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.)
MisterTea 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bee_rider 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rob74 40 minutes ago [-]
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?
no_wizard 8 minutes ago [-]
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
cooper_ganglia 39 minutes ago [-]
>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
bevhill 15 minutes ago [-]
Peak COVID never ended. It's more important now than ever to stay vaccinated, maintain social distance, and mask up.
wizzwizz4 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
neilv 8 hours ago [-]
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.
benchly 6 hours ago [-]
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.
4ggr0 5 hours ago [-]
> I was repeatedly told to target black women
not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.
benchly 5 hours ago [-]
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.
4ggr0 5 hours ago [-]
> especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution
seems like it, probably also doesn't help that the current administration has no issues with promoting these 'values'.
> Lasted a mere 6 months
congratulations! at least your moral compass is strong enough and you were in a position where you didn't have to do it.
benchly 4 hours ago [-]
As an aside, this is not the first time I've seen a discussion (mine and your comments) about racism downvoted on HN. It makes me question the crowd I'm attempting to mingle with, here.
I get that the site is primarily concerned interesting tech-related things, but if anyone thinks that we can just avoid politics, social and economic issues that tend to surround those things once in awhile, they're delusional.
infecto 1 hours ago [-]
It’s a trope and easy to say but I do find the voting system in HN to have gone downhill over the years. It’s very similar to other social media sites. People are polarized about everything, if you have a different opinion, downvoted, if you have a response that might be factual but one of the professional posters here does not like it or you, downvoted.
I will make a benign question and it will instantly get downvoted which to me is against the spirit of HN.
benchly 54 minutes ago [-]
I've experienced the same and have always been of the mind that voting systems on aggregate sites are anti-discussion and promote brigading. When people see a highly upvoted or downvoted comment, the tendency seems to be to follow the actions of those before you. Things quickly turn into an echo-chamber, although Reddit is admittedly more prone to that than HN, since it's divided into topic-specific subreddits.
Still, I'd be fine if the voting system were eliminated and threads were managed chronologically, keeping flagging for obvious rule violations, of course.
This is all, of course, tangential to the post at hand, but that's part of the beauty of it, in my opinion. Start on one topic, end up on something different.
4ggr0 3 hours ago [-]
i noticed the same, my comment was at 0 votes for a moment and yours was even greyed out. also can confirm that it's not the first time i see a discussion talking about social justice which gets downvoted.
> if anyone thinks that we can just avoid politics
some people still don't understand that everything is political. if you think something isn't, then you're just not in the part of the population which is negatively affected by it. it being whatever.
flir 27 minutes ago [-]
The opposite position gets downvoted too. (By me, for a start). But it's also more likely to be deleted as being out-and-out offensive, so if you're a casual reader maybe you don't see it as much?
hopelite 3 hours ago [-]
Do you review all lines of code equally, if you have a bug report that tells you what and where a buggy behavior is occurring?
4ggr0 3 hours ago [-]
equating racial profiling to specific bug reports, or what are you implying? let's just speak in plaintext instead of using simplistic analogies.
apologies if i deciphered your message wrongly.
darkwater 3 hours ago [-]
This is going nowhere in any case but maybe at very, very least use a whole programming language as an example. Like, if you use JavaScript you are going to find more bugs because someone made up some unscientific figure about ratio of bugs per computer language.
GrinningFool 55 minutes ago [-]
In code, the manifestation of the buggy behavior is often quite some distance away from the underlying cause of the bug.
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pcthrowaway 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rapnie 4 hours ago [-]
You are correct, it was Bells Palsy, thanks for correcting me.
bmn__ 6 hours ago [-]
> We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here
>> [FTA] the retail giant has been secretly using facial recognition technology on customers
Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account. We ordinary citizens who did nothing wrong should not be made to bear the costs and have to suffer our lives being made worse with big corpo surveillance and what not because of hostile nevrons who shoplift and make a nuisance of themselves in the hardware stores and supermarkets. Police and mayors want protect the criminals? Bring in the military and send them to prison, too.
Remember, people, you can do anything you want if you get enough of you together.
bee_rider 10 minutes ago [-]
Anybody reading down from here, note that you are entering the zone of mostly evidence free ideological-team-signaling posting. Let’s all get out our jerseys and tell everybody how society actually works.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions.
The Brits very conclusively disproved this concept.
