they so desperately want to use.
False positive their ass into a cell and I'll guarantee you this garbage will stop fast.
Most policy decisions should put people in prison, laws be damned. We have to reign in corporate overreach while we still have a government to do it with.
Well that’s a not even a slippery slope. Thats straight authoritarianism. Imagine if the sitting US president followed your advice.
be sure to buy such shoes with cash or the Amazon cart ( or CC data ) will lead back to you.
> live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress"
That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.
The trick is to shop at a high-shrinkage Home Depot where their self-checkout stations are all staffed by cashiers and you get concierge escort service whenever you purchase something locked in a cage.
I almost always prefer a staffed checkout vs. self checkout.
One time at the grocery store I watched a cashier clock out, shop for herself, then check out at the self checkout (!). I wonder if she recognized the irony.
I've noticed cameras in the payment terminals at some Kroger stores lately. All checkout lanes, not just self-checkout.
Also, the HD nearest me has no fewer than 10 ALPRs in their parking lot. They've made absolutely sure that you're gonna get into the database.
ALPR = Automatic License-Plate Recognition [1] for those not familiar with the acronym.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
The more conventional acronym is ANPR.
Whatever is more conventional depends on the convention for whatever the plate is called in the respective location.
The people at the checkouts are typically not the ones stealing things.
There is a bit of a spate here in the UK where just walk in, literally empty shelves into bags and walk out. Some security guards or assistants try to intervene, but apparently some security guards (e.g. ones at apple stores) are told not to try and intervene so really what's the point?
The plot twist for this though is that the police are increasingly using "facial recognition vans" to spot people walking around in town centers and apprehending them for thefts from stores, sometimes months previously since they have CCTV footage of them doing it. One hopes there is more evidence than just a hit on the facial ID database as we all know how inaccurate and biased they can be.
you'd be surprised how many people steal small valuable items and hide it by doing normal shopping and having a normal shopping cart for their other items.
That expensive 30 dollar bottle of shampoo for example, in the handbag, and just checkout the other items like normal.
I worked at a place where we could easily track people through the store. Not ID them, but if at any point we clicked on a person, and we could see from entering the store until exiting the store everywhere they passed. shoplifting is super easy to prove after the fact, just hard to do whilst they are still in the store
So, we're talking a 30 dollar bottle of shampoo vs. people walking in, dumping the whole shelf into a trash bag and walking out. And yet we're putting all this technology, surveillance and loss prevention staff in place to catch the shampoo guy rather than trash bag man.
Sounds like the guy is fishing here. Theres no proof in the article that Home Depot is actually storing his information. I'm personally pretty suspicious about the cameras at self checkouts and at the entrance of supermarkets, but this lawsuit looks like a waste of time, or this is a really badly written article.
Yes, he probably is fishing. But the lawsuit is how you fish. It is how you force a company to share information about what they do or do not store. If they don't store your data, it will be dropped. If they do store your data, it will proceed. Even if it gets dropped, it was not a waste of time because someone is making an effort to find out what is going on.
So you are 100% correct - the article is badly written because it doesn't give that context to how people use the legal system to determine whether or not there is a case to be had.
Not our first rodeo. Post 2010 we ask for evidence data collection is not happening, and not being sold for $$$.
You can't prove something is not happening, nor even provide evidence. So that would be a quite unreasonable standard if that truly is what you think we should enact.
Well, you can if you're suing a company or entity and there is a complete picture of the situation collected. This isn't a criminal case - I would not be surprised if this isn't about setting a precedent. The result clarifying boundaries for what can and what can't be done.
A forensic study… audit of the source code, firewall logs, and device storage would be enough information to determine if it is happening or not.
Absolute proof it could never happen? No, but we don’t need that.
Secretly? They show you they're recording your face. They don't point the cameras at both the scanner and your face simultaneously.
Anyone rubbing two brain cells together could deduce that they're using facial recognition.
This is similar to the time that ASDA (in the UK) was accused by a customer of violating the GDPR by using face detection in their self-checkouts. ASDA's statement was that the face detection was for the purpose of preventing theft (GDPR allows exceptions for the purpose of law enforcement) and that the information was not stored or used for any other purpose.
https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/asda-iss...
I wonder if it is image only or using IR - my anti IR sunshades will prevent the latter from working...
Looks like I need to start dressing like an ICE agent before I do any shopping. Ugh.
Illinois is going to bend them over if it turns out to be true.
What's the purpose of the green square, anyways? Why not just have a regular camera feed?
