I must be a rube, because I've never stolen from one of those things. When it makes a mistake I call the attendant to correct it. Mainly because I support the idea of automation and want it to work well. Maybe it's just the reliability engineer in me that wants to call out the bugs and have them fixed. Or maybe it's the former security engineer in me who got paid to find the flaws in these systems and my ethics demand I don't exploit them for personal gain.
Honestly though I hope they don't go away just because everyone abuses them. I really like the self checkout machines and being in control of how long the transaction takes instead of up to the whims of which cashier I've chosen (although if the markets would just do a little research on queuing theory and make us all like up in one single line for the human cashiers, that wouldn't be a problem).
The self-checkout at Costco is a godsend. I usually buy 2-5 items at Costco, and the self-checkout allows me to avoid standing in line behind people with overflowing shopping carts. I can pay in about 30 seconds and get out of there.
Those don't track you around the store, or profile you for personalised advertising, or connect your purchases to online behaviour, or even necessarily identify you (I never filled in the contact details for mine, just use the number to get the discounts).
They definitely do profile you for personalised advertising. They identify you because you have to give the card when you pay, and unless you always pay with cash your name comes by.
Funny, my impression of Costco is that they have literally the worst self-checkouts anywhere. I've never made it through without needing assistance and it takes forever to get assistance because, as best as I can tell, no other customer is more successful at it than me and there's never more than one person working there.
Meanwhile, the staffed checkouts always seem to have another person assisting the cashier to get those overflowing carts through quickly.
I find it very annoying to use the self checkout in Costco especially if you are buying bulky items. They force you to place scanned items on a scale which isn't always feasible.
I don't know what it looks like in the US, but here in Europe it is often faster / more convenient to use the self-checkout. The lines are shorter, it's easier to bag everything, and it's easier to keep an eye on all the prices.
Plus there are random inspections every now and then, and usually cameras on each machine. To top it off, they don't take cash, only debit cards, so it's very easy to find any wrongdoers. I wonder if the anonymity of cash is part of the 'problem' here.
"Europe" covers too many countries and supermarkets to make such a generalisation, I feel. In Estonia at our local supermarket the self-checkout lanes / machines are often extremely busy, and also introduce the chance of getting stuck behind a number of people who have problems using the machine or who are just slow.
We know who are the fastest operators at the 'manual' check-out, and it's easier to watch prices as they are scanned when one doesn't also need to be doing the scanning.
I don't know which part of Europe you're referring to, but I've used self checkout machines in both Poland and the UK and pretty much all of them always accept cash. There's no issue with anonymous purchases using self checkout machines at all.
U.S. resident here: every where I've been the self check out mostly supports cash. Sometimes there will a machine or two in "card only" mode, presumably due to running out of bills/coins.
>I really like the self checkout machines and being in control of how long the transaction takes instead of up to the whims of which cashier I've chosen
But if there's a line for the self checkout machines, you're not at the whim of a cashier, you're at the whim of some customers who many not know how to operate the checkout machines well.
Very true. Luckily in every place I've ever been, they seem to follow proper queuing and have a single line for all the self checkout, so the wait usually isn't very long.
Luckily, most places have 6 or more self-checkouts, so you would have to get 6 customers. 1 customer here or there doesn't slow you down significantly because 5 others are moving.
> I must be a rube, because I've never stolen from one of those things. When it makes a mistake I call the attendant to correct it.
That you know of - there are plenty of errors that are entirely innocent.
It wasn't even self-checkout but in college I went to Walmart to buy a new microwave for my sorority and it was so big we left it in the cart with the barcode up instead of putting it on the conveyor belt. I just assumed the cashier scanned it and since we were buying so much stuff the price didn't seem off. Well when I went to submit the microwave receipt for reimbursement I realized there was no microwave on the receipt. I had "stolen" it. (Though I'm not sure you can call it stealing when you lack intent.) But if I hadn't needed to look at the receipt to get reimbursed I never would have known I needed to go back and pay for it.
There are countless people in this thread (which concerns me because I generally think of HN as a pretty highly educated and moral group) who see errors like that at the register and walk away thinking they won a prize.
I’ve had this happen with a case of noodles checking out via cashier. It had a barcode on it, which was scanned, but later realized that it was a copy of the code on the individual boxes so ended up getting 24 for the price of one. Self checkout might have prevented that one as the weight sensor would have tripped.
The best interaction I had with one of these machines went like this.
It said 'Press button to start'. I did. It stated 'now giving back change' and proceeded to dispense 17,xx€. I was then able to scan my items (2 jars of jam) and pay for them (~4€) (and got my change back too). Fantastic interaction, really.
I gave the wrong change back to the cashier in the other lane though. I'm not sure how often that happens, I could have taken the money and just left, easy.
I'm a sucker, too. I tell the DMV how much I actually paid for the car. I had to go out of my way to ensure Garmin understood they sent me a second $600 watch, and be extra clear that when I returned it, they needed to make sure they didn't send me another in the RMA process.
I could say I sleep better at night. But I don't know. I'd get over selling the extra watch on eBay. I'm sure I've understated vehicle value in the past to save a few bucks on taxes. I apparently regret it so little that I can't even remember for sure. I've DEFINITELY bought things from out of state to avoid tax. shrug
None of us are perfect or perfectly moral, but I think starting out by not considering yourself a sucker for doing the logically correct thing (without bringing morals into it) is a good start.
I think there is a growning distinction between being honest in face to face dealings, and being honest with a machine built by people for the expressed sole purpose of profit.
It already has, in Singapore. There are Starbucks which close at night simply by drawing a plastic chain across the storefront and emptying the cash registers. I think they still lock the Frappuccino fridge, but no one knows for sure because we don't go test it.
The point would be that people could still come in and buy stuff with self checkout. It doesn't sound like this is what that Starbucks intends you to do.
I think that may have happened to me accidentally once: a couple years ago I was sick and unable to sleep, so I went to a grocery store at about 1 AM to buy decongestants so I could maybe get some sleep. Most of the lights were off inside and I didn't see another person there, it was sort of creepy actually, but I figured, meh, 1 AM. I bought my pills with the self checkout and left.
About a week later I was at the same store and saw a sign on the door that said they close at 11...
There are a number of reasons to reopen a machine after end of day close including testing hardware. Also someone could have forgotten to close it out.
For a machine where all the cash is locked in or more likely emptied their is not much risk in that.
I’ve seen a few luxury condo buildings in Canada with a 24/7 convenience store and self-checkout, though with an entrance that only tenants can access (and I guess surveillance).
So this is starting to happen already, but proliferation really depends on expanding the social contracts that can enable this. The above convenience store wouldn’t last in an apartment building where the tenants weren’t exceedingly well-off as the world is now.
Way back when, Safeway’s 10c off per gallon rewards would just continue stacking up. I saved up until my discount was more than the price of gas, and got myself a free tank.
I’ve always wondered how much it would have let me pump. The limits I’ve seen on pumping have always been on the dollar amount, presumably because they verify they can charge that amount before you start pumping.