So your solution is to put people who are desperate enough to steal say $500 of goods from a pharmacy into jail at a cost of $50K+? As others have said, that money is better spend helping these people out of poverty or helping them with their addictions rather than trying to "teach them a lesson".
bevhill 14 minutes ago [-]
Organized crime or a disorganized black market supply chain aren't desperate.
scoopdewoop 2 hours ago [-]
Glad to hear you love laws, you can start with wage theft: comparable in scale, basically unenforced
ruszki 5 hours ago [-]
AFAIK improving on poverty is a more effective approach.
andy99 4 hours ago [-]
Is there evidence of that? That seems to have been the prevailing view over the last many years, and it's not clear to me that it's improved anything. There seems to be more homeless camps, more petty crime, more drugs.
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
matthewdgreen 57 minutes ago [-]
The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).
giraffe_lady 3 hours ago [-]
Where do you live where that's the prevailing view? Where I am police funding has increased year after year for decades, and people are routinely prosecuted and jailed for petty offenses. For the most part bmn's position is the prevailing view, they have already gotten what they're asking for and it has failed to achieve those goals. At what point are we going to acknowledge the evidence and try something else.
randallsquared 3 hours ago [-]
In places that have more crime, they typically don't prosecute effectively. A significant chunk of NYC's shoplifting was just ~350 people, if I remember the NY Times article correctly from a few years back, but they just keep getting released back to do more of it, while more and more steps are taken by private businesses in response, like locked cases and limited hours, the burden for which is more keenly felt by the poor.
immibis 4 hours ago [-]
Is it rich people in the homeless camps?
hopelite 3 hours ago [-]
Then you are looking at it from a totally wrong perspective anyways, just like most people do. The homeless encampments are full of people with mental illness challenges and/or in one or another way related to drugs. It is why I cannot stand drug use apologists and drug dealer/traffickers defenders that at the same time lament poverty and homelessness.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
bevhill 12 minutes ago [-]
I'm totally with you! These are huge societal problems we have to solve, and nothing can get better until everyone is taken care of.
flir 24 minutes ago [-]
What makes you think the arrow of causality doesn't go homelessness->drugs?
giraffe_lady 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
victorbjorklund 4 hours ago [-]
Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.
UncleMeat 3 hours ago [-]
Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.
octopoc 2 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, I had a Hispanic friend once who had been a professional thief (not when I knew him but before). His grandfather had won the lottery so he had a guaranteed income, but he did it for fun and because that’s what the cool people did.
diggan 2 hours ago [-]
Growing up in a rural area with literally nothing fun to do except sit at home and play games basically, me and my friends didn't shoplift and do other shitty stuff because we couldn't afford it or to earn money, but because we were bored and looking for any type of excitement. I'm sure we aren't alone in that.
justin66 2 hours ago [-]
Do professional thieves shoplift? That's odd when you think about the risk/reward typically involved.
catlikesshrimp 1 hours ago [-]
That might their version of buying groceries. Imagine their version of taking someone to a restaurant.
542354234235 2 hours ago [-]
Gut feelings are also highly effective as tools to direct policy.
9cb14c1ec0 4 hours ago [-]
People from every socioeconomic level steal, and the motivations vary far more widely than simple need. It has much more to do with personal ethics than the amount of money you can afford to spend.
It's not mutually exclusive. Just because poverty exists you shouldn't legalize theft, as that hurts both business and the community as a whole, since nobody wants to run a business and create jobs where there's a lot of crime so then the entire community spirals down into a shithole.
aaronbaugher 25 minutes ago [-]
Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
varelse 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Henchman21 1 hours ago [-]
Where is your empathy for your fellow man?
DaSHacka 1 hours ago [-]
Empathy for the criminals making the rest of us deal with these increasingly patronizing technologies?
But don't worry, I'm sure they stole that Milwaukee drill set to eat it, and only shoplift the bare necessities.
flir 23 minutes ago [-]
>>fellow man
>criminals
Nice bit of dehumanizing language there.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
That would require spending more tax dollars on law enforcement and courts, and almost nobody wants to do that.
closewith 5 hours ago [-]
> Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
cooper_ganglia 36 minutes ago [-]
A high-trust society cannot be built any way other than force!
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
RugnirViking 5 hours ago [-]
> A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
UncleMeat 2 hours ago [-]
It is amazing to me that we have have failed so completely to report on the miraculous drop in crime rates over the past 30 years. People consistently report that crime is up, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
JKCalhoun 46 minutes ago [-]
That's a good point. Perhaps people "feel" unsafe, not that, statistically, they in fact are.