Increase deterrence effect to scare away shoplifters.
Home depot goes out of the way to make its cameras visible. There is a large "camera" sign, bright light to catch your attention, a visible display to show it's not a fake, and sometimes even a motion activated chime. I assume the green square around the face is the next step in a game.
>Increase deterrence effect to scare away shoplifters.
Exactly - these checkout monitors are positioned so you can see you're being filmed. I'm surprised the purpose of this is unclear to anyone.
Ironically, Home Depot is the only store I ever shoplifted from because of a bad UX on their app. They have/had a "shop in store" mode, where you can scan an item and pay for it in the app. So I scan and pay and leave.
A few days later I get an email "your item hasn't been picked up and you've been refunded."
Apparently if you scan an item and pay for it in the store they still expect you to wait for their staff to approve you, or something. It wasn't clear.
This was also only necessary because they didn't accept Apple pay so I had no way of paying for my items except through the app.
Around here they have been deploying parking lot camera systems with a blinking blue light. Some sources have suggested these sorts of "made you look" attention grabbers are being deployed near cameras in order to get people to reflexively look at the camera, giving the system a better shot at capturing face biometrics.
The shoplifters don’t care. Look at any hardware section at homedepot. Half the bags are ripped open. Try and find some stock they say is there online. Its not it already got stolen. The registers is not where they need to be combatting theft. It is everywhere else in that store.
Some shoplifters don't care. There is no good trick that works on everyone.
>The registers is not where they need to be combating theft.
There is plenty of theft happening at the self-checkout registers as well, as it's very easy to do.
As someone living in Japan, the sheer number of instances of theft in your description shocks me. Is this that common there?
Often happens in the UK for things like bags of screws or bathroom/plumbing fittings.
The charitable view is someone is opening the packaging to e.g. make sure that the thread is the right size (in the UK especially we suffer from annoying mixture of old legacy imperial measurement era pipes/threads/etc as well as metric).
The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the bit they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.
This could be a by-product of bad merchandising too.
The local Home Depot sells some types of screws only in pre-packed bags.
The Ace Hardware a block over (a franchise of independently owned shops) sells the same screws from cabinets with several hundred types of loose parts, and you can select as many as you need and bag yourself. You can even put multiple types and prices of items in one bag
So if you need one, HD makes you buy four. If you need sixteen, HD makes you buy a bunch of extra plastic waste. That might create an unexpected nudge towards just ripping the bag and pocketing the rest.
Depends on where you are at. Shrinkage runs around 1.6% on average in the US, but it can vary quite a bit by location. If you are in a rich quiet suburb, you will probably not see it. If you are in a rough neighborhood, or a very dense urban area, you probably will.
I have lived in neighborhoods where theft is unheard of, and I have lived in neighborhoods where I checked to make sure each item hadn't been opened before putting them in my cart.
Nope, I've never seen anything like that. To be fair, I'm sure some stores have higher crime rates than others, and just knowing human nature, people whose experiences are pleasant and uneventful probably aren't taking time to share anecdotes about their local stores.
That is certainly not my experience in the stores I go to.
I hate the beeping cameras in the tools aisle and frequently stop browsing and leave
also locked cabinets... cause me to not buy whatever is in them.
Came here hoping someone would mention those absolutely cursed cameras - the ones with the pre-canned video of a guy in a back office "monitoring" the feeds?
Gets to me the worst when I'm on my 3rd Home Depot trip of the day BEEP looking through a box of pipe fittings that is filled with everything _except_ the fitting matching the label on the box BEEP okay.. the Home Depot website says it's in stock at the one 20 minutes up the store BEEP but, that's what it said about BEEP the stock at this store so.. but hmm BEEP maybe I could combine these two other fittings and save a BEEP ... trip to the other store, okay I'll look here for... BEEP hmm, the two fittings I would need to combine also aren't in the right BEEP box, but... it looks like maybe there's some that someone put back into a BEEP different box? Oh, wait BEEP _none_ of these fittings are in their correct box? What!? BEEP
Sorry I've just never had anybody to talk with this about. I hate those things with a passion. Let me know if you'd like to start a support group.
And yet, we keep going here...
There are fewer and fewer physical stores left that sell non-food for reasonable prices. Home Depot is often the only choice (at least in my area, the competitors, Lowes and Ace Hardwares, are more expensive, sell fewer things, and sometimes worse quality too)
It could a psychological trick: Look the camera is filming and we got your face specifically, so don't try to steal.
