I’ve often wondered if someone at Food Lion etc. has noticed that Jenny buys a huge amount of groceries in multiple states. Also, I prefer self-check out and am annoyed that the ones at Publix and Lidl don’t take cash
I’m sure that the stores know that numbers like 867-5309 are commonly used. My guess is that they just throw away any results from such numbers. Or perhaps the systems are set up to reject any such numbers.
I tried to call it before, but I lost my nerve…
That may work for you, although I wonder why you care.
My Clubcard has to be linked to a credit card, so they have all the true details. Frankly, I accept that pretty much everything I buy and everywhere I go is being recorded somewhere and my attitude is “So What.”
And we don’t get free turkeys anyway - not that I want one.
We have a number of local area codes; Jenny worked with all of them until one day she didn’t work for any of them. They must have purged her, but 555-1212 still worked & Jenny does work again so some customer must have set her up.
How different is Jenny from using a store card, which sometimes is a real store card & sometimes is the cashier’s personal card. If they wanted to data mine, they should exclude any acct with multiple purchases multiple days a week. Yes, you could buy lunch at one & then stop to pick up groceries on the way home but have you ever been to a grocery store 4 or 5 or more times in a day, multiple days in a week? It’s pretty simple logic to say if a card is used more than x times per day/week/month exclude it as it’s probably a store/community acct.
If they haven’t figured this out for themselves yet, don’t go giving them good advice! 
We do exclude them. We just don’t want to argue with people about them. We also do not assign continuity rewards to those cards. You get the sale prices, but you don’t get the $5 off $50 if you spend $1000 in a 60 day period or whatever the spiff is.
If you are old enough to even remember Jenny’s phone number, perhaps they could throw in some discounts for Metamucil or Mylanta?
Rob Cockerham (Cockeyed.com) did a thing where he would send you a sticker to put on your loyalty card for a chain around his area. He sent out hundreds.
So for a while it appeared Rob was buying all sorts of stuff at many different locations.
I had not previously had anything to contribute to this thread, but two recent changes to local self-checkouts motivated me to chime in.
First, my local (two blocks away) Aldi added self-checkout lanes. This has completely changed my attitude about stopping in for a few items when I drive by. Prior to the self-checkout, it was completely normal to have eight or more people ahead of you at the register. The cashiers are pretty fast there, but just the thought of getting in line halfway down the aisle because I needed a can of dog food was pretty off-putting.
Second, the new self-checkouts at my Food Lions don’t require me to put everything up on the bagging shelf. I can scan things in my cart with the handheld scanner and just leave them there. This used to work only with things like cases of canned goods or huge bags of dog food. Now it works with virtually everything I try it on. If I don’t intend to bag it, it stays in the cart. Big plus.
Yes, dropping the bagging-area issues was a big game-changer in the evolution of self-checkout. Now for that specific change to spread far and wide.
Stores are starting to rethink them, too
That’s exactly what i want!
Dollar General (at least, the one a block away from my previous temporary apartment) has scan as you go as part of its app. I never tried it, though, just scanning to get prices. I used the self-checkout, for the first time.
The first time, it took me a bit to realize that there were two scanners (one hand held, one built in facing up) and so I kept scanning things twice. I used cash that time, so it was easy.
But, for some reason, when I had to use my card, they didn’t give any indication of how to do so. Apparently there was an extra slot on the bottom for chipped cards, but it was basically invisible. They did have a sticker saying just to hold it up, which didn’t work.
Still, I would keep using it. I just needed to learn how. It was preferable to waiting on the cashier to show back up.
I’m not looking for a primer on theft, but can you give me at least an idea how any thief, let alone professional, steals at a self checkout?
At the one store I visit with self checkout, a store clerk is within feet of all six scanners. He or she watches very closely. I can tell because if I hesitate for only a few seconds they are right there instructing me how to get out of the mess I’m in. I cannot imagine stealing anything under such close observation.
Are cameras watching from all angles, or is there only one overhead looking at all self check-outs? If they have a bunch of cameras how do thieves get away with it? And if there are a bunch of cameras I wouldn’t think much review would be necessary to see theft.