RugnirViking 9 minutes ago [-]
and thats kinda what my point is. Even outside of the news cycle, there is so much anti thievery signs etc where their main function, in my estimation, is causing people to feel that crime is all around them, regardless of their effects on actual crime.
randallsquared 3 hours ago [-]
> This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
bee_rider 37 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think that’s what a high trust society is. In fact, I’m pretty sure the whole point of the thing is that people in a high trust society don’t defect even when they don’t think they’ll get caught, because they understand that not-defecting is part of the bargain everybody is engaging in to keep the good thing going.
9cb14c1ec0 3 hours ago [-]
High trust societies can only exist when there are consequences for things like theft.
closewith 3 hours ago [-]
All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
9cb14c1ec0 3 hours ago [-]
And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.
matthewdgreen 52 minutes ago [-]
Lots of people in the US are religious. This generally doesn’t seem to dramatically lower crime on a statistical basis (with all kinds of caveats.)
cnity 3 hours ago [-]
A lot of HN readers would get a lot out of watching more Star Trek: TNG.
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
> You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people.
Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?
bko 2 hours ago [-]
Yes
gotoeleven 2 hours ago [-]
When you're talking to left wing people about what "works" with regards to law enforcement, it's important to keep in mind that they have a different definition of "works" than most people. Most people think that a law enforcement policy "works" if it reduces the incidence of criminal events against innocent people. Left wing people, on the other hand, tend to think of the criminals themselves as victims--of "the system," or racism, or colonialism, or stigma--so a policy that is too harsh on criminals doesn't "work" for them. In their view, law enforcement should weigh heavily the victim status of criminals themselves.
(and this isn't AI I really do use emdashes)
bko 2 hours ago [-]
I think another framework is blank slatism.
For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.
I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things
matthewdgreen 50 minutes ago [-]
Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.
justinrubek 56 minutes ago [-]
As opposed to right-wing people, who think it works if it makes them feel warm and bubbly inside, which only happens when it's designed poorly and not working properly.
cnity 3 hours ago [-]
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ojosilva 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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)...
culturestate 6 hours ago [-]
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.
fumeux_fume 13 seconds ago [-]
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.
rovr138 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Henchman21 1 hours ago [-]
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.
justinrubek 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
34679 18 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, use the touchscreen instead.
Scoundreller 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
bcraven 7 hours ago [-]
This is an important observation as you now have a mechanism to obtain free things from the megacorp of your choosing.
speedylight 1 hours ago [-]
Not just easier, they’re probably waiting until the cumulative value leads to felony theft charges.
bevhill 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
JKCalhoun 42 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
AngryData 9 hours ago [-]
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.
novok 8 hours ago [-]
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.
conductr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
distances 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Scoundreller 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
gblargg 6 hours ago [-]
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.
widforss 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 6 hours ago [-]
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.
FirmwareBurner 4 hours ago [-]
*loicense
widforss 6 hours ago [-]
You are correct, I didn't realize this nuance.
Ekaros 8 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
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.
anewonenow 8 hours ago [-]
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.
4ggr0 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
DaSHacka 40 minutes ago [-]
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...
fluoridation 6 hours ago [-]
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".
Ekaros 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
So are we talking about minimizing theft or maximizing justifiable human suffering?
Ekaros 8 hours ago [-]
Clearly the system people have voted in has failed to minimize theft as it is left unprosecuted too often. Thus rational and moral actors have to work inside system people voted for. And that is to reach state where crimes are properly prosecuted.
fluoridation 8 hours ago [-]
It has failed to eliminate it, is what you mean. Do you want to minimize theft at the expense of any other concern?
bmn__ 6 hours ago [-]
If the state fails to punish a criminal, the suffering is externalised to the rest of society. How is that fair? Why should the moral people put up with that?
fluoridation 5 hours ago [-]
If the company chooses to allow the thefts to continue unimpeded, why should it be anyone else's problem? Like, if someone walks into your home, picks up some items from your shelf, makes eye contact with you, and walks off, and you let them keep doing that over time, at some point you're just consenting to it. I think if you tried to sue them after they stole some arbitrary threshold, a judge would be right to ask why you didn't say anything at all, not even a simple "hey, stop that".
DaSHacka 39 minutes ago [-]
Hence why this very post is about the method those companies are using to prevent such theft (in this case, facial recognition).
fluoridation 23 minutes ago [-]
This subthread is not about the use of such a technology, but about Home Depot tracking a customer to build a prosecution case over time. So, no, they're not using it to prevent theft, they're using it to punish theft they've allowed.