In my local supermarket, the screen turns on and shows the face of the customer when they select "finish and pay", which I suspect is to give a "honesty nudge".
Emphasizes that the system pays attention to the shopper. They are aiming for a psychological effect.
Lazy subcontracted software engineers
I want to be paid in rebates for working at self checkout.
I'm paid in shorter checkout times for working at self checkout.
I have yet to encounter a self-checkout system competent enough to actually speed up the experience.
They are individually slow but highly multithreaded. The single cashier that stores hire these days may have a 10% higher clock speed, but their queue length is high.
Sounds like the problem is that we aren't hiring enough cashiers.
Using a Kroger self-checkout is tantamount to waterboarding. Hesitate for a quarter of a second before placing your item on the scale? Angry prompt. Put an item on the scanner (which itself is another scale) but it doesn't scan within half a second? Angry prompt. Get three angry prompts? Now you get a fourth angry prompt, except this one can only be dismissed by a staff member, and we've already established that they're few and far between.
I've given up on actually bagging my items while checking out. I can't rearrange anything in the bags, or move the bags, without the checkout machine throwing a hissy fit. So no, it's not actually faster, because I have to bag everything after paying for it. It totally breaks the pipeline of the checkout.
There are a few problems.
- Real estate: Self-checkout takes minimal floor space. Stores can fit ~10 stations in the area of 2 cashier lanes. Even if you hire more cashiers, there’s no room to add lanes.
- Demand vs. staffing: Checkout demand is dynamic, staffing is static. You can’t instantly add cashiers during a rush, and you don’t want them idle when it’s slow. Self-checkout stations are basically ~free to run.
- Cart size: Trader Joe’s works without self-checkout because their stores are small, carts are tiny, and checkouts max ~20 items. Their cashier lanes are smaller but occupy a bigger share of store space than Walmart or Kroger. In big stores with huge carts, no one wants to be stuck behind a full cart. Once you pick a lane, you’re locked in even if another line moves faster, whereas self checkout lanes are serviced by all machines.
But in the big stores with huge inventories, no one wants to wait behind a person with a huge cart and once you commit to a lane, you're stuck, even if someone else finishes faster.
Shops could have trusted fast self checkouts become add hoc cashiers .
The ones without scales are the quickest and generally fast. One queue for 10-12 checkouts etc...its fast unless you get some luddite infront of you who seem to enjoy proving some point to no one about how they can't "work the machine" etc.
They're certainly faster than standing in line for 20 minutes for the only open register, tho.
the silent argument is that the store should have more open registers.
The rebate is the privilege of not having to employ a cashier in the process, and I'm not even kidding.
The shrink from "forgetting" to scan things is how they pay you.
Self-checkout means you can do a self-rebate ;)
I have developed an extreme distrust of self-checkout systems generally, in part because of the risk of this sort of thing. As a result, I simply don't use them at all anymore.
I don't use them when it's an option - but Home Depot in particular often has zero actual cashiers. They've always got a couple people standing around in self checkout to assist when the system (inevitably?) doesn't work properly, though...
HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.
It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.
When they were first rolled out you had to weigh everything or get a person to come over _per item_ ... It was total Insanity.
Target and Aldi don't use a scale. Costco does, but I bet it works better for Costco because they carry much less items so weights are more unique?
HyVee actually removed all self-checkouts. This sucks because they had awesome self-checkouts with conveyor belts.
I bet it works better for Costco because they don't stock any items with weights low enough not to be registered by the scale.
Also, the last time I went to my local Costco, you were no longer permitted to check yourself out at the self-checkouts. They didn't remove them, but they had started using them as cashier-staffed checkouts.
Mine still lets you scan your own items. I bet they only have employees scan items at stores with higher loss rates.
That was the old NCR Fastlane implementation, done wrong. They left the item security feature enabled and left the bag scales turned on. This also happened at IKEA US (which lead to them being pulled out for a long while).
A lot of retailers have dumped NCR and gone in-house for their self checkout software packages now and made it so much better. Home Depot took their custom point-of-sale and built their own self checkout frontend on top of it to allow all checkout lanes to “convert” to self checkout.
Target also did the same, dumping NCR’s software and rolling in-house software on top of the hardware to make it Not Suck.
They do indeed often have zero ordinary cashiers.
... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.
I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
When I am being abused by a faceless corporation I simply withdraw my business entirely and direct my capital towards a competitor. Sometimes this is very inconvenient for me, but change has to start somewhere, right?