It think it will go that way but not because level of honesty increase but because the survielance tech becoming so advance that it can quicky identify you if you stole something
> make us all like up in one single line for the human cashiers
I have encountered these at Decathlon and Carrefour (in Europe). It feels fairer, but standing in longer line feels worse, even when that doesn’t make any sense.
The trader Joe’s on 4th and market in SF does this, seems to work pretty well! They have too much traffic to handle though—the line snaked through 3 aisles the last time I went on a weekday after work.
I wanted to checkout at a Home Depot but there were no employees to be seen and only self-checkout lanes open. I had some items I wanted help with and in frustration asked the customer next to me, "does anybody work here?"
He said "I guess we do."
I won't be the guy who causes shrinkage but it seems reasonable for the seller to pay something for the buyers' labor as cashier.
> it seems reasonable for the seller to pay something for the buyers' labor as cashier.
One argument against that is that if people are willing to provide that labor freely, it's worth nothing.
Another argument: before supermarkets, you'd ask the clerk to get a list of things from the shelves (which customers couldn't access). Now this labor is done by customers. Self-checkout is just another change like that.
Extending this: there are services that will deliver your groceries to your house. If we go to a store and take things home ourselves, are we working for free?
There’s no correct balance between customer labor and employee labor. Choose what suits you. If your chose store forces you into an arrangement you don’t like, choose a different one.
That's not the same thing. Those services cost extra. If you go to the store and take home the things yourself, you're avoiding paying the extra fee for those services
GP's point is those things used to be a standard part of the service. They were done away in the name of convenience. Then later brought back for a fee.
Only in the beginning, when self checkout stations are being introduced and most of the customers go to cashiers, out of habit.
Thing is: even a person that does self-checkout quite often is still much slower than a cashier, who has 100x more practice. Also, when anything goes wrong with self-checkout you typically need to wait for someone to get to you and fix the issue - cashiers typically are able to fix their errors themselves.
So, in the end the lines will be longer, because of less skilled people doing the work.
Since self checkouts are cheaper to operate and take less space, it's compensated by there being more of them. Our supermarket replaced 2 checkout lanes with 6 self-checkouts in the same space with half the staff.
The super market chain "Piggly Wiggly" was the first grocery store that gave customers baskets and let them wander around the aisles grabbing items off the shelves themselves.
>Before Clarence Saunders opened his shop, anyone who needed groceries would hand their shopping list over to a clerk who would pluck the groceries off the shelves and hand shoppers a bag full of their items. Piggly Wiggly turned that model on its head. Shoppers were invited into the store, handed a shopping basket, and left to wander the aisles of the grocery store, filling their cart with whatever products caught their eye. It’s hard to imagine now, but no one had ever thought of self-service grocery shopping before. According to TIME, who dug into Piggly Wiggly for the store’s centennial, Piggly Wiggly was the original grocery store, who not only introduced grocery carts, but also “price-marked items, employees in uniform, and the supermarket franchise model.”
Officially, the mysterious story behind the name is:
>According to the Piggly Wiggly website, the name's origin is truly a mystery. Saunders never fully explained where he got the idea that naming a supermarket after a squirmy porker was a good idea. Instead, he let stories circulate and, like a politician, neither confirmed nor denied them. One story claims that he came up with the name during a train ride where he looked out his window and saw several little pigs struggling to get under a fence. That made him think of the rhyme “piggly wiggly” and that apparently sounded like a good name for a grocery store. Another original story floating around is that when people asked Saunders why he gave his grocery store such a funny little name, he’s reported to have said, "So people will ask that very question." It seems to have worked, because here we are over 100 years later asking still asking the question. One thing for sure, though: It’s memorable.
But my mom, who grew up in the south, told me it was common knowledge that it was called "Piggly Wiggly" because the frantically shopping customers acted like pigs wiggling around all over the store in a mad feeding frenzy!
If that's the real reason, that they named their chain after how their customers behaved, then maybe Clarence Saunders and the Piggly Wiggly Office of Public Relations were so coy and mysterious because they didn't want people to know they thought of their customers as wiggly piggies.
I believe it's called lower prices – at least in theory.
(My apologies for coming across as pedantic.) Physical stores use them to remain competitive in pricing. The lower price is your incentive for doing it yourself (again in theory.)
I've never been to a store that gives a discount for self-checkout, but it probably does lower the overall cost of shopping there. there's very little that Walmart can do to differentiate itself from Target, so I would at least expect these kinds of businesses to be forced to pass a lot of the labor savings on to their customers.
if you really hate ringing up your own groceries, there are plenty of higher end grocery stores that have more cashiers (at least in my area). if you want better service, you might need to open up your wallet.
It doesn't. It just increases their profit. What they charge is determined by different people in those organizations. Most vendors have cashiers in Mid-South. Walmart and Kroger are the ones adding lots of self-checkouts with Walmart being about charging less with low service and Kroger charging more with a bit more service. Dollar General and Aldi are cheapest with no self-checkout, but less cashiers.
So, there's your data points. Meanwhile, a lot of companies are getting rid of their self-checkouts since there's tons of theft. They've probably lost more at some places than they saved on laid-off cashiers.
this isn't a self-evident claim. if you have other large competitors who operate in the same market space (for walmart and target, large stores selling a mix of well-known brands and discount store brands), and there is a cost-cutting technique that's available to all participants, it's really hard to employ it and keep all the surplus for yourself. this is especially true if the customers don't like it. I realize this is a naive econ 101 argument, but this particular market is about as close to "perfect competition" as it gets. I personally couldn't tell the difference between target and walmart if you removed all the signs, but if one were noticeably cheaper or more convenient, I would go to that one every time. cost comparisons between walmart and aldi is not particularly convincing; they sell different assortments of products. by not selling such a wide assortment of well-known brands, aldi probably has a significantly more efficient supply chain.
> Meanwhile, a lot of companies are getting rid of their self-checkouts since there's tons of theft. They've probably lost more at some places than they saved on laid-off cashiers.
well this is certainly a confounding factor to my argument. if true, there aren't really any savings to pass on in the first place. maybe it's just a lose-lose for everyone involved.
Your argument makes the common mistake to look at these companies as abstract entities competing based on economic theory instead of groups of humans doing what humans do in businesses. In most cases, the decisions come from middle management that operate based on a mix of competition and what gets them a bonus. Cutting costs or increasing profit within a manager's personal area of responsibility is often a bonus (or promotion) metric. So, many of them keep damaging their own companies to try to get their bonus or promotion. Such companies usually have endless discussions, meetings, and politicking where they explain away their bullshit hoping it will work.
This should be a factor in every discussion of why companies are doing what they're doing. Will the CEO or any managers doing it get an easier bonus or transition for it with minimal liability within whatever period they're working? Well, there you go. That's economic self-interest in the real world.
Source? Grocery stores are a notoriously low-margin business.
When only one uses self checkout, that one sees increase profit. When everyone uses self-checkout, they lower prices to compete with each other; and not using self checkout becomes economically unviable unless you have something else to distinguish you from your competition.
Do you have a source that retail companies follow economic theory versus profit maximization? In a capitalist system, companies try to maximize profit. They usually go into cartel or copycat mode doing the least they can to compete and increase profit. One thing many do is have a self-checkout to cut labor while otherwise running the same way. In the real world, that means the prices and level of service will be the same except for your bad, checkout experience you get so somebody might make a bonus for cutting staff or increasing profit. Capitalism 101.