GOD_Over_Djinn 8 hours ago [-]
Stealing from Home Depot doesn’t make you a “sociopathic criminal”. It’s shoplifting, not murder. Besides, people who are stealing building supplies are probably doing it because they’re hard up for money and trying to make more on whatever jobs they have. They’re not stealing some random superfluous consumer goods, they’re just broke and trying to make a little more money.
It’s really not that hard to understand - unless you exist solely in the white collar Silicon Valley bubble and have never known a struggle in your life. The fact that you think they “deserve no sympathy” is straight up creepy. Who are you, Marie Antoinette? Who is the real sociopath here?
pastage 8 hours ago [-]
> white collar Silicon Valley bubble
This is not helping. You should not make up an enemy that does not exist.
There are many otherwise "sane" people that like punishment, many of these people are the ones that has led a life of struggle. Go back to the reason of an eye for an eye, it is compelling even if it has been disproven.
dns_snek 5 hours ago [-]
> You should not make up an enemy that does not exist.
Maybe not by that name, but that enemy is classism and it transcends geography. Many people are quick to make extremely serious moral judgements about less fortunate people because they haven't been in that position.
> There are many otherwise "sane" people that like punishment, many of these people are the ones that has led a life of struggle.
There are many people who don't want others to have it easier than they had it, even when the solution is harmless. Many people even endure unnecessary hardship by choice because it allows them to feel morally superior to everyone else. It may feel compelling but it's not right, and it's not beneficial to society.
vineyardmike 6 hours ago [-]
> There are many otherwise "sane" people that like punishment
Then they probably don't find "an eye for an eye" compelling. The whole expression is meant to ensure the punishment fits the crime. Stealing from Home Depot is a pretty minor crime, so should warrant pretty minor punishment.
And it is widely proven that people who are experiencing struggles in life are more likely to turn to crime. Reducing poverty reduces crime. Just because some people struggled and now want to dish out punishments, doesn't make it "sane" nor effective.
pastage 5 hours ago [-]
It is insanity but the opinion is not a fringe one, and people are not insane just because they differ in opinion. I think everyone agrees that how you comport yourself should have consequences, inaction and action might be equally bad. Finding a suitable consequence is a hard problem because opinions differs so much.
closewith 5 hours ago [-]
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.
pests 9 hours ago [-]
Target is also known for building cases over time until more serious charges can be used.
Ekaros 9 hours ago [-]
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.
pastage 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jrs235 6 hours ago [-]
Pro money/business party wants/needs more people in prison so their private for profit prison businesses can make more money on legal slavery.
cortesoft 8 hours ago [-]
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.
lmm 5 hours ago [-]
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
Ekaros 8 hours ago [-]
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?
bevhill 4 minutes ago [-]
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?
conductr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jrs235 6 hours ago [-]
Because private for profit prison businesses can make money off them. Public is paying for private profits.
black_knight 6 hours ago [-]
Yes.
DaSHacka 36 minutes ago [-]
Lol, I'm all for letting them all out in whatever county you live in, at least.
immibis 4 hours ago [-]
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.
AlecSchueler 8 hours ago [-]
It's shocking at times to see such these ideas parroted in a community that prides itself on critical thinking. Punishment isn't rehabilitation!
showdeaduser 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fluoridation 9 hours ago [-]
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.
criley2 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
ndsipa_pomu 6 hours ago [-]
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).
blitzar 3 hours ago [-]
cut off their hands as a punishment
the_third_wave 8 hours ago [-]
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.
danpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
anewonenow 8 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dahcryn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
freddie_mercury 7 hours ago [-]
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?
bevhill 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
drstewart 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kevin_thibedeau 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
47282847 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Frost1x 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jolmg 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Izkata 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
joha4270 2 hours ago [-]
FWIW I have never encountered or even heard about a limit for self checkout here in Denmark.
2 hours ago [-]
rapnie 7 hours ago [-]
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.
moomoo11 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
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?
rapnie 7 hours ago [-]
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.
phito 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
They had such system but it led to too much grocery theft, that they put the scan barracks in place instead.
moomoo11 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rapnie 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
TavsiE9s 3 hours ago [-]
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.
AidenVennis 5 hours ago [-]
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).
octo888 1 hours ago [-]
> 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
itake 4 hours ago [-]
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.
blitzar 6 hours ago [-]
The experience of interacting with the checkout people makes me long for a future of less human interaction
drstewart 4 hours ago [-]
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.
idiotsecant 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gblargg 6 hours ago [-]
Or those backward states where you must let the gas station attendant pump your gas.
margalabargala 22 minutes ago [-]
There's only one of those, New Jersey.
boobsbr 5 hours ago [-]
There are whole countries like that.
moomoo11 7 hours ago [-]
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.
apt-apt-apt-apt 3 hours ago [-]
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
delichon 22 hours ago [-]
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.