Exactly this, last time I went to HD I had a cart with maybe 20 items, NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands. Now I decided that if a place doesn’t have human cashiers I just don’t shop there and give priority to small stores, I might pay more but at least I know the profits are for a neighbor.
> NONE of the working self-checkouts accepted cash so I just walked out with empty hands.
I'm pretty sure this is illegal. All businesses need to accept cash somewhere, somehow. I am curious what would happen if you forced the issue and announced to the attendant that you intend to pay in cash.
As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
>As far as I know this is not accurate. A business may be required to accept cash in order to settle an outstanding debt that it is owed, but I don't think anything prevents them from simply refusing to do business with you from the outset if you don't accept their payment terms.
That depends on where you are. In NYC, businesses have been required to accept cash in person since 2020[0]. In 2025, New York State[1] followed suit.
[0] https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...
[1] https://qns.com/2025/06/cash-payments-to-protect-unbanked-sh...
You're right. And I'm surprised. There are states and cities that mandate a cash option, but most don't, including my own. I now side with the OP. There was a time I carried $50 around at all times to avoid being tracked by my card data, but then got lazy. Need to return to this habit.
The only store where I insist on paying cash is (maybe not surprisingly) Home Depot, because they have this odd, shameless practice of tying your in-store purchases with your web account, and sending emails in response. No thank you.
I have not used cash in years. My Citi doublecash card gets 2% cashback.
In the HDs I've seen the customer service counter has a couple cash registers and is staffed. I assume the registers are there so they can check out people who are there to pick up an item that they ordered for pickup, but they will also handle regular checkouts.
If home depot wanted to reduce shoplifting, perhaps they should go back to employing cashiers.
Isn't it safe to assume there's face or gait recognition all around stores though? In general, if not most places yet then inevitably soon. It's only an issue here because of an Illinois law, how many states don't have that?
Well, I do try to choose where I shop in part to reduce the amount of spying I'm subjected to, but yes, this is of course a risk.
However, where a store might be spying on me when I'm just doing my shopping, it's guaranteed they're spying on me if I'm using self-checkout.
Honestly, though, the privacy invasion is only part of why I don't do self-checkout. Another major part is that I don't want to risk the store thinking that I stole something from them.
I exclusively use self-checkout because the lines move faster because one line feeds multiple self-checkouts vs each regular checkout having its own line. This leads to head of line blocking from very customers with a lot more items than you.
This is not an exclusive feature of self-checkout. I have shopped at many places where one line is fed into an array of human cashiers.
What store? I have not seen a single store with this setup.
I see it most often at independant or franchise retailers. Places where providing a pleasant customer experience still seems to have an impact on their bottom line.
I believe some Kohls, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, and Dollar General stores do it.
Also Ross, CVS, Walgreens, Kohls, Dicks, Ulta, Burlington, Sephora, most clothing stores, many large gas stations.
Yep, those are stores I never go to.
You've never been to a CVS, Walgreens, or RiteAid?
Technically I go to a CVS pharmacy in a Target. RiteAids are not near where I live. And have been in Walgreens a few times.
Similar here. If you want me to deal with your dystopian self-checkout, how about you pay me?
(Conveniently, I live in a large-enough city for there to be plenty of other options. Including small or high-touch stores, which do not have self-checkout.)
There's a lot of news recently abouts companies just simply hiding things. Dishonesty seems to be the new normal everywhere. There is no god.
Corporation-on-consumer fraud has effectively always been legal in the US.
When a corporation lies for profit and gets caught, it is merely a "mistake" and no criminal charges are filed.
Individuals aren't afforded the same privilege.
I'm fine with that, shoplifters are scum.
I don't see the point in campaigning against things like this, because it only protects bad people. If the government wants to get you, they won't use home depot to do it, they'll just take you from your house or shoot you in the street. If they want to spy on you, they'll break into your house and put microphones under your carpet and cameras in your walls.
If we actually had cameras like this everywhere, there would be so much less crime. Instead of the drug addict robbing twenty shops a day, they'd be arrested in the second shop.
I am of the firm opinion that if big corps want to outsource their labor to me, the customer, then it is my right to treat myself to a few free items here and there as compensation for the work being done.
If you don't want that to happen, give cashiers their jobs back, you greedy bastards.
your compensation is speed, you get to go home faster. Is that not enough?
I don't condone theft... but I do remember a day before self checkouts existed, and stores had to hire enough cashiers to be faster than their competitors. Those dozens of checkout lanes at the front of big-box stores weren't always decorative, they used to all be staffed during busy periods.