The funny thing is you all come up with all this stuff that has no connection to what the companies offering self-checkout think. For them, it's much more local kind of reasoning featuring middle managers with incentives to think about.
Now McDonalds is a company which clearly is introducing self checkout to raise their margins, but I don't see any hand wringing about it on this thread.
If you're referring to the order kiosks, that's not really the same thing, since the staff is still preparing your order. In fact, I prefer those kiosks, as I can use them to remove a point of failure and ensure that my order goes into the system correctly.
That doesn't tell you anything for two reasons: missed profit by mismanagement and operating vs net profit. Especially those companies.
First one. I have friends that work at every retailer you named. Every one of them intentionally leaves stuff empty on the shelf to get workers to do side jobs, esp displays, reports, abd various meetings. Walmart and Target start throwing money away towards the afternoon after they're mostly stocked. Kroger starts leaving stuff empty in the morning to do scans or "walks" as employees describe them. None of these intentional losses are in their annual reports or the media. Latter being because they're big customers of media.
Second part. The percentages you quoted are whats left after all their big spending. For instance, both Walmart and Kroger in my area are doing million dollar remodels. Although some are welcome, many changes are just moving shit around. Customers wouldve kept shopping regardless. So, that easily couldve stayed in final profit. They often give executives raises in 6-7 digit range. They have way more managers in stores and offices than Publix which is more profitable. Also, local Kroger uninstalled some registers and added more self-checkouts despite their profit going up just before that. Obviously, the two weren't connected.
So, the operating profit vs justifiable expenses is what to look at along with management practices which you get surveying employees. When management is bullshitting, the employees are often more than happy to tell you about it if you seem sympathetic and esp have your own stories. Once I knew it was intentional, I almost entirely boycotted Walmart and Kroger with me going to companies like Costco, Aldi and Piggly Wiggly who still stock shelves. Piggly Wiggly and Trader Joe's also still have plenty of checkers/baggers despite "tough market conditions" others report. And that Piggly Wiggly is in one of most cut-throat areas price-wise. Talking $0.89-0.99 cent gallons of milk at all stores at times with Aldi dropping eggs to $0.28. Fresh Market straight-up canceled their store mid-construction seeing how rough it was.
Home depot always has at least 3 people available to check you out no matter how late or dead it is.
A service desk associate. A cashier at the self check. A cashier at the exit opposite the service desk.
You ignored the actual cashier 30 seconds walk down towards either exit and didn't incline your head sufficiency to see the gal 30 feet away probably cleaning an adjacent checkout or stocking the adjacent cooler.
The labor cost of the 2 minutes scanning items is between 26c and 40c
Would you like that deducted from your bill?
You aren't paid to check yourself out because your labor isn't in service of the businesses needs its servicing your own needs to check out quicker rather than walk slightly further down.
What really irritates me about shoplifting is that the honest among us subsidize the criminals. Inevitably, retailers and grocers raise prices due to increased theft, encouraging more theft, in a vicious spiral (I don't have proof of this; rather, it's an intuition). Also reminds me of drug use in sports.
Well it doesn’t spiral out of control. It’ll reach an equilibrium where the grocer prices their goods to make an optimal profit given the rate of theft (which you’ve aptly pointed out increases with the price they choose).
We in fact do: executives of companies with poor service, little innovation, and lots of fraud against consumers and employees. They take millions to tens of millions... typically goes up... despite others doing most of their work whose own income is minimized wherever possible. There's also thieves that make three to four digits a year taking some percentage of company earnings for themselves, too. I can't stand them either.
Multiple factors contribute. Paul Baran, inventor of packet-switched networks, added a footnote to a 1968 monograph noting that his parents' inner-city Philadelphia fire insurance had just been cancelled.
The unavailability, or high cost, of insurance may prove fatal to both homeownership and businesses.
Note too that Marginal Revolution, based at George Mason University, pushes an explicitly libertarian, market. fundamentalist, ideology. Cowan and Taborrok occasionally break type, but the exceptions prove the rule.
I'd need to review the article in depth, but an immediate observation is that in a media-saturated, advertising-filled world, demand is anything but exogenous.
> Shopping can be quite boring because it’s such a routine, and this is a way to make the routine more interesting.
Maybe there is an opportunity here to somehow make shopping or self-checkout more thrilling and thus reduce shoplifting. Maybe add some features from a slot machine and give random discount or free items. Gamify the checkout experience so people want to buy more.
That's a really good idea. A carrot instead of a stick.
I've heard of a few "sticks" in the last few months that don't seem nearly as fun/customer friendly as yours: facial recognition to identify/charge thieves after the fact and AI that analyzes body language and identifies shoplifters through their (supposedly) suspicious behavior in-store.
I'd also be curious whether the "honesty eyes" concept[1] would put a meaningful dent in self-checkout shrinkage.
Convenience stores here in Japan do that a lot - they'll have a campaign period where for every $10 you spend or so you get to pull a raffle ticket and might win a chocolate bar or can of beer on the spot. Not related to self-checkouts though (those haven't reached convenience stores yet, at least not outside of one or two enterprising franchisees)
Certain brands of vending machines will also do a slot machine routine - the price LED display will spin numbers and if you get 4 in a row you win a second drink (I've never won)
This idea seems absurd to me, I already sick of companies getting in my way and annoying me with 'buy more stuff!' just let me do my thing and leave me alone.
My guess is that expected payout would be too low to keep opportunistic shoplifters from doing their thing since most self-checkouters who aren't stealing would also get the discount. Otherwise this is a great idea.
Lotto disagrees. In fact super rare wins make them perceived as so much more valuable (and so much more an object of envy if it happens so that your friend wins at the self checkout).
Precise measurements are needed, this would be a cool psychology project to work on in some big chain.
In all stores I know, there are randomized inspection of say every 30 customers. Missed something tiny and you might be reprimanded and you’ll get tighter inspections for many months to come (until you had several inspections without issue). If you are found to have made some kind of fraud that is obviously a mistake then you’ll be stripped of the “privilege” of self-checkout as well as probably reported to police and likely other stores.
To ensure self checkout is a “privilege” stores must ensure there are rebates available only to self checkout customers, and that lines at the traditional checkout are long enough to make self checkout significantly faster.
Yes.
The article mentions various “fraud detection” schemes in place (weight etc) but I don’t get why random checks aren’t just used instead, or in addition?
I once left cash on a machine and sat with store security while they went back through the video to see what happened to it. (They were happy to give me the money after seeing someone quickly pocket it before the attendant noticed)
If they wanted to cross-check, the videos see everything - but obviously it's not cost effective.
It’s not a search of a person’s things after leaving the checkout. It’s a manual audit taking place with a random probability. You aren’t being “searched” because the transaction isn’t completed yet. In the traditional checkout people are asksed to put their not yet purchased items on a conveyor too. I’m sure you agree that’s not “searching” them.