22 hours ago [-]
m463 14 hours ago [-]
It still "recognizes a face" and shows this. Legal terms do not have to be scientific or engineering terms.
mlyle 9 hours ago [-]
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.
conductr 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mannykannot 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
margalabargala 14 minutes ago [-]
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!"
m463 9 hours ago [-]
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.
MagicMoonlight 1 hours ago [-]
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
npteljes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
doctor_radium 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JosephRedfern 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
aembleton 2 hours ago [-]
They've still got your gait analysis.
stogot 2 hours ago [-]
Wear different size shoes and put them on the wrong foot. Your brain will be struggling to have a consistent gait
Maximus9000 2 hours ago [-]
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
lightedman 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cameron_b 2 hours ago [-]
be sure to buy such shoes with cash or the Amazon cart ( or CC data ) will lead back to you.
legitster 22 hours ago [-]
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.
kotaKat 2 hours ago [-]
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.
“Face Detection Boxes (Neon Green, Front and Side Detection)”
mattlondon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
conductr 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bob1029 6 hours ago [-]
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.
unwind 6 hours ago [-]
ALPR = Automatic License-Plate Recognition [1] for those not familiar with the acronym.
Whatever is more conventional depends on the convention for whatever the plate is called in the respective location.
idiomat9000 7 hours ago [-]
I want to be paid in rebates for working at self checkout.
itake 4 hours ago [-]
I'm paid in shorter checkout times for working at self checkout.
ryukoposting 3 hours ago [-]
I have yet to encounter a self-checkout system competent enough to actually speed up the experience.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mattlondon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nilamo 1 hours ago [-]
They're certainly faster than standing in line for 20 minutes for the only open register, tho.
npteljes 6 hours ago [-]
The rebate is the privilege of not having to employ a cashier in the process, and I'm not even kidding.
saubeidl 6 hours ago [-]
Self-checkout means you can do a self-rebate ;)
8 hours ago [-]
MagicMoonlight 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mattlondon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dahcryn 2 hours ago [-]
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
dominicrose 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Nextgrid 4 hours ago [-]
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.
usbpoet 22 hours ago [-]
What's the purpose of the green square, anyways? Why not just have a regular camera feed?
theamk 22 hours ago [-]
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.
nmeofthestate 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
luma 2 hours ago [-]
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.
pants2 20 hours ago [-]
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.
m463 14 hours ago [-]
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.
kjkjadksj 21 hours ago [-]
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.
fercircularbuf 4 hours ago [-]
As someone living in Japan, the sheer number of instances of theft in your description shocks me. Is this that common there?
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mattlondon 3 hours ago [-]
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/bolts/etc as well as metric).
The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the but they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
That is certainly not my experience in the stores I go to.
codingdave 3 hours ago [-]
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.
npteljes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
9 hours ago [-]
npteljes 6 hours ago [-]
Emphasizes that the system pays attention to the shopper. They are aiming for a psychological effect.
nfinished 22 hours ago [-]
Lazy subcontracted software engineers
mytailorisrich 22 hours ago [-]
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".
saubeidl 6 hours ago [-]
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.
dahcryn 2 hours ago [-]
your compensation is speed, you get to go home faster. Is that not enough?
Loughla 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
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.
saubeidl 1 hours ago [-]
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.
JohnFen 22 hours ago [-]
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.
beaviskhan 19 hours ago [-]
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...
frosted-flakes 19 hours ago [-]
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.
seany 8 hours ago [-]
When they were first rolled out you had to weigh everything or get a person to come over _per item_ ... It was total Insanity.
kotaKat 2 hours ago [-]
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.
UltraSane 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
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.
c22 18 hours ago [-]
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?
neuralRiot 18 hours ago [-]
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.
doctor_radium 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
UltraSane 7 hours ago [-]
I have not used cash in years. My Citi doublecash card gets 2% cashback.
tzs 9 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
If home depot wanted to reduce shoplifting, perhaps they should go back to employing cashiers.
add-sub-mul-div 21 hours ago [-]
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?
JohnFen 19 hours ago [-]
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.
UltraSane 8 hours ago [-]
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.
c22 3 hours ago [-]
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.
