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Yeah, “scanning errors”, like when it’s charging me full price instead of the discount that it was supposed to be on, which would not be as obvious if a cashier scanned it?
Zero training and zero pay. Hmm I wonder if anything could possibly go wrong…
And for some reason they were expected to tip the machine.
Hey, it’s not my fault that a pack of T-bone steaks weighs the same as a pack of hot-dog wieners.
They’ve been experimenting with self-checkouts for decades. When I was a kid, I remember being in a store with my grandma, waiting in line to pay, and an employee kept trying to entice those in the line to come over and try the self-checkouts.
She asked my grandma a few times before my grandma, a proud union supporter, snapped “I want a person to ring me up. I’m trying to save you’re JOB, young lady!”
And the young woman stopped asking my grandma.
trying to save you are job
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
In the local shop they often catch you for not scanning the paper bag.
But if you scan tomatoes as peppers or vice versa nobody bats an eye.
Watch out guys they might cut your shifts if this keeps up.
I still don’t get why you wouldn’t get a discount for checking yourself out. No wonder all those high-falutin’ CEO’s think consumers are a bunch of dumb schmucks. The real heroes are the clerks who “miss” scanning something from time to time.
I get a five finger discount now and then. Small things usually. I will NOT pay the bag fee if I self checkout, you took away a job for a computer, you can absolutely eat the 25-50 cents worth of bags.
Same reason they don’t pay you for using an atm instead of an expensive teller at an expensive branch
It’s easier To add a fee To a new service even if it’s to save them money, Than it is to start charging for an existing service that used to be central to their business
I am not paid, i dont do the work.
Also, if the cashier makes a mistake, it is their peoblem. If you make it, they call you thief. Fuck them, i aint no cashier.
Totally Company’s fault. 😂
I get that we hate corporations. But since when is reconsidering something complaining? Presumably if they reconsider there might be more paid cashiers, good right?
i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for Criminal charges sticking. The Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
I don’t think I’m making that argument at all. I’m just relaying what I witnessed when I worked first hand in that industry ~26 years ago.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The letter of the law is the letter of the law afaik
They even call the security and police. Yes, they call it thief.
Fair, you may be pulled to a court for no reason.
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…The more likely scenario is that you just neglect to scan that case of beer, or those ribeye steaks.
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
I completely refuse to use the self-checkout lanes. every mistake we make there helps correct the process that will eventually ensure that the people who need jobs in a grocery store no longer have a job.
Fuck training their robots for them.
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
I almost exclusively use self checkout because it is quicker, and I felt rushed exactly once because a line was forming. Funny thing is, because I felt rushed I literally forgot to pay and just walked out with a free load of groceries. I did come back the next day and told them, and asked to pay because I didn’t want to risk getting banned from that store, as it is the closest one to me. They said nobody ever comes back to do that lmao
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
That’s a staffing problem…if they paid another cashier they wouldn’t have as many thefts
You are not faster than a cashier.
I’m faster than queuing for a cashier.
And if it’s one where you take the scanner round the shop with you, it’s certainly faster than unpacking it all and repacking it.
Yes I am. Worked in retail for 8 years. They are slow because they are paid by the hour, not the transaction.
No, it’s way more relaxed and honestly I don’t wanna speak to someone after a whole day of yapping at the office. I just wanna pack the groceries into my bag in peace
What a strange thing to say.
I’m faster than the line of people buying ice and lotto tickets and cigarettes and paying with a check.
Yes, but the cashier has a line of people waiting, and the self checkouts don’t.
So I get a massive head start, and I still finish first.
There would not be a line at the cashier if there were more of them. There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out. The self checkout created the problem.
No, this is wrong in my experience. The store would only staff as many lanes as needed to keep the lines short enough that people wouldn’t complain. So, there was ALWAYS a line of at least three people. That was policy, not a limitation of the number of lanes.
The self-checkout machines are always open, so if you go during any time except the busiest, there is no wait. Self-checkout, in my experience, has been faster, and it’s not an illusion. I shop in the early morning, and there is never a wait for a machine, I just walk right up and start scanning. Before self-checkout, even in the early morning, when they’d only have two lanes open, there was still a wait.
Self-checkout did NOT create the problem of waiting, store policy did.
Idk how it works in Burgerland, but where i come from most checkouts aren’t occupied. They’re usually on demand, and even then they rarely use all of them.
There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out.
Let’s not pretend they open all the checkouts and it’s space keeping them limited.
Not true, there are less because it costs money to pay for more cashiers
FYI, it takes around 6-9 months (depending on how much larger inventory shrinkage is on the self checkouts) for a self checkout to pay for itself and begin saving money. Not that I am advocating for that.
This might perhaps be true in the land of XXL everything, but in the space it takes to have 3 cashiers you can easily install 2 rows of 4 self checkout machines, and in Europe space tends to be more scarce.
