Here’s a thread that’s been running for the past couple of years regarding shoppers opinions on self check out proliferation at big chains like Walmart and Target.
Primary reason stores implemented these options was due to the lack of labor availability. Lots of memes popped up about people having to do the stores work.
Within the last month or so, the tide has turned and Walmart and Target are reversing course and putting limits on the use of self checkout.
The super target in my area was just renovated last year and 3/4 of the check out area was set up and designed to be self check out. Now they close one side down and have limited to other side to 10 items only. They have staffed the regular check out aisles with actual people. Previously there might be one or two staffed check out aisles.
I was in Walmart yesterday and they had shut down all of the self check out lanes and were requiring all people to use the staffed aisles for check out.
The reason for the cut back on self checkout - - they don’t trust the shoppers. Retail has seen a direct correlation with the increase in self checkout and theft losses at the store.
YOU MOTHERFUCKERS AREN’T HONEST AND WE CAN’T TRUST YOU!!!
Apparently the losses were great enough, that the companies decided that the cost of hiring more checkers and having to pay up for that labor was less than the amount of projected losses they would have from having greater access to self check out.
You may laugh, but my local Wal-Mart has NO self-checkouts, and does the Sam’s/Costco style receipt checking, because the nearby apartments are high-crime and apparently that extends to shoplifting and other petty thievery from the Wal-Mart.
I can totally believe that there’s a lot of shoplifting facilitated through self-checkout. It would be easy enough to just scan some part of it without a barcode with the gun, and put it in the cart quickly, so that unless someone was watching you and paying attention, it wouldn’t look obvious. Or any number of other little dodges to steal stuff.
I had a conversation with a manager from a Boston area CVS yesterday. She said that corporate won’t let security detain any shoplifters, won’t cover enough staff to have someone posted at both entries, and are pushing self-check outs to the point that they don’t have cashiers on the registers most of the time. Then corporate complains about the amount of shoplifting and takes it out of the bonuses available to the store’s employees. Obviously I don’t support theft, but any fool could see that shoplifting is inevitable in a store that’s not properly staffed.
I’ve often thought how easy it would be to cheat on produce prices at our Safeway self-check out. For example: grab the most expensive mushrooms, and when punching in what you are buying, select the cheapest ones. If you got caught you could just plead confusion.
Of course, that’s awfully small scale. I imagine true shoplifters are getting away with a much higher dollar value than you’d generate by the above.
I think the retailers screwed themselves and have now antagonized their customers. When there were only a few self-check registers, most people used the old fashioned way since it’s wasn’t that much faster to use the few self-checkout lanes. As they became more popular, the stores added more self-check with just a few employees and lots of cameras monitoring. Maybe they just couldn’t hire enough people to staff their check-out areas properly. I sure wouldn’t want that job.
In my local Walmart there are now four regular check-out lanes and at least 15 self-check registers. To go back to the way it was before, they would have to rebuild all of the old check-out lanes they ripped out just last year.
By closing down half of their self-checkout lanes and now requiring 10 items or less they are causing confusion and a huge backup to checkout your groceries no matter what you choose. The only solution for the customer is to shop elsewhere or in the middle of the night.
So how do those Amazon Fresh stores get away with just on a handful of employees managing the entire store? You just scan your stuff and walk out the door. Don’t they have a large shrinkage problem too?
Those Amazon stores seem to have more or less solved shoplifting. You’d need a fairly elaborate scheme to steal more than just a couple of items, as tested by Ars Technica:
And since visiting and shopping fairly regularly at one of their stores, it’s always felt a lot like a proof-of-concept they could sell to other B&M retailers.
Paging @Broomstick for an up to the minute report from the trenches.
And @Mighty_Mouse for the high level managerial POV.
Some years ago we had a thread on such, wherein some newbie showed up and proudly announced that he rang up his most expensive meat purchases using the code for loose potatoes. Getting 5 pounds of prime rib for a couple bucks seemed fine with him.
Of course there’s a tradeoff between staffing for theft control and reduced staffing due to self-checkout. What seems silly is how some managements apparently thought they could have both at once.
My pet theory ...
Self-checkout started well before the widespread advent of social media. One of the generic consequences of social media is that catchy ideas (both good and bad) quickly et disseminated to everybody.
Used to be if you knew some secret, like an off-the-menu special, or a secluded picnic spot, you could enjoy it in relative privacy. Now everybody and their brother learns about it quickly. So the good deals are rapidly withdrawn as too expensive, or the picnic spot gets overrun or …
I posit that as to self-checkout, under-ringing whether in quantity or price, and the lack of any effective sanction by the stores, has become so well known in the general public that millions of people who previously thought of themselves as honest have now joined the ranks of the “little white shoplifters”. (ETA pre-emptive clarification: The above sentence is by analogy to “little white lie”, i.e. a lie that folks don’t really consider lies, or at least are harmless even if not quite true. That was not an attempt at a comment on the racial makeup of either the honest shopper or the shoplifter contingents).
And it’s killing the stores. Or at least it’s killing the manager’s perceptions of their costs.
There’s not much hope of stores putting that societal genie back in the bottle. Yet another nice thing we can’t have in the social media everyone-knows-about-everything era.
Hasn’t the proliferation of self-checkout increased retail theft? Most places have ONE person watching 4 to 6 stations at once. All you have to do is wait for her to look away and then put a product you “make believed scan” into a bag.