UltraSane 3 hours ago [-]
What store? I have not seen a single store with this setup.
c22 3 hours ago [-]
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.
doctor_radium 3 hours ago [-]
I believe some Kohls, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods, and Dollar General stores do it.
kube-system 2 hours ago [-]
Also Ross, CVS, Walgreens, Kohls, Dicks, Ulta, Burlington, Sephora, most clothing stores, many large gas stations.
UltraSane 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, those are stores I never go to.
kube-system 1 hours ago [-]
You've never been to a CVS, Walgreens, or RiteAid?
UltraSane 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bell-cot 5 hours ago [-]
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.)
ndsipa_pomu 6 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
codingdave 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mixmastamyk 22 hours ago [-]
Not our first rodeo. Post 2010 we ask for evidence data collection is not happening, and not being sold for $$$.
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
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.
scyzoryk_xyz 8 hours ago [-]
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.
black_13 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bgwalter 22 hours ago [-]
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.
npteljes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
apt-apt-apt-apt 3 hours ago [-]
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.
npteljes 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
apt-apt-apt-apt 3 hours ago [-]
I was thinking of Costco, where loads are big and they do a good part of it for you, except for the smaller stuff.
npteljes 3 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
lightedman 1 hours ago [-]
"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.
HiroshiSan 22 hours ago [-]
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.
neuralRiot 18 hours ago [-]
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.
bgwalter 22 hours ago [-]
If no one used the self-checkouts there would be 15 cashiers.
redserk 21 hours ago [-]
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.
TillE 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bgwalter 21 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 20 hours ago [-]
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.
nmeofthestate 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ethagnawl 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seany 8 hours ago [-]
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)
mnw21cam 2 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
gblargg 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bgwalter 22 hours ago [-]
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.
os2warpman 20 hours ago [-]
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.
neuralRiot 17 hours ago [-]
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.
os2warpman 17 hours ago [-]
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.
deathanatos 8 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewflnr 9 hours ago [-]
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.
danpalmer 8 hours ago [-]
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.
RiverCrochet 21 hours ago [-]
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.
lotsoweiners 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ac29 21 hours ago [-]
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).
tzs 9 hours ago [-]
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.
namibj 20 hours ago [-]
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.)
AmVess 9 hours ago [-]
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.
add-sub-mul-div 21 hours ago [-]
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?
pixxel 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
_DeadFred_ 20 hours ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
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.
eth0up 21 hours ago [-]
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.
themafia 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
os2warpman 20 hours ago [-]
>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.
eth0up 20 hours ago [-]
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.
nmeofthestate 3 hours ago [-]
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?
eth0up 3 hours ago [-]
And not one single spineless egghead among you will just endorse it. You'll peck away in the shadows, bloodying your haggard beaks on little arrows, clucking vacant comments. But no insight will be offered.
I keep thinking the mods here will one day reveal certain statistics, metrics. If they did, few, or none would be surprised by the data, but maybe a bit ashamed of their fear to say something. I'll call a fowl a fowl.
Don't pinch a nugget though; you are and have always been the alpha chickens around here.
You go girl. Shake it for home depot.
nmeofthestate 1 hours ago [-]
Damn dude you are a brave grizzled warrior battling demons, a lonely fighter against injustice (self checkout terminals) and I am duly chastened.
eth0up 37 minutes ago [-]
As if the very quintessence of the article has nothing to do with the abuse of cameras, and the style they (don't) go about it is insignificant.
I suppose the colors match, or close enough. Maybe we should move this thread to the Home Depot website. Them workin type folk might offer some dynamic to the desk dwelling HVAC dependent techno borg types that rule the roost around here.
And go ahead. Tell me about your vegan bicycle, chicken boy. A few pigs will join us soon, then the GOAT will come along and save the day from the bad guy who thinks cameras should be used respectfully.
pilingual 5 hours ago [-]
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.)
vorgol 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
nmeofthestate 4 hours ago [-]
>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.
pilingual 2 hours ago [-]
The location where my car was parked was remote. There is no explanation for the proximity of his idling vehicle.
prawn 1 hours ago [-]
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.
nmeofthestate 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
kotaKat 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.)
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.
Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money
Did I just step into a time portal to 2022? Have you... been in a coma for the past several years? haha
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.
not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.
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.
seems like it, probably also doesn't help that the current administration has no issues with promoting these 'values'.
> Lasted a mere 6 months
congratulations! at least your moral compass is strong enough and you were in a position where you didn't have to do it.