Note: in most places such as grocery stores, customers scan items while picking them using a handheld scanner while putting things in their cart. Then you just pay for the total at the checkout, at which point the register could randomly decide to give you an audit. If you don’t agree to ever being subjected to that, your only choice is to use traditional checkout.
In other places (perhaps most notably IKEA) items are self-scanned at checkout time.
You register with your store bonus card to get access to self checkout, then use the same card each time. Getting the card required ID so it’s effectively an ID by proxy.
>> “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”
I find the twisted reasoning in this comment shocking and I don't really know what to say. It is a kind of twisted reasoning that I've only seen in people who were high on strong narcotics and were carried away by waves of wishful thinking and delusions, or, again, extreme persecution complex.
Yes- it is possible to make this connection: that because you are scanning your own shopping you are being charged to work at the store. However, you are not being charged to scan your items. You are charged to buy the items you scan. There is no extra charge for using the self-checkout (not anywhere I know of anyway). Indeed, the store may be making an extra profit by not having to pay as many cashiers. But, stores are always finding ways to make extra profit, for example by offering you a discount on certain items, on certain days, etc. Are you more morally justified than usual to shoplift because a store has a discount on Swiss cheese this week? They are making you pick up the swiss cheese and take it to the till (automated or not). Are they charging you to move items around the store?
Like I say- this makes no sense. It is quintessential procrustean logic: stretching and reducing the meaning of words until they fit your preconceived reasoning.
P.S. I spent so much time on this crap instead of dismissing it shallowly because dang gets sad when people don't show intellectual cuiriosity.
Obviously they’d rather the company hire more workers and charge them s little extra.
At least in some parts of the countryside it’s nice to see farmers’ stands with produce and a pay jar where people “self checkout”.
I ack that companies take advantage of people but that does not grant people a right to be dishonest themselves and become that which they bemoan. If you think they’re ripping you off, go to the the market that offers full service.
> Obviously they’d rather the company hire more workers and charge them s little extra.
It's happened the other way around - self checkout didn't exist, and when it was introduced prices didn't drop even though employment expenses are now lower. There isn't even an incentivising discount for using the self-checkout.
I've seen people have no end of problems with self-checkout systems, and would rather I have an experienced and 'expert' human dealing with the scanning and check-out part that I can also interact with.
Groceries are the most low margin retail business at 1-2 percent. So the cost savings have definitely been passed on to the customer, unless you can find figures to the contrary.
By "the cost savings have been passed on to the customer", do you mean that a) self-checkout has caused the customer to pay more for groceries, or that b) the cost of groceries has remained the same (or decreased), but now the store makes extra profits from it because they don't have to pay as many clerks?
If b) then we're back to where I started: you might as well complain about the discount on Swiss cheese. You don't pay more for youg goods, you may even pay less- but the store is making more money anyway.
I won't say "where is the harm in that" because there is certainly harm to the clerks- but that is a separate issue from the extreme stretching of reason to justify shoplifting in the passage I commented on.
Take the wholesale price of the product, add rent, delivery, payment processing, in store labour and all the other expenses involved in running a store, then add 1-2%. That gives you the price you pay in store. That formula hasn't changed since self checkout was introduced, but the cost figures have changed.
I don't see how self-checkout does not come under "all the other expenses involved in running a store". Also, I dont' see how it comes under the 1-2%, which I assume is the profit that the store makes.
I still don't see how all this says that "the cost savings have been passed on to the customer", as per your previous comment.
> So the cost savings have definitely been passed on to the customer, unless you can find figures to the contrary.
I think it's more up to the supermarkets to demonstrate that self-checkout is lowering prices. As a consumer I wouldn't 'definitely' believe any cost savings would be passed onto customers, and IMO it'd be foolish to do so.
> They are making you pick up the swiss cheese and take it to the till (automated or not). Are they charging you to move items around the store?
Until the Piggly Wiggly supermarket introduced the self-serve concept in 1916, you would go up to a counter and tell a clerk what food items you wanted, and they would get them for you. So your analogy really is the 1920's version of the self-checkout!
I didn't know this, thanks! However it reminds me of something similar that happened ~25 years ago in a UK town where I lived.
We had a long power cut that went on for many days. The supermarkets shut at first because, why not. As things went on they had customers to serve so they had to sell, I remember that tesco set up a table at the store entrance with the shop manager and a few assistants. You told them what you wanted, the assistants got it. They took cash only [0]. It worked.
Tangential to the article, what would happen today? People are carrying much(?) less cash, card only point of sales terminals are blooming, I just 2 days ago went to top up a spare mobile phone and the vodaphone store told me they'd no longer take cash.
Notes & coins don't need electricity to be acceptable. We may be creating a very fragile alternative because things like comms and power look increasingly reliable so why lean on them ever harder, but they will go down someday, that I guarantee, and the harder we lean on these things, they harder they will drop us when they vanish.
And we may have short power cuts due to human nature but there are things like solar storms. We know they are coming but aren't prepared for them. So what then?
[0] which they must have got from somewhere. I don't remember how the banks were operating.
For quite some time, stores did retain the ability to run offline carbon-copy based credit card transactions. I've definitely seen this occur more recently than one would imagine, at least within the past decade.
I don't know if this is still a thing, as cards are no longer coming with the raised characters required to take an imprint. But perhaps the imprint is no longer necessary, and simply writing the information suffices.
There are (obviously) more avenues for fraud without online verification, but the techniques of fraudsters are no longer optimized for running physical cards either.
The more significant thing that we've lost is a cashier/manager being able to exercise some level of intelligent oversight to judge whether a transaction is likely to be fraudulent. But then again, perhaps a store being cleaned out of its entire inventory of eg Tide because of a long term power outage isn't that big of a deal either.
> It is a kind of twisted reasoning that I've only seen in people who were high on strong narcotics and were carried away by waves of wishful thinking and delusions, or, again, extreme persecution complex
I really don't see the relation between delusional thinking and consuming narcotics. Can you explain what you mean? I've seen people high on narcotics; they seem loopy and sleepy, but not particularly susceptible to fallacious reasoning.
My experience with people on drugs is that their ability to make a correct judgement in any situation diminishes drastically.
For example, many of my friends would see cops everywhere after smoking weed (edit: secret cops, in civilian clothes. See how well they hide among us?). Another friend would always misplace her stuff, then start suspecting whoever was with her of stealing them (e.g. she would think I stole her baccy, though I don't smoke, etc).
A friend of mine who was a heroin addict (and died of it at the ripe old age of 34) used to tell me how heroine makes you sociable and friendly, but my experience was that when he shot, he would just fall asleep and then be too smashed to be anything like sociable. But in his head he was the soul of the party.
I've also known a fair few people who developed some kind of paranoid delusion most likely as a result of doing too many drugs. For example, I had a friend who thought one of his pals' brother was a hitman sent by the secret services to kill him. When he was sober, he was OK, most of the time, but when he was under- you couldn't make sense of him.
I mean, let's face it. You don't take drugs because they make you smarter.
Thanks for explaining what you meant. However I don't quite see how your examples relate to the kind of fallacious reasoning in the example (that it is OK to steal from self-checkout stores because they're making you do work). This (the example) is not just bad reasoning; it seems to stem from moral deficiency, and one can be morally deficient with or without being a drug addict.