Yup, the speed has not gotten better, it's just that it's on me to be speedy as opposed to somebody that gets paid for it.
It's a lousy deal for everyone except the business.
Why am I waiting in line to check myself out? That is what drives me nuts. "But they take up space" you say. There's lots of wasted space with the 8 standard checkout lines that are unmanned every time I come in the store.
I have never experienced a faster checkout with self checkout.
If it's super fast, it's just for a few items, and a cashier would've been just as fast. If it's for a lot of items, there's a decent chance I have to look up some codes or something; which a cashier is better and faster at.
The trade off of self checkout is cost savings for the business. These savings are not passed on to me. Therefore, I don't give a flying rat's ass about them.
I'm with OP. If I'm working for the business, they will compensate me. Willingly or unwillingly.
IME it's faster because the queue is shorter. You can fit about 2.5 self checkout machines in the same space, enabling more people to checkout in parallel.
Don't use self-checkouts. You do all the work, slower than the cashier, and are treated like cattle. Often there is a supervisor breathing down your neck and demanding the receipt before the exit doors open. Now there is facial recognition.
At my Walmart there is roughly 10-15 self checkouts vs 3 cashiers where people with full carts are waiting in line. Self checkout is great if you have a few items. Also cashiers aren’t that fast considering they have to scan, bag (in some places) and then take your payment.
Some self checkouts are better than others the worst ones are the ones that don’t let you take your items off the scale after scanning and then they throw an error for you to put them back.
I’ve also never felt treated like cattle but I’d figure a checkout with a cashier is more cattle like since you are being funneled through a tight space one after the other vs an open space like self checkouts.
In my experience usually there is 10+ self checkout lines of which maybe half of them are open, only 2 accept cash and the line for self checkout is 3x longer coupled with the fact that people take roughly 10-15secs per item + 10-15secs to find the “finish and pay” button, 15-20secs to pull out their card, or phone, 5-6 secs to get the receipt and leave. If there is a single elderly person on the line or somebody buying an item that needs the employee “blessing” then then that time might reach the full minute.
If no one used the self-checkouts there would be 15 cashiers.
There is no evidence anecdotal or otherwise to back this assertion.
Many stores near me appeared to cut cashiers before they added self-checkouts. If anything, adding self-checkouts increased the number of available options to get out of the store faster.
I'd place my bets on curbside pickup getting pushed more before cashiers get added given how popular it's become as an option.
Germany's discounters (ie, nearly all grocery stores) have long been hyper-efficient about checkouts. There is exactly one lane open until the line gets too long, then they open another. When the number of customers subsides, the second lane closes and the employee goes back to other tasks.
Only in recent years have self-checkouts started appearing in any significant number, and the formula hasn't changed. I guess theoretically stores might be able to cut back on employees, but it would be literally one or two people at most.
My anecdotal evidence is that one of the supermarkets I go to had 4-7 active cashiers and no self-checkout. After a complete redesign and renovation they have two active cashiers and self-checkouts. The self-checkout is closed unless there is a supervisor.
No, there wouldn't be. Having to have 15 people on staff and manage them and pay them is a big cost to the store owners. Self checkout machine costs $xx,000, amortized over 10 years, vs $15/hr and other overhead for a human being.
I drive to the store, pick things up off the shelf, carry them all around the store, take them to my car, drive home, bring them into the house, but moving the items twelve inches across a bar code reader is "work"? I need some low paid worker to do that trivial part so I can feel some sort of status of having been served?
No, it's to offload the burden/liability of being accused of shoplifting. If a cashier messes up, it's on the store. If you do, it's on you. Thanks but I'm not willing to assume that liability with little benefit to me.
I use self checkout all the time and have never been accused of shoplifting. Other stores in other neighborhoods might be different, and I wouldn't be surprised if skin color makes a difference too.
What do you mean "all the work"? Grocery shopping is preparation, logistics, actually to the place(s), handling the items from shelf to cart, cart to register, checking and paying at register, move from register to own container, container to vehicle, vehicle to home, unpack at home.
Of all of this hassle, the cashier merely handles a single step. You already do all the work.
I'm not sure what you mean by "treated like cattle". I haven't really had a bad experience with self-checkout, granted, we probably don't live in the same country / culture.
The receipt checking happens with the cashier as well, just implicitly. If anything, they are treated badly, with having to stand most of the time in the US. Absolutely unnecessary.