They are a massive space saver, and when that’s the space you have, 8 self-checkouts and a cashier have more throughput than 4 cashiers (which don’t even tend to be staffed all at once).
At my local store they seem to comfortably replace 1 cashier with four quick self checkouts, and 3-4 with 2 rows of 6-8.
People dislike them, but it gets a little silly when they insist they have lower throughput too.
They need to hire the cashier I had once, she was scanning and shuttling the items down the ramp faster than I could bag them. Probably 3-4 times faster than bagging. They had ramp splitter so once you are piled up and paid, she flips to the other ramp and slams the next person through. I’d never seen speed like that. The second person was checked out and bagging theirs before I was done bagging my own.
It was like watching grocery skeeball
The problem is the opposite. There are too many regular checkout lines and not enough self checkouts. Almost every grocery store I shop at has like 12 self checkouts (taking the place of 4 previously regular checkouts) and then like 10-15 regular checkouts, of which never more than 4 or 5 (sometimes less) have cashiers in them. How about turning 5 or more of those regular checkout lanes you never use into 20 more self checkouts?
How about hiring 5 or more additional cashiers to relieve congestion?
Why have jobs for jobs sake?
It’s not “for jobs sake.” It is to reduce congestion and wait times for people trying to check out. It’s got the added benefit of reducing shrink by having a trained and practiced professional doing the labor quicker and with greater ease and accuracy than the customers would do themselves.
If you want to use the space argument 6 self checkouts take the space of 2 cashiers
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obviously my self checkout experience is faster, or i would go to a cashier. we’ve been over this.
I use an app to scan items when I pick them up and immediately put them into my bag. The whole self-checkout process takes 10s to scan a QR code and pay. It is much more faster and pleasant.
Wait… I need time to know more about this magical process.
Here in Estonia, major stores (I think we have 5 chains) offer mobile apps that let you scan items. You pick something up, scan it, and put it in your bag. By the time you arrive at the self‑service checkout, everything is packed and you only have to pay, which takes mere seconds.
That’s amazing and I am so jealous of that!
Walmart and sheetz does this.
A bunch of smaller places around me just totally shut down the self checkout. It’s actually incredibly frustrating because there will be a line and I could just do it myself and be done. But no, everyone has to wait for a single cashier now because people were stealing. Just make up your mind. Get rid of it entirely or use it.
Why would they pay more cashiers if you shop there anyway?
It’s almost the fabled concept of “free market” where people are “voting with their dollar” is mainly a fiction.
Probably because the nearest similar store is far enough away to make it unreasonable to go anywhere else.
I don’t particularly like shopping at Target, but it’s sometimes the best option for me. Except my local Target’s management refuses to hire enough employees to properly staff the store. Unpacked boxes of products crowd the unorganized and uncleaned aisles. Employees look stressed and generally unhappy. Half the time there’s a single cashier or no cashiers, and the self checkout is limited to 10 items (and is often closed, presumably because no loss prevention staff is on duty to monitor it). One time I had ~20 items and there was no cashier. I was about to rage quit (seriously considered just rolling my cart out the doors) when an employee saw me and opened a register just for me. (She clearly was stressed and overworked but took pity on me. I made sure to rate her highly on the survey thing printed on the receipt.)
The Target two towns over is the opposite: well staffed, clean, plenty of cashiers on duty. Staff there seem happier too, presumably because they aren’t overworked and/or are paid better. But the local one is 5 minutes away and the farther one is 30 minutes on the highway. I’ll still go to the farther one if it makes sense and fits in my schedule, but it rarely does.
It’s more shocking to me that a target could be a best option for anything. The one by me has nothing in it that you can expect to buy. Food? Lol… maybe some prepackaged brownies. If you’re lucky. Toaster broke? Lol, they don’t sell that at Target. Need a hammer? Lol…
Toys and games, mostly. We’ll get food from grocery stores and farmers markets, tools from the Ace Hardware, clothes from a variety of retailers. But there’s no place around with a better selection of toys and games. (We used to live near a great independent toy store, but nothing like that around here).
Target usually has better prices on cleaning products than our other options, as well.
Dear Walmart, You owe me 4 weeks Vacation pay, and my annual raise. And where is my staff discount???
Sincerely, Customer
You are responsible for applying the staff discount directly
I’m going to make official-looking stickers to say something like “Customer appreciation discount code: 4011.” I’ll put them on all the terminals.
Here is the 4011… Everything is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S
It’s not shoplifting, its an employee discount.
The industry term for that is “shrinkage”.
I was shopping in the pool!
I thought that was used in the porn industry.
That’s “fluffing”.
I thought that was when you stuffed your mouth full of marshmallows and then give head
That sounds dangerous.
Two choking hazards at the same time
That’s a fluffernutter.
It’s my compensation for doing their work for them.
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
Whoops! It seems that my finger has slipped and picked the cheapest variety of banana, out of the 11 varieties of bananas.
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
4011 is the new 411.
This is indeed 4011