Also, the specific mental issues you list are: a) paranoia and b) amnesia. Neither of these seem to relate well to this example. It only seems old-fashioned generalised disdain for 'junkies'.
I don't disdain junkies. Addiction is a disease. I fault junkies for letting themselves get the disease, and they are a huge pain once they have it but, disdain? Why?
I relayed my experiences with the people I basically grew up with- most of my friends when I was a teenager did drugs and by that I mean that they hardly did anything else. A few were honest-to-god junkies, who ended up in rehab and never really left, most of them (except the fortunately only one friend who died).
Is "disdain" derived from my statement that you don't take drugs to get smarter? My observation is that drugs make you you do stupid things and that most people who take them know this very well. Sometimes they seem to take the drugs to justify stupid behaviour that they wouldn't dare adopt otherwise.
The two examples are provided are general examples. I consider them examples of unreasonable thinking, and of how drugs make you do stupid things. I don't attribute the stupid behaviour of people on drugs to a moral deficiency (if that was the cause of the disdain interpretation)- I attribute it to the effect that drugs and the resulting intoxication have on their mental faculties.
As another exaple, I had a friend who started stealing our stuff when he took barbiturates. Once we were at my place and I showed everyone a silly trinket I had bought. After a while I noticed it had gone missing and I started looking for it. Seeing my frustration that I couldn't find it, my friend told me he had taken it and gave it back to me, _very_ embarassed at his own actions. I laughed, of course. Later another friend accused him of stealing some other trivial thing from his own house. My friend who stole those things (he was one of my inner circe, so to speak) was a pretty straight-up guy with very conservative values and he would have never deigned to stoop so low as to steal stuff from anywhere, in his sober moments. When he was under the influence, he basically turned kleptomanic.
I think this is a more relevant example to our discussion? If so, apologies for not bringing it up earlier.
The following is unrelated to our main discussion- a digression. Apologies, but your comment about disdain of junkies made me reminisce (also- it hurt my feelings, but OK, I'm a big girl) (I'm on a diet).
The first time someone tried to sell me heroin was when I was sixteen. I had gone for the first time to Exarchia Square, a place in Athens, Greece, were all the countercultural types gather. I had heard that all the punks and the anarchists gathered there and I wanted to meet some.
When I got there the place was empty so I sat on a bench and waited. At some point, this older dude came and sat next to me and started chatting me up. He started telling me about this thing called "paramytha" ("fairy-tale stuff") that people take to have a good time. He explained the name comes from the fact that it "makes you believe stuff" ("se paramythiazei"). I asked what this "paramytha" looked like and he described it as a powder, sometimes brown, sometimes yellow, sometimes grey, etc. So basically not only did he want to sell me heroin (I was 16, remember) he also wanted to sell me heroin cut with whatever dirty shit he had lying around (as normal).
Well, I wasn't buying. A while later an other older dude came and sat with me and told me to stay away from the other guy and the stuff he was trying to sell me. This dude, let's call him Dude B, told me that the "paramytha" was heroin, that it was a horrible disease that caused you to do the most degrading things to yourself and others. He told me that a grown man had once told him he gave someone a blowjob for money to get his "paramytha" (I'm guessing it was Dude B himself who did and that he did it many more times than one). I am not going to look down on a man (or woman) who gives blowjobs, or who gives blowjobs for money. But giving blowjobs to get money to spend on heroin that makes you give blowjobs for money is scraping the bottom of the lowest pit of degradation, in my book. Edit: but when you're addicted that's all par for the course.
So, no disdain. Sometimes pitty. Sometimes anger and frustration. Most of the time these days just a great big distance between myself and anyone who bears the marks.
I hope that is intersting to someone in this thread.
I had a friend, called Mitsos, the Sailor (because he used to be a sailor). I
first met him after he had come out of jail- I don't know what he was in for
and I never asked. He had this way about him that you see in people who have
been in jail and have taken it as a harsh lesson. Once they 're out, you look
at them and they may be a bit scruffy, a bit uncouth, a bit down and out
(because jail never lets you move on) but they are straight like a rod,
figuratively speaking. I don't mean sexually. I mean they watch their own
behaviour like a hawk watches prey. The slightest misstep can lead to trouble,
you see, and trouble can only end in one place.
So, Mitsos, he was trying to get his life back on track. He was homeless for a
while. He slept at the benches in the park where we all hung out. At some
point I noticed that when this girl -I don't remember her name but she was
from Brazil- so when she was around, Mitsos was more smiley, more polite and
even better groomed than usual. One day I saw him, out of the corner of my
eye, hand her an actual boucquet of flowers, all wrapped up in crispy plastic
sheet with a huge big smile on his face.
Eventually, Mitsos shacked up with this girl and they were happy together.
Unfortunately, one of Mitsos friends was a junkie. But he was Mitsos' friend,
so the Brazilian girl let him into her house.
It pains me to remember what happened after. One day the Brazilian girl came
home and found her house empty- Mitsos' junkie friend had sold everything off.
For junk money, it goes without saying. It goes without saying that Mitsos and
the Brazilian girl had a huge row and Mitsos ended up on the streets again.
But he didn't stop there. I lost him, for a while, then one day I was in
Athens' central square, Omonoia square. Omonoia is where you go to buy heroin
and I saw Mitsos standing in a corner with another guy and trying to shoot up
with what looked to me like a syringe with a broken needle. I went over and
talked to him but he didn't want to talk. He wasn't drugged yet, he was still
trying to shoot. He was angry and desperate and, I think, ashamed that I had
seen him like that. I stood and watched him for a while trying to insert the
needle in his vein and all I could think of was how grotty that syringe was. I
worried he might get an infection.
Do you understand what he was doing? Mitsos wasn't a junkie. He had junkie
friends but he was clean. At Omonoia he wasn't trying to get high. He was
committing suicide. I only figured it out a couple of weeks later, when I
heard they had found him dead.
I've thought often that maybe I could have helped him- given him a place to
stay, even though my folks would never have agreed. Anyway, it happened as it
happened. Mitsos took a last shot to nowhere a day when I was with my other
friends at the park and we were all happy and laughing and having fun enjoying
each other's company.
Sounds like a comment from the Shoplifting reddit which was full of people proudly showing the things they stole and posting excuses why them being a thief is someone else’s fault. It’s since been closed.
I don't shoplift, but I'm appalled at the double standards that are often applied to consumers and workers compared with large companies.
Amazon is selling counterfeit products to unwitting shoppers across the United States. Large firms like this do not subject themselves to any code of ethics like we do; there is only the risk of getting penalized. Yet their business models are reliant on us acting ethically. It is one big scam that preys on human decency, so I really don't blame someone for taking extra fruit at the self-checkout after doing a cost-benefit analysis and making the profitable choice.
If Amazon is not held accountable for fraudulent business practices, is it ethical to hold a shoplifter accountable? The answer, in my mind, is that it is not only not ethical to do so, but it is grossly unethical to do so.
It's not fair but we shouldn't conflate the judgement of other's actions with choosing how we ourselves act.
If Amazon is not held accountable for fraudulent business practices should I then steal? No. They've no relevance to each other, I am responsible for my actions.