Facial recognition I don't like either, but stores (and others) will do that anyways, with self-checkout being, at most, an excuse to develop/improve/deploy such systems. Theft would be a problem/excuse anyways for stores, and advertising is a pretty big trojan horse in this regard as well. Self-checkout doesn't make a difference here.
Try unloading an entire cart and scanning each one individually and putting it back, after spending a tiring hour shopping. I will be very surprised if you still feel the same.
Do you not do the same with a cashier?
(This is getting tangential, but I do exactly what you describe, and I really appreciate that I can do it on my terms, without having to accommodate three other people: the one in front of me, the cashier, and the one next in line.)
I was thinking of Costco, where loads are big and they do a good part of it for you, except for the smaller stuff.
Ah, I see. I don't live in the US, so I never experienced that. In Hungary, there is zero service, the cashier sits behind a counter, the shopper unloads everything to a conveyor, cashier beeps every item, shopper puts them back into their cart. For heavy items, the cashier comes out with a portable beeper, and does the job with that. And now with self-service, it's on the shopper to do the exact same.
"You already do all the work."
Uh, no? Ralphs absolutely has a full order and pay online thing, then you just drive to the store and get your groceries delivered to your car. I used it just yesterday as I can't go anywhere after my oral surgery.
> slower than the cashier...Often there is a supervisor breathing down your neck
Not sure what stores you're going to go but this is nowhere near my experience.
When I first started using self-checkout that was my experience, slow and annoying. That went away after about ten times. I'll trade a little annoyance for an extra 5-10 minutes of my time.
You scan faster than a trained cashier? Do the self-checkouts in the US use RFID? Here in the EU I have to scan, clumsily and slowly.
I was a trained cashier many years ago because I didn't grow up privileged so I had to work retail (and dishwasher and waiter) jobs.
Not only do I have the muscle memory, still after 30 years, I also have the added incentive of knowing the value of my own time, not being fatigued from hours of work, the ability pre-position items in the cart at an optimal orientation for handling and scanning, and foreknowledge of what items I have and a plan for how best to bag them that was made prior to my arrival at self-checkout.
So, yeah, I scan faster.
Much faster.
edit: oh man this has brought up a bunch of frustrations. Why do customers just pile shit on the counter? When I interact with a cashier, like at a gas station on a long road trip, every item I place on the counter has the barcodes oriented towards the person, so they can just "zap zap zap zap" the items rapid-fire without handling them. My bag (I live in a civilized state that has banned plastic bags) is ready and waiting, items are organized and presented in an order that make sense for ease of bagging. My payment method is ready. The experience is efficient and quick.
It takes no mental effort to do any of this and yet I am constantly stuck behind people who act as though they are purchasing things for the first time in their entire lives and the process is as foreign to them as communicating in the language of an extraterrestrial intelligence is to me.
Awesome, what do you do with all the full 20secs saved? Jokes apart I’ve made the decision, after a near-death experience, to never rush anywhere for any reason, to live every minute and to enjoy even stupid moments like waiting in line, I might be wrong but I’m sure happier than before.
Rushing leads to errors. I don't rush. I also don't anti-rush. Dawdle?
But to answer your question, after a year I use those 30 extra minutes to play Sonic the Hedgehog six or seven times, nibbling on an ice cream sandwich between acts and zones, a sandwich that eventually melts and makes a great mess of things including all over my Genesis controller, which I clean in the kitchen while looking out the window over the sink.
Even a trained cashier cannot scan as fast as a trained cashier on these systems; they're slow by design. I got reasonably fast (but not cashier fast) on Safeway's and hit a wall: I kept running into false positive "unidentified item in bagging area", followed by clerk overrides. I eventually figured out that you can't place the item into the bagging area until the computer has processed it — there's a delay between the "beep" of the barcode scanner recognizing a barcode and the computer adding the item to the tab & then announcing the purchase, and you cannot hit the scale prior to that or it gets out of sync with you.
Also the only place truly training cashiers, AFAICT, is Aldi's.
The line for self-checkout is usually faster, often nonexistent. That easily eats any marginal benefit a fast cashier might offer for my 1 to 5 items.
In the U.S., particularly the Walmarts I've been to, cashiers are usually slower than the self-checkouts now.
Their self-checkouts used to be slow because the registers would verify the weight of items on the scale (the surface where you bag it) before letting you put it in the cart. If it didn't like the weight it would force you to put it back in the bag. I don't think they do this anymore. Asset protection can view a camera pointed at the scanner and bags if they think you're stealing.