I use self checkout frequently. Once I almost walked out of Target with a 12 pack of Coke that I hadn’t paid for. Hey, red cart, red Coke box in the bottom of the cart. It happens.
I think I’ve said enough. There’s a balancing act between staffing and loss prevention and yes, the balancing point moved with technology and the ingenuity of thieves. Or even of previously honest people who start slipping in an item or two because it’s so easy.
AITA?
Whenever the self-checkout isn’t working, to get an employee’s attention I say in my outdoor voice,
“Excuse me. You didn’t train me before I started working here.”
I was doing the whole scan, bag, scan, bag, etc. and I guess the item didn’t scan so when I put it in the bag the screen said something like “Are you sure the last item scanned correctly?” but then the screen showed the overhead cam live shot of me like WE ARE WATCHING YOU THIEF.
That’s been going on for longer than the proliferation of self-checkouts. I once watched a contractor load an entire bundle of premium white oak hardwood flooring, tear off the UPC tag, and replace it with a tag for a much less expensive builder’s grade red oak. Since we are absolutely not permitted to confront shoplifters directly, I just followed him to the register, and handed the correct tag to the cashier, saying, “Oh, the tag fell off”. Guy gave me a dirty look, but didn’t quibble.
Most contractors are honest, but a certain percentage of them will try to squeeze out a buck with little tricks like this. Tiny little thefts added up to about a million dollars of lost revenue - “shrink” - at my store last year.
A couple weeks ago I witnessed a crazy-complicated-for-a-kid heist from the self checkout. Not really even self-checkout related. I suppose he coulda done it from any checkout. But it sort of reeled me so I’ll share:
Mom is using self checkout with a baby in a carrier in the seat of the shopping cart.
As she scans, she puts items in bags and puts the bags in the cart. There’s already a 12-pack of Coke under the cart (presumably scanned)
Little kid, about 8, races away from mom, who doesn’t notice cuz of the baby and the scanning.
Kid returns with some box of Pokemon cards or something, from the card aisle next to the checkouts
Puts the card box under the cart, behind the Coke, and beneath the bags in the cart above.
Kid checks that the cards are not visible through the top of the cart, and adjusts accordingly. He’s clearly done this before.
Mom’s done, they all walk out. I think “maybe the door checker will catch it.”
Door checker does not catch it.
Like I said, I’m not sure if this was a product of the self scan or not. I suppose if someone else was checking items for the mom, the kid wouldn’t have been able to pull off his scheme. And the family would have been more “corralled” in a checkout line.
Whatever it was, it made me feel super weird. In my mind the mom found the cards when they got to the car and she made the kid come back in and return them. (But probably not cuz she’s over it.)
Are there “little white shoplifters”? Yes. We even have a good idea who they are due to video surveillance. For a dollar item we aren’t likely to pursue anything.
Real thieves get greedy and start stealing more. Once that passes a certain threshold (either $ or frequency or both) “asset protection” will get involved.
But, again, the general public doesn’t see anyone “doing something” about it so they think it’s being ignored. It’s not. The general public doesn’t see the store go to a judge with video evidence and ask the thief to be arrested and brought into court.
Do all store pursue theft diligently? No. Because there’s a tradeoff between security and customer volume and profit and legal costs.
I am also going to point out that there are people who truly accidentally walk out without paying for something who later come back and do pay for it.
And before there was self-serve checkout regular cashiers would sometimes miss things on the bottom of the cart of make errors that resulted in “shrink” for the store.
The sweet spot on cost vs. profit for all of this moves around, too.
Not sure how widespread it is across stores, but I see more and more items pre-weighed and tagged with a UPC. I assume this is to reduce theft / error from employees / self-checkout customers. For inventory control as well.
It still doesn’t seem hard to skip an item or scan a cheaper item twice. To @CairoCarol’s point I don’t know what practical recourse a store has considering honest customers might make a mistake as well.
It all leads to the current state of removing self-checkout.
Same with Kroger, in addition to helping folks who get notifications that “Help is on the way”.
I like being able to self checkout at Kroger. It’s generally much faster than standing in a line at the cashier staffed check out lines. But within the last month or so I was speaking with one of the checkers who said that Kroger is also thinking about going back to no self checkout for the same reason as Walmart/Target - THEFT. I can say that only one time did I ‘steal’ something. It was a banana that was under my hat, gloves, scarf in the child seat area of the shopping cart. When I got outside the store and found it as I was putting my winter gear on, I weighed the approximately 20 cents that I owed them against the extra time to go back in and stand in line and decided it was a discount that they could afford. Another time I had a 24 pack of coke on the bottom of the shopping cart and forgot to scan it. Noticed it when I got to the car and went right back in and paid for it.
However, I HATE the self checkout at Home Depot. It’s not as intuitive as at Kroger or Meijer and I’ve got big stuff that I don’t know how to scan. Get some cashiers!.
Mildly TA, IMO. The employee you’re snarking at did not choose what self-checkout system the store bought, nor did they program the stupid thing. If you were snarking at a manager who might have some actual power, that wouldn’t be so bad, but the low-paid grunt who’s overseeing the self-checkouts really doesn’t deserve to be treated badly for decisions that were made well above their pay grade that they have no ability to do anything about.