Maybe you should steal, and still be responsible for your actions or inaction (I am not recommending this). If you consider them evil, then sabotage is justifiable.
Do we have an objective set of morals that are above the law? Was the Soviet government evil? What about any corporation that is not carbon negative?
Applying a double standard between people is in itself unethical; that is my entire point. We can all choose to live by Amazon's rules, where maximizing profit without regard to ethics is acceptable, or we can live by our conventional sense of morality (which is what I want.) But insofar as we hold ordinary people to a different standard than Amazon, we are behaving unethically. The shoplifting is not central to my point.
Companies are under constant scrutiny by various bodies and agents including regulators, consumer protection groups, media outlets, unions, review sites, consumer word of mouth - not to the simple market reality that if too many customers feel defrauded, they'll soon stop being customers.
It's a huge leap to argue that since some counterfeit goods have been sold via their platform, blatant theft from them or other companies is therefore justifiable, particularly when you don't mention that those counterfeit goods were sold by third parties, and that Amazon has a formal process to refund customers who have been sold counterfeit goods and to bar such sellers from their platform: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201165970
We all learned as children that theft and dishonesty is wrong, because in families and societies alike, things quickly break down if it becomes widespread.
>It's a huge leap to argue that since some counterfeit goods have been sold via their platform, blatant theft from them or other companies is therefore justifiable, particularly when you don't mention that those counterfeit goods were sold by third parties, and that Amazon has a formal process to refund customers who have been sold counterfeit goods and to bar such sellers from their platform: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/201165970
You are giving Amazon a pass to engage in unethical behavior. Whether or not the products are sold from a third party is entirely irrelevant; Amazon is profiting from defrauding shoppers, plain and simple. And in spite of their meager penalties, they continue to do it. Why? Because they make money from it.
>We all learned as children that theft and dishonesty is wrong, because in families and societies alike, things quickly break down if it becomes widespread.
This is a platitude that people here are saying to make themselves look good. If they are not enforcing their morals among all members of our group equally, then I do not believe that they care about their system of ethics as much as they let on; they are virtue signalling.
There exist a different set of morals in our society depending on whether you run a business or not. Everyone decided to fixate on the shoplifting aspect of my comment and intentionally avoid the thrust of my point. I don't actually want people to shoplift; I am calling out the hypocrites who shrug at behavior like Amazon's then proceed to hop on a soapbox about shoplifting. It's disgusting.
I regret getting involved in this discussion. It's not even relevant. Amazon wasn't mentioned in the article and nobody was talking about them until you brought them up. Nobody in this discussion was saying that big companies should be held to lower ethical standards than individuals. I accept you have an axe to grind about big company conduct and regulation, as do many people. That's fine. I'm done here.
Your example is comical. By my reading, Amazon stole (and was ordered to return) $70 million from Americans by offering their children fake playmoney for their real money. Where are the punitive damages? $70 million is piss to Amazon.
Here's another comical example from recent:
Facebook is fined $5B for privacy violations. Their stock goes up for the day.
The claim was big corporations get to rip off and exploit little people virtually at will, and your refutation was that they are punished (or at least get slapped in the wrist as evidenced), everything is at balance in the moral realm, and a hostile personal orientation against them is unwarranted.
You've now updated your argument to Big Tech may be evil but that doesn't mean we should assume Big Grocery is too. That could be right, but if we look closely I'm sure we could find some tremendously nasty things happening there too. The incentives are making Big Money, not doing good. This is an issue of our (Post-)Industrial society.
I'd started writing a longer reply, then thought "you know what, it's Sunday night here, I've just started drinking a really nice glass of wine and my partner is about to serve up the home-made pasta we've spent the past couple of hours preparing... life's too short for this" and wrote a low-effort reply. As your previous comment began with "your example is comical" didn't exactly make me feel like a good-faith effort at serious discussion was likely to be worth the investment, and you came right though and asserted that I'd said things that I did't say at all. So here we are.
For what it's worth, I don't think "big tech" or "big grocery" is "evil" or "not evil" in any binary sense. People and organisations respond to incentives and societal standards. Sometimes those incentives and standards are healthy and lead to broadly beneficial outcomes and sometimes they are perverse and lead to negative outcomes. Countless economists over several centuries have explored these topics far more deeply than I can in an HN comment late on a Sunday evening.
For some people it's really important to think that the big tech companies are evil and to blame for all society's ills, and now people are claiming that means it's really important to go easy on people who shoplift. OK then, they're welcome to that view.
I still think society is better if people - both individuals and corporates of all sizes - act ethically and morally and don't steal or defraud, and I don't think individuals can expect politicians and corporations to act ethically if we're not willing to act ethically in our personal lives.
That said, I'm not a law-and-order hardliner, and I have actually shoplifted in my life, at a young age, though not for any reasons to do with waging any just war against supposedly evil corporations. I was just in a bad place in life. So I have plenty of compassion for people who end up doing wrong due to being in bad circumstances.
Anyway, like I said, it's late on a pleasant Sunday evening and life is too short to spend any more time talking about this, so I'm out.
My partner is of half-Italian background, and today was the first time she used the chitarra [1] she recently received as a gift from her family.
So yep, making the dough, waiting for it to rise, making the sauce, then pushing the dough through the chitarra to make the spaghetti all takes a bit of time.
It's not an every-day thing, but as a couple's thing to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon, it was great.
all I get to eat today is milk lol that's supposed to be used with coffee (kwa-fee lol lol) but I just drink it lol lol, not super ethical but life is too short lol. Hope you enjoy pasta with fine partner lol and enjoy life bruh
Sounds like you are just trying to justify whatever logic allows you to benefit. Amazon resold a fake charger so you should be allowed to steal that guy's bananas, got it.
His argument is "I live in a low-trust society, in which large and powerful institutions are only out for themselves, carelessly fuck me, nobody cares, and so it is my moral obligation to protect my personal interests by whatever means possible."
It's a very sour mindset, but it's also very common in third world countries and American inner-city ghettos where affairs are quite nasty.
If a wealthy, influential person is not convicted of a murder they clearly committed, does that mean it's grossly unethical to hold anyone else accountable for murder?
I think that phrase is used a little more freely than it should be. It is wrong to imprison people against their will; yet we do it because those people do/will do wrong things. Two wrongs don't make a right in that case either, but we feel the second wrong is justified because of the first.
>> Yet their business models are reliant on us acting ethically.
The way I understand it, every structure in an organised society relies on people acting ethically, or in any case not going out of their way to harm each other without a very good reason.
For example. If I go to the doctor I trust that she won't suggest treatments I don't need because she wants to take my money. That sort of thing.
For me anyway at least one practical purpose served by morality is that it ensures a society remains functional and does not degenerate into chaos.
I've had multiple people try to explain to me why morals are necessary for society, as if I'm arguing against them. I'm not even advocating for shoplifting (though perhaps I could have phrased it better), but I think a lot of people may have intentionally misread my overall point.
We are in agreement that a common sense of morality is necessary for the proper functioning of society. My issue is precisely that powerful people in our society often do not share our sense of morality, they do not live by it, and they are not adequately punished for it. They use our system of ethics against us, and that is what I find frustrating.