Furthermore, it's hard for Walmart to retain people, so cashiers are treated like a dump stat. They won't really dedicate people to checking out anymore unless that's all they can do, e.g. elderly, so someone who's a cashier all day tends to be slow because they're accomodating that person. So you could be the fastest cashier in the world but it won't mean anything as far as raises, etc. Your fast cashiers are often pulled off and stocking unless its super busy.
Last week I went to Walmart and went through self checkout. Probably about $100 of groceries. After paying and clicking to print the receipt there was an error with the receipt printer. They changed the paper but the error remained. They gave me a “trust me bro” you won’t get stopped and sent me on my way. I could have made a fuss but didn’t have anything I would have returned anyways. A bit off putting in how they handled it though.
I spend less time in the self-checkout queue than in the cashier queue. Overall much faster. And I don't think that's just because the shops have chosen to have more self-checkouts, it's a matter of floor space - self checkouts are much denser so they can get much more throughput.
Bold of you to assume Walmart and the like train their cashier's on speed.
(I wish I was kidding; discounters that squeeze costs everywhere including cashier throughput seem to be the exception in retail.)
In the specific case of Walmart I use the "scan and go" feature of their app, so I scan the items using my phone's camera as I take them off the shelf.
If the option is waiting in line for a cashier versus going to an open self checkout (this is almost always the case where I shop), then yes, self checkout is faster.
Even aside from the line, the only thing clerks are sometimes faster at in my experience is ringing up fresh produce where codes have to be typed in (these codes are usually on a label on the produce, but if not you have to go through a lookup procedure if you haven't memorized the code).
Trained cashier? The local Lowe's and HD have little old ladies running the checkouts. They can't even lift most of the things I am buying, and have to scan them myself.
Supermarkets usually have old slow people running them. The only time I don't use self checkout is when I have alcohol, and it is slower every single time than doing it myself.
I have no doubt that you've experienced all of the above but I'd hazard that it's the exception and not the rule.
Personally, I'm faster at scanning items than most cashiers are. I used to work in retail, though, so maybe that's just me.
I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me. To my partner's chagrin, it's one of the reasons I won't go into Costco.
While self-checkout is less private in a lot of ways (see article) I value it because I have social anxiety and would prefer to avoid too much (or too little!) smalltalk with cashiers -- especially about the items I'm buying.
> I haven't ever experienced a receipt check while using self-checkout. If I did, I'd stop visiting that store. That's a bright red line for me.
Not self checkout related, but the Kroger stores by me have all started having security guards check receipts before you can leave the store. They do this whether or not you do self checkout. Accordingly, I have stopped patronizing those stores because I refuse to spend my money at a business that treats me like a criminal. I sympathize in that they are trying to stop theft, but I'm not going to put up with that particular method of deterrence.
I was boycotting Kroger for a long time over a different thing they were doing. The self-checkouts (and a lot of the time there isn't another option) had a camera that watched what you put in your bag. If you didn't move what you scanned very slowly (the camera seemed to be running at <10 FPS) over the exact trajectory it expects it would demand an employee make sure you weren't stealing the thing you scanned. So every few items you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for an employee to notice you, be free to come over, decide they can be bothered, and go through everything.
They got rid of it eventually and I started shopping there again, but if they start doing receipt checks they're back on the shit list.
Not sure what state you're in, but in most places you can just walk by then with zero legal issues (excluding contractual obligations like costco)
I was going to say, at the point they aren't letting you out the door, aren't they committing false imprisonment?
Besides, most places nowadays you have to explicitly ask for a receipt or press extra buttons within a 5-second time window to get one.
It depends on the reason why they're stopping you. If they actually think you are stealing, then no, they can stop you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper's_privilege
I'll keep using self-checkouts because they're fine and frequently faster than using a non-self-checkout. There are a few minor headaches like hair-trigger sensitivity of the weight sensors. I don't care in the slightest that a camera is filming to try to deter thieves - don't consider that a downside. The security measures are a bit depressing but only in what they say about where society is going with respect to theft from shops.
Don't people dodge these cameras?
When I used a credit card at home depot self checkout I was asked if I wanted to have the receipt sent to a specific email address I entered previously online. Creepy. So I started using cash only.
Last year I went to get some low voltage wire. I walked for several aisles in both directions to find someone to open the cage. Not a soul. So I reached behind the cage and pulled it out, went to self checkout, began paying with cash. The machine said it couldn't issue change and to see an associate. Seemed odd as it was early in the day. Associate casually went to another register and got me change. When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental.
I discovered a smaller local hardware store and go there. The employees constantly ask you if you need help which is the complete opposite of home depot.