I get that the site is primarily concerned interesting tech-related things, but if anyone thinks that we can just avoid politics, social and economic issues that tend to surround those things once in awhile, they're delusional.
I will make a benign question and it will instantly get downvoted which to me is against the spirit of HN.
Still, I'd be fine if the voting system were eliminated and threads were managed chronologically, keeping flagging for obvious rule violations, of course.
This is all, of course, tangential to the post at hand, but that's part of the beauty of it, in my opinion. Start on one topic, end up on something different.
> if anyone thinks that we can just avoid politics
some people still don't understand that everything is political. if you think something isn't, then you're just not in the part of the population which is negatively affected by it. it being whatever.
apologies if i deciphered your message wrongly.
I haven't heard of a short-term Cerebral Palsy, but then again I'm not an expert.
>> [FTA] the retail giant has been secretly using facial recognition technology on customers
Put the criminals in prison. Do it often enough, and shoplifting ceases to be a problem of plague-like proportions. Big fan of accountability and immediate personal consequences and enforcing the law.
I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account. We ordinary citizens who did nothing wrong should not be made to bear the costs and have to suffer our lives being made worse with big corpo surveillance and what not because of hostile nevrons who shoplift and make a nuisance of themselves in the hardware stores and supermarkets. Police and mayors want protect the criminals? Bring in the military and send them to prison, too.
Remember, people, you can do anything you want if you get enough of you together.
The Brits very conclusively disproved this concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
Also it’s absolutely not prevailing in America. Especially in a European sense.
But even when you push to a good direction, it can be misleading. Like Portugal legalised hard drug usage, but they slashed funds of organisations helping to drug addicts. Of course, you will have a problem after a while (and they have now), even when decriminalisation is a good step. But politicians can pretend that that’s the “prevailing view”, while they just make some pretexts to point their finger to the “prevailing view”.
The poverty is not the cause, it is the symptom of the system’s rot. Especially when you compare other countries and societies that are poorer, but have far fewer of those problems and less crime. Drug addiction is not cheap.
The irony is that your very perspective is the very kind of mentality that has led to the circumstances where we can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to, while the powerful and rich simply do a cost benefit analysis of it because of that and conclude it is easier to, e.g., import replacements for the humans that have been destroyed by drugs and mental illness, which then also drives down the wages/salaries, and drives up the costs of living and drives up the profits of the rich you blame. It’s a kind of “the blind men and an elephant” problem. You keep scratching at the scabs of your self-inflicted cuts, but they don’t seem to be healing.
It really always astonished me that even here, in a community of people in a domain where logic is necessary there is still this stranglehold of irrational proto-religious, emotion based belief and dogma.
That’s pretty meaningless. Distribution what matters. For example https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
But don't worry, I'm sure they stole that Milwaukee drill set to eat it, and only shoplift the bare necessities.
>criminals
Nice bit of dehumanizing language there.
This just doesn't work. A high-trust society cannot be built by force.
> I am fatigued of the suicidal and deleterious empathy of those in charge who refuse to take second-order effects into account.
The irony here is palpable. An increasingly desperate poverty class with no hope of social mobility has many second-order effects, and none of them can be policed out of existence.
Once you've removed the dredges of society (by force), all of the good, law-abiding citizens have better lives.
Imo we're kinda in the worse quadrant of whats possible.
You can either have high visibility/force of prevention efforts or low. And you can have high actual rates of crime or low.
Imo we currently have low actual rates of crime (you see people saying oh its rampant in California or whatever but im not there and can't make an accurate assessment of it over the internet) and highly visible (damn near pervasive) efforts at preventing crime in almost every corner of our lives. "please don't abuse our staff" "cctv in operation", facial recognition, constant assumptions that you are a threat. If I didn't know better its almost like they "want" people to be criminals -- it seems like according to some other threads there are at least some people whose jobs it would make easier
A major part of the problem, in my estimation, is that a lot of people don't actually perceive crime as crime but instead perceive divergence from their expected social hierarchies as crime. This is how you get people saying that crime in DC is high because they saw a person that looked homeless sitting on the metro. Although sitting on the metro is legal, a poor person doesn't "belong" there so this is seen as evidence of crime.
To badly quote Mead, "It's the only thing that ever has". If the incentives are such that defecting becomes less attractive, defection will decrease.
A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_G...
You do understand that an overwhelming majority of crime and overall anti social behavior is done by a tiny percentage of people. Remove those people and you spare the rest of us.
For instance, the number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%.
You can just have a 15 strikes and you're out policy and make a huge impact. Once these bad actors are out of society, high trust can be built. Stop letting a tiny percentage of people terrorize the rest of us.
