I used one of these for the first time tonight. (I feel like such a hillbilly.) I swipe the product across the scanner, and then some yellow thing which I assume deactivates the security device, and bag it. So what would prevent a person from swiping a product across the yellow thing without scanning it and walking out without paying for it? I was curious, but I dared not try it since there’s no way a big corporation would overlook something so obvious.
Generally, there’s a scale which weighs the contents of the bag, so you couldn’t put anythign in the bag which you hadn’t scanned, plus there’s usually folks watching you on security cameras so even if you stuffed it in your bra or whatever, they’d know about it.
They have various cunning ways. The stuff you buy often gets weighed on the conveyor belt. Not only that, but you may notice that the three or so self-serve aisles have a floating employee whose primary purpose is to help out when things don’t ring right, but who also is probably keeping an eye on people to make sure that they’re scanning stuff and not swiping it.
There was no conveyor belt. The bags were within arm’s reach of the scanner, and I’m fairly certain it didn’t have a scale under it. The only employee relatively close was in the first employee checkout line, who was too busy to watch four self-serve lines. Even if she could, she would have been too far away to tell if I swiped the product near the scanner, but not near enough to scan it.
If it’s like the ones I’ve seen, the bags are on a carosel and the whole carosel is a scale.
I used to work in IT at a major supermarket chain that was among the first to put these in. The others are basically right. The bag area expects a certain weight to be put in when you scan something. If it sense weight added to the bag without a scan then it knows something is wrong and alerts both the customer and the person monitoring the self-scanning machines. There is almost always somebody watching the machines as a group and all actions are videotaped.
That said, people don’t usually steal from the self-scan area. The technology seems sophisticated and scary to many people. Plus, that type of stealing would have to be only one item or so. Time-tested shoplifting techniques work much better.
The bag did have a scale under it. The whole platform is a scale. The employee doesn’t watch every self-scheckout all the time. The monitoring station has alerts that call attention to things like a weight mismatch or simply a customer needing assistance with a transaction. There ALWAYS has to be an employee there because there are certain transactions that require employee input (like buying produce). Everything is monitored but stealing in that way isn’t any more common than pulling a fast-one on a cashier and probably less so.
As an experiment, scan the item, but don’t put it into the bag. You will hear a recorded voice (not the attendant) telling to put it there.
How do they know you haven’t? Because the weight of the item is not yet registered.
Okay, that makes sense. So if you did manage to cheat the system, it would have to be by ringing up something of the same weight and putting the more expensive item in the bag, and then stashing the cheaper item somewhere, hardly worth the trouble especially in a grocery store that doesn’t have very expensive stuff. I guess I’ll keep my day job.
(Before someone says something, that was a joke. I had no intentions of stealing anything anyway, especially from a grocery store.)
In our stores, the self-check systems are as described earlier here. The transactions are also (as are all the registers) recorded to a DVR system capable of logging several weeks of images before they are rotated out. One might not get caught in the act, but the image will be on file for about a month if security needs to review anything. Big Brother - perhaps. But you might be surprised at the intensity of retail theft these days. It is simply out of control.
In our store, the cashiers rarily check to see why the scales are going over balance. They usually just overide the error with their little computer screen. So. If you were to hold two items at once, scan something cheap and then have it demagnitize both of em, our store wouldn’t even pick it up. It really aggrivates me because we have people do this all the time.
There’s really still some R&D needed on the whole self checkout system. If you happen to reach down and move about some of the items in the bag it throws the whole system out of whack and causes me to want to punch the screen to punish the Cheerful Robot Voice.
And what about items with varying weights, like flowers? How does that work?
Flowers are treated the same as the newspaper. Based on inserts, special editions, and whatnot, my Sunday paper can have a range of weight. When I scan the barcode, the checker calls out “what paper?” and I say “Patriot-News” so they enter the proper amount.
At the store I go to, the scale under the bag area often doesn’t work, and there is an onscreen button that says something like “skip bagging”, which I think is there so the consumer won’t get totally frustrated when the scale doesn’t work so you can scan the next item. This happened to me today.
Also at this store, the consumer also punches in his own produce codes. I’ve often wondered what was to prevent someone from punching in a cheaper produce code (ordinary apples instead of fancy apples, for example). Just idle curiosity, of course, because I’ve heard that some people can be dishonest.
And to further complete your education, put something in the bag without scanning it. You will hear a recorded voice asking you to rescan the last item.
How do they know you didn’t scan it? Because there was additional weight that didn’t correllate to a scanned item.
I was curious about the yellow thing too - I’m guessing they’re demagnetizers, but I was damned if I was going to pass an apple over a demagnetizer just because the sign told me to. I never used it on any product and nothing happened to me. A month or two after they appeared, they were removed again.
Well, there’s a solution to this problem, albeit a very bad one. The demagnetizer only activates when it’s an item that the self-checkout recognizes should have a… thing to deactivate. The problem is that these can be hidden in some very odd items, such as staple guns and boots, just to name a couple of strange ones. The kiosk recognizes that your DVD will probably have a tag in it, and thus prompts you to deactivate it, but your boots are going to make the door go off.
The skip bagging button is designed for things like cases of soda, which you really aren’t going to fit into the bagging area. People do use it if the scale takes too long, and then the scale registers it and tells you to scan the last item, because it thought that you put the can of green beans directly into your cart. You, being an impatient customer, come to me, the underpaid Wal-Mart lackey, and complain that the self-checkouts are a bad idea, and don’t work.
There is absolutely nothing to stop you from ringing up your 8.00/lb produce as .30/lb bananas, except for employee vigilance. My personal technique when manning the self-checkout is to spend a couple of minutes at the home base, looking at the screen (which itemizes everything you purchase), and going around “facing merchandise,” by which I mean I half-assed turn stuff around the right way while really watching you. The only way I’d catch someone switching out the produce is if I see 8 lbs of bananas come through, I’d probably go investigate, or if I see bananas come up 4 times in a row.
Other than that, it isn’t hard to find ways to cheat the self-checkout, especially after finding security holes from working there, but we shan’t discuss those.
The first time I tried one of these at Walmart I had trouble. I’m not sure what happened, but I ended up scanning most of my items twice because there was a long line and I didn’t want to hold people up. There was no attendant. I didn’t have trouble at Shoppers Food.
So do the self-checkout registers actually save any time for customers, or do they just perceive that it does while actually taking more time?
It is almsot always quicker for me to do self-checkout at the grocery store than wait in line. For some reason, I am always behind the old lady wants to pay in exact change and has to dig out her coin puirse after the final price comes up. Hello? McFly? You know you’re going to need to coins, at least get the damn thing out of your pocketbook while your items are getting scanned. Or better yet, just give the damn lady all bills. God forbid you get stuck with thirty-seven cents.