Under no circumstance will I shop at Home Depot again.
(And, today I drove by that HD and noticed they installed multiple ALPR.)
>When I went to my car (parked far away of course) there was a police car hanging out right next to it. Nothing further happened, but all too coincidental.
I think you're being paranoid.
The location where my car was parked was remote. There is no explanation for the proximity of his idling vehicle.
The remote parts of the car park are usually where the least desirable sorts hang out. (I park in the same areas due to an oversized vehicle, so notice them.)
I also think you're being paranoid.
Paranoia is irrelevant. The design of Home Depot is unwelcoming.
In contrast the local hardware store succeeded in using its employees as both a deterrent to theft and being welcoming to its customers.
https://www.securityinformed.com/news/co-855-ga-co-1753-ga.2...
So you paid by cash and as a result home depot secretly called the cops on you, and the cops knew where you were parked and sent a car to passive aggressively harass you by parking nearby?
Maybe the cop was parked out of the way eating his lunch.
> When I used a credit card at home depot self checkout I was asked if I wanted to have the receipt sent to a specific email address I entered previously online. Creepy. So I started using cash only.
A lot of retailers do that now. They match first 6/last 4 in store against your online account to match receipts up. Walmart is a big one now with that implemented across their self-checkouts (and eventually pushed onto the registers with their new software/hardware upgrade push).
> The machine said it couldn't issue change and to see an associate. Seemed odd as it was early in the day.
Slightly makes sense if they haven’t loaded every machine up with a full cash load. Plus some lanes might “accidentally” be turned on without any cash in them and not put into a “cards only” state.
It's very tempting to assume what people will or are doing, and it's so, so easy to get it so wrong.
Picture this. Guy comes home late at night. Outdoor light is on. He goes in and presses he light switch. No lights come on but the fuse blows and now the outdoor light is gone.
What does he do?
The answer is that you have no idea based on only that information. It's tempting to think he'll do what my friends and I would do: find the fusebox and investigate.
But the thing is, his crazy ex's crazy boyfriend threatened yesterday to kill him. This guy is bolting, not looking for the fusebox.
I frequent the Home Despot and Lowe Life's, until recently, traditionally favoring the Home Despot.
The last two visits revealed the complete elimination of checkout lines and the appearance of a new cluster of self service registers with a new orientation perpendicular to the old lines. As I stood before the register, looking at the large monitor, I watched my dehumanized face beleaguered by green lines. I realized it had no other purpose but to foist an impression of my dirty face toward me, conveying my position as a filthy, groveling consumer pestering them with my petty needs. The camera could easily do its work without the hostile display, but then the customer may get away with a sense of dignity, which to them would be a form of shoplifting, or squandered neuromarketing potential.
During each visit, I make it a point to express my contempt for this to any ostensibly human employees nearby. I do so respectfully, yet their pride as high priests of home improvement and the glorious providence of private equity that blesses their sacred mission always results in perceived offense. Despite prefacing my grievance as not directed personally at them, the allure of indignance prevails and I always walk away as the bad guy who dared piss on their holy gilded ground.
Their use of cameras bothers me for different reasons, but I'm glad to fan the flames.
>I realized it had no other purpose but to foist an impression of my dirty face toward me, conveying my position as a filthy, groveling consumer pestering them with my petty needs.
I look at myself and go "damn that's one sexy dude I'm gonna jut out my chin and stand up straight so if anyone looks at this, they fall in love with me".
Also, the staff doesn't identify as anything except someone trying to make it through their day.
I think a bit of Peter Principle and role enmeshment is at play here. Halo effect? Moral disengagement?
Or perhaps it's truly pure gratitude and warm hearted loyalty for having a job, any job, which our future suggests won't be very common soon.
On a more serious note, I don't think it's terribly valid to dismiss these behaviors (Home Despot mug shaming, not zealous employee bots) as nothing more than a fun opportunity to admire one's reflection. It may not by itself be a keystone stride on the path of anomie, but it's a stride indeed and I don't want that kind of society. Maybe you do. Home Depot and Blackrock certainly do. I don't.
> always results in perceived offense.
If you think the company has contempt for you then you might try to see what they put new employees through. If you feel lucky just to be able to complete your transaction then you shouldn't have to wonder hard what it's like to feel lucky just to receive a paycheck without any notes or veiled corporate threats attached.
The gamification of society has reduced us all to cattle.
Your experience, or your perception of it, clearly made you feel like you were the main character in a dystopian thriller - what's not to like?