> I find the twisted reasoning in this comment shocking and I don't really know what to say.
You don't know what to say because saying shoplifting is moral (under some conditions) goes against the central belief you were raised with all your life: private property.
But following an ethics based on social equality, you realize that in many situations self-discouting (autoréduction) is the just thing to do.
We live in a world of money and private property. These ever-invasive tools of injustice are actually based on institutionalized theft. The land you work you don't "own". The house you live in you don't "own". The programs/websites you build you don't "own". So usage-based property (the oldest and only "natural" form of property) is out of the equation because society's belief in a piece of paper (a property title) dispossessed you from what you need/use.
So in this equation, we realize what we need (that has no price) was taken away from us by private property. When we take a look at the production/supply chain, we can follow the money to see who benefits from this worldwide scam. Take food: food costs little-to-nothing to grow (unless you do it with chemicals, which you should never), so it's a good sample of how a capitalist system behaves.
Food you find in supermarkets is grown by farmers. Their production is bought by logistics giants who will take it to supermarkets, or to logistics hubs run by supermarket chains. For supermarket chains (not small shops), it is rare to have more intermediates than this.
Yet, even with so few middlepersons, retail prices can be 5 times or even 10 times what the farmer was paid for the product. Here in France, we typically pay 2-6€/kg of vegetables in supermarkets (farmers markets are cheaper), while the farm gets paid typically less than a euro (with some exceptions for luxury produce).
So where does the money go? The middlepersons are an obvious answer. But supermarket owners are also responsible for the high prices of food.
So in the end, supermarkets are just the place where common people come to spend all their money to survive, while the person making the food can't pay their bills and is pushed slowly towards suicide (very common among farmers working for the industry). Can we call this "moral"? To me it sounds a lot like any other definition of slavery: working a lot to just earn your right to live and help other people be exploited.
Coming from this economic analysis, i believe anything you need you should steal from the rich and the powerful. We need to dismantle these people and their systems of oppression before they complete the destruction of our planet (they will never stop until then).
That's not to say that stealing is a moral way of life under every circumstance. But before i steal something, i ask myself these two questions:
- Is it a necessity or a nicety? (niceties-stealing is just another form of consumptionism)
- Am i stealing from a rich person or from a poor/working person? (in a supermarket, you're stealing from rich shareholders; in a smallshop, you're stealing from your neighbor's work, who themselves get ripped off by surrounding capitalist structures)
I know many people among you will not understand or approve my way of thinking. I'm not here to try and convince you. But you should understand that commerce and private property are not inherent aspects of humanity and that stealing is most times a necessity. Therefore stealing from the rich does not come from a delusion, but from the realization that the rules of the game are rigged and we need direct action to bring justice to the table.
P.S. I spent so much time on this crap instead of dismissing it shallowly because dang gets sad when people don't show intellectual cuiriosity ;)
I can see your point. After all, the original comment has BLOCK CAPITALS screaming- always a tell-tale sign of a rant on the internets. Maybe I should have refrained from commenting on it at all.
But, I'm actually really interested in the ways that we delude ourselves, particularly on issues of morality (but not only). It's an itch I can only resist scratching with great difficulty. If I ever manage to get my PhD I might even throw some papers at the problem (of figuring out when we are taking bad decisions based on bad reasoning).
Although I disagree with it, I do understand the logic behind it. The companies doing this are usually capitalist, not virtue-driven. They don't care about morals, laws, etc. They screw over their customers in any way they can get away with. They also do things that cause their customers problems but lie to them about the reasons. Self-checkouts make the customer experience worse for most (not all) customers. When they add them, they usually do a staff cut followed by telling self-checkout workers to push customers to check themselves out. Nothing is given in return for the extra hardship. It's just a middle finger to the customers that made them the money to buy the machines (or invest in better customer experience) in the first place.
So, some are following that "do whatever I can get away with that's in my self interest" mentality giving them the middle finger back. Funny enough, in my area, most of these companies with poor security in their self-checkouts are nickle and diming the people that run them on top of increasing the number of machines they watch or side jobs they have to do on top of self-checkout. I had to wait a few minutes earlier today for my self-checkout clerk to stop bagging at a register to fix a problem on my self-checkout. Needless to say, that kind of crap just adds to opportunities for people stealing or just walking out to buy their stuff somewhere with fast-moving people at registers. I've done the latter many times since a trip to convenience store was faster than the lines at similar prices.
I'd be more outraged if it was someone ripping off Publix, Costco, or Aldi.
Alternatively, it's revealing a deeper truth that had been obscured by a long chain of seemingly logical justifications. Corporations tend to abuse abstractions until they break, and self-checkout is basically at that breaking point.
I for one could never stand the things for their slow and obtuse programming. I cannot get how people just accept slowly following a machine in lockstep, rather than the machine being designed to accommodate a natural human workflow. Back when the things were new, they would give out freebies by deciding to flip out and void the last few items, without the conveyor actually bringing them all back. I certainly wasn't going to go out of my way to correct its error, setting myself back even further.
At this point I just skip the frustrating things out of personal policy, and outright avoid stores that punish customers for doing so (Walmart being the worst offender). If I can't stand an extra 5 minutes in line for the professional cashier, I should order online or simply stock up and visit less.
I don't share the thinking behind that comedy bit at all. For me, self-service checkouts offer such added utility -- no tiresome social interaction with the cashier, no awkward moments when shopping in a country where you don't speak the language -- that it more than makes up for the burden of ringing up my purchases.
I'm glad you get personal utility from the new method, but the rant is coming from a place where people are forced to use self checkouts and would rather not - eg stores where they shut all but one staffed register, creating a huge line.
I'm in the Mid-South around Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. They did exactly what parent described to push self-checkouts. Many people down here like a personal touch in their orders. Some percentage prefer to use self-checkouts to get out faster or not have to interact with people as much. The stores with self-checkout tried to cut staff forcing the majority of customers to use them to bypass the artificially-long lines. They tried to justify that with it was better or industry was just too competitive to afford cashiers (except at places that still had them). The recent push is to add even more with Walmart designing theirs to make people move through more like cattle.
The other thing with those down here is they have a weight-based security scale with high number of false positives. Combine that with 4-6 machines constantly having them to get some unhappy customers. Also, those at Walmart and Kroger often have coupons or other issues that require attendants. Sometimes customers will argue with them wanting things checked. This might take a lot of time. Now, we have 4-12 or something people all waiting on one person due to one person. Then, some get irritated about what order they're served in when the attendant gets back. Way worse experience than at a register with a few people in line.
I'm fine with self-checkouts or registers. I prefer to have options, though, like you said in your comment. I'm good at reading the situation to determine which will be faster. When they force me, I just go somewhere else to spite them unless they got me locked in with an exclusive item or deal(s) worth the time. The oligopolies let them do that here and there.
In terms of Walmart, my experience with one that is only self-checkout (2 staffed registers remain but are usually not open) is that:
* The computers are extremely fast (or at least don't feel sluggish like some at Kroger do)
* There is no "unexpected item in the bagging area" nor "please put the item in the bagging area" (They probably mark items that will often not be bagged)
* I can constantly add and remove items from the weighted scale and put them in the cart without any interruption
* Checkout with the many options is fast both for Walmart pay and traditional payments that don't use Walmart pay.