It's not about poverty and ironically the biggest victims of this criminal behavior are poor people. Poor innocent people deal w theft, getting hassled and other consequences of criminal behavior at a much higher rate. It's not compassionate to let them suffer.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...
Are you including all the bosses committing wage theft in this? Or are we only looking at a particular kind of crime?
(and this isn't AI I really do use emdashes)
For instance, you can look at two countries and if one country has a higher prison population, that country over polices because every country and its people should have the same criminality level because all cultures and people are identical.
I remember feeling great shame that the US had such a high imprisonment rate. This led to a big decrease in state prison population and things like cashless bail and letting people go to basically like the stats. We need to get back to basics and remove people that are destructive and stop overanalyzing things
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.
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...
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.
Yes, I want 2 boxes of cereal.
I just find it easier to go to a cashier.
Wastes a lot of time for those of us working with >=2 hands.
That's a new one. It's clever but I feel guilty having laughed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s really not that hard to understand - unless you exist solely in the white collar Silicon Valley bubble and have never known a struggle in your life. The fact that you think they “deserve no sympathy” is straight up creepy. Who are you, Marie Antoinette? Who is the real sociopath here?
This is not helping. You should not make up an enemy that does not exist.
There are many otherwise "sane" people that like punishment, many of these people are the ones that has led a life of struggle. Go back to the reason of an eye for an eye, it is compelling even if it has been disproven.
Maybe not by that name, but that enemy is classism and it transcends geography. Many people are quick to make extremely serious moral judgements about less fortunate people because they haven't been in that position.
> There are many otherwise "sane" people that like punishment, many of these people are the ones that has led a life of struggle.
There are many people who don't want others to have it easier than they had it, even when the solution is harmless. Many people even endure unnecessary hardship by choice because it allows them to feel morally superior to everyone else. It may feel compelling but it's not right, and it's not beneficial to society.
Then they probably don't find "an eye for an eye" compelling. The whole expression is meant to ensure the punishment fits the crime. Stealing from Home Depot is a pretty minor crime, so should warrant pretty minor punishment.
And it is widely proven that people who are experiencing struggles in life are more likely to turn to crime. Reducing poverty reduces crime. Just because some people struggled and now want to dish out punishments, doesn't make it "sane" nor effective.
Having a hidden social credit system hidden and managed by a private actor seems like the worst way of doing it.
I am pretty sure the evidence shows the opposite.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 understand it’s a losing battle on all fronts.
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.
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.
Also like the other response, I hadn't heard of explicit limits either, as long as everything fits on the bagging scale.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
When a job doesn't need people, keeping a person there is not some kind of noble gesture. It's annoying.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
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.
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.
That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.
False positive their ass into a cell and I'll guarantee you this garbage will stop fast.
Is a picture of a face count as "biometric" information? I strongly doubt it and suspect this case will be thrown out.
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)”
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
also locked cabinets... cause me to not buy whatever is in them.
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.
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/bolts/etc as well as metric).
The unchartiable view is they are opening the packet and stealing the but they need/lost/broke 45 minutes earlier and need to finish the job.
>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.
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".
If you don't want that to happen, give cashiers their jobs back, you greedy bastards.
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.
It's a lousy deal for everyone except the business.
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.
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.
HyVee actually removed all self-checkouts. This sucks because they had awesome self-checkouts with conveyor belts.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/asda-iss...
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure what stores you're going to go but this is nowhere near my experience.
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.
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.
Also the only place truly training cashiers, AFAICT, is Aldi's.
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.
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).
(I wish I was kidding; discounters that squeeze costs everywhere including cashier throughput seem to be the exception in retail.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I keep thinking the mods here will one day reveal certain statistics, metrics. If they did, few, or none would be surprised by the data, but maybe a bit ashamed of their fear to say something. I'll call a fowl a fowl.
Don't pinch a nugget though; you are and have always been the alpha chickens around here.
You go girl. Shake it for home depot.
I suppose the colors match, or close enough. Maybe we should move this thread to the Home Depot website. Them workin type folk might offer some dynamic to the desk dwelling HVAC dependent techno borg types that rule the roost around here.
And go ahead. Tell me about your vegan bicycle, chicken boy. A few pigs will join us soon, then the GOAT will come along and save the day from the bad guy who thinks cameras should be used respectfully.
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.)
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 think you're being paranoid.
I also think you're being paranoid.
Maybe the cop was parked out of the way eating his lunch.
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.