I’m quite naïve about self checkout misuse and any form of retail theft.
Clerks can be distracted. The most extreme distraction by thieves at my store was when a team of them set three fires in the store, which very effectively distracted us, but in the instance referenced above it was nothing that extreme. More commonly, one thief asks for a lot of help, drops and breaks something glass, or the like while the rest of the team at a more distant machine do the stealing. Which is not to say those who ask for help or break things are thieves, they almost never are, but it is a potential distraction technique.
There are multiple cameras, and multiple angles. When thieves are brought to trial these do feature prominently in court.
There is swapping bar codes, failure to scan, and one that we’ve been fighting for years - thieves forging bar codes that cause the machine to provide high value coupons or massive discounts.
There’s a spectrum between casual shoplifting and the actual professionals are can be very sophisticated and organized.
Why don’t manufacturers put bar codes on every surface? It stupid and incompetent not to.
They don’t want to foul their design? Who cares. I just want to get out of the store.
Make it easy for the cashier or me to scan without having to search every item.
Again halfway done with my shopping the shop and scan (sas) app suddenly goes unavailable. Grrr. Two canvas bags filled that I unload at the cashier lane. No problem I’ll wait as I ain’t scanning it all in again at the self checkout.
But the disinterested gum snapping bagger can’t be bothered to pack the canvas bags in any orderly fashion. Just hands over a lumpy sack of jumbled items. So I repacked the bags. Then when I finally get outside the store sitting in my car I check the app and my sas cart reappeared. Well at least I didn’t get the opportunity to dbl scan an item or add a mystery meat to my cart.
I can’t speak for all stores, of course, but at the Wal-Mart self-checkout I frequent there are (almost invisible) multiple cameras in the high ceiling over each machine or two. They are situated and designed to be able to photo the bills or coins inserted. There are also one or more cameras internal to the machine pointed at the scanning area from the side. In practice this may not work perfectly.
I had a recent experience where I inserted a bill into the machine, which greedily grabbed and gobbled it, but did not credit me (that’s my claim). It was a large enough bill that I wasn’t going to overlook it, so I escalated my complaint to the level above the clerk/monitor. The supervisor disappeared somewhere to check the recordings, saying she would be able to tell if I inserted a $1 or $50 bill or none. But she was unable to confirm or deny my claim, possibly because I was wearing a cap, which might have (unintentionally) covered my hands.
I still don’t know the outcome of this story, as the clerk said when they empty the machine and reconcile the day’s activity, they would be able to tell if the till was over or under. I questioned how they could use this data to tell if the under/overage was due MY activity or someone else’s, but received no good answer. I’m still waiting for a phone call about it.
I’m tempted to lay bills and coins out on the surface for the exact amount and take a quick photo of them in the future, at least for large purchases. But unless I recorded a video, that wouldn’t prove I inserted them all, so it might be a wasted gesture.
Or I could just use a credit card.
I’ve inadvertently done it by leaving lipstick at the bottom of my cart I don’t notice until I’m in the parking lot. Even when you have a clerk, a significant number of transactions have errors - items run through twice or not run through at all. I’ve come home from Target with $150 in groceries thinking “that was cheap” to look at the receipt and realize the clerk didn’t ring through the $40 worth of dog food. The CNN article has a lot of other ways its done by people intending to steal - everything from just not scanning some items to using a false bar code. You can’t put a lot of faith in the people watching the registers or the cameras in a lot of stores - they don’t feel they are getting paid enough to be confrontational. And its easy if there are two of you to have someone distract the attendant with “can you help me, I rang this out twice.” If its small scale theft, it really isn’t worth the store’s time to do much about it on an individal instance level.
I read the CNN article yesterday and thought “anyone with two brain cells knew that shrinkage would exceed paying a clerk.” A friend worked for Target and did some work on the pilot way back when, he said “I didn’t think the data supported putting them in.” But apparently the people who wanted labor costs cut didn’t listen to the people responsible for loss.