The system does "move people like cattle" but that's evidently all Walmart thinks their stores should be doing. From my points above, they're doing their best to make the system "work" for their customers and more importantly investors.
I know this isn't a good thing for other types of people - Walmart doing this will make other stores also attempt to implement this type of thing to stay competitive on prices and margins or at least "not lag behind in technology". This system will most likely be not meet the customer satisfaction levels Walmart can, so these competitors will either
A. Lose customers due to a frustrating experience [in relation to W]
B. Lose customers due to higher prices [in relation to W]
C. Lose customers due to the loss of the "personal touch" some people like when checking out
The only stores this won't happen at is probably Publix and more local offerings. Publix charges noticeably higher prices for almost everything compared to both Kroger and Walmart for me, but I see how they're still in business:
1. the extremely friendly staff
2. policy for baggers to offer taking customers' groceries out if it's not too busy
3. having dedicated baggers at all
Although I observe the demographic to be mostly boomers which are phasing out; Millenials and Zoomers (Gen Z) are already caught up in the desensitizing internet culture, desensitizing the checkout process won't have a big negative effect on them, especially since it's just iterating on the self-serve checkout machines that have been around for years already.
That varies. A current trend in the Netherlands is to remove all normal checkouts and replace them with nothing but self-scan checkouts in the train station 'to-go' formula (essentially convenience stores) of one of the largest retailers.
The same retailer (AH) is also pushing for self-scan checkouts in certain normal supermarkets (often mid-size ones) by reducing the number of normal checkouts to one or two, creating nigh permanent queues. Because self-scan checkouts don't accept cash, you are stuck using these if you do wish to pay with bills and coins (which is probably why the retailer does this; i.e., the war on cash).
At a train station, if you have a few minutes to spare to grab a coffee and some snacks, you can pretty accurately guess how long it will take with a human cashier and any potential queues.
With a self-scan checkout, the machine invariably has a bunch of failure modes that take an unguessable amount of time to correct — either by you following the instructions, or by an attendant overriding some error state.
I just go to the kiosks that do have human cashiers instead.
No they are not. I was buying in my local Tesco in Hungary the other day and they've removed almost all human cashiers and on that day only self-checkouts were working so I had no choice. And as for speed - I had to call operator three times because of measuring error and after the checkout had to go to another operator to remove that beeper things from the T-shirts I bought. The process was definitely much slower than with cashier. I will not be buying there anytime soon.
The Marks & Spencer's at London Victoria has a couple of manned tills and about a dozen self-checkout tills. There's always three or four clerks in the self-checkout area yelling "next please" when a self-checkout till empties.
That's their job now, see? Yelling "next please". That's just miserable and pathetic and I fully sympathise with the frustration at self-checkout proliferation (I guess I'm a bit of a neo-Luddite).
But that's not a justification for becoming a jerk oneself.
I'm frustrated with stores that only have self-checkouts also. I don't see how it justifies shoplifting, especially when it's supposed to be an exception to the normal ethics of shoplifting ("it's not OK to shoplift except at self-checkout").
I don't understand the momentous burden shouldered by others and their fleeting and superficial social interactions but I suppose that is due to my naivete. For me they are simply the lowest-stakes social interaction you can undertake and another chance to work on my ability to charm an audience.
So you admit openly to stealing, just to put it plainly. You chose to shop somewhere, you chose to use a self checkout, you knew there was an error, and proceeded to leave with things you didn’t pay for. No matter how you justify it to yourself, you’re a thief.
If you can justify that you can justify stealing from your employer (hey I’ve been under paid for a while, taking this unsecured device is like making up for a bit of my salary), etc.
I find the logic here really interesting. When you participate in a buy-one-get-one-free offer, you "leave with things you didn't pay for". So imagine these scenarios:
You go to a greengrocers. The lady at the checkout sees you basket of 27 grapefruit and can't be bothered to do the maths, says "let's call it 5 [relevant currency]". You know you have something in the region of 7 relevant currency, but she insists she won't take a button more.
You go to the supermarket. The tills are misconfigured, a 10[currency] box of chocolates is coming up as 0.1[currency] [1]. You're buying 5 of them. The cashier has no facility to charge you more - whatever the system says is a divine edict as far as the company is concerned.
You go to the supermarket. You're walking by the main doors with your trolley when a fire alarm goes off; smoke is billowing from the back of the store, sprinklers are activated. In the blind panic, you - and your trolley - are pushed outside. After half an hour, they announce that the store will not be reopening. You tell security that you have not paid for your shopping, they gruffly request that you take it home and make use of it rather than litter the car park with rapidly defrosting frozen items, as nobody is allowed back in the building.
In most of these cases, you could probably pay the correct amount by queueing at another till, at another time, date, at your own time and cost. For the benefit of someone who doesn't care enough about the profit margin to worry.
These are much closer than your employer-theft analogy - I don't think that the parent poster's moral standpoint is at all far away from any of the above. In fact, the only difference is that because it's a technical "glitch" with no humans involved, you clearly feel you're supposed to go the extra mile to rectify the seller's mistakes, caused by the seller failing to invest sufficiently in the system.
I certainly wouldn't judge someone making any of these calls, regardless whether I personally would go that extra thankless mile.
I think the closest, albeit boring, analogy to the situation is you go through the traditional staffed register at a busy time. The tally comes out a little lower than you were expecting. Since it's not higher, you pay and get out of the way. In the parking lot, you look over your receipt and see that one item out of many didn't get scanned. Now you have the choice of either just accepting the benefit from the mistake, or spending your life waiting in line again simply to redo their job better than they did it themselves. IMO it's foolish to correct their mistake by harming yourself instead.
I've also corrected cashiers on the spot, especially for more significant errors. I once had a cashier ring up a manual 20% off coupon as 80% off ($20 vs $80 final price). Going through with that transaction could reasonably be called dishonest, despite it being perfectly legal.
So yes, 15 years ago I got a few items for free. I didn't act to get around their system - their system was just straight up broken, moving items to the have-paid-for-them area without counting them. I don't think it is a customer's job debug a store's system and manually move items back from the have-paid area. You're trying to push a paradigm wherein the store can shirk hiring even a single person to oversee their side of the transaction, yet make the customer responsible for applying diligence for both sides. Give me a break.
I guarantee you the store doesn't analyze their situation in such inflexible absolutist terms, because they could literally never do anything ("can't just put stuff on the shelves, someone might pocket something!!"). Rather they look at cost/benefit. The cost they incurred there was part of the development of the machines, which seemingly has paid off for them by now given that the machines are still around. That is how they chose to handle their half of the responsibility, end of story.
I myself only brought up the detail to make that point that even with the machine's obtuseness leading to missed items, the frustration of it grinding of my gears was still greater! Place the item here, place the item there. no, you did something wrong, go back. no, go back. okay now I am finally ready to take your money. bills first, sorted by serial number! And every time I have tried the machines in the following years, I find that same obtuseness. If you can't take the judgment of valuing my personal convenience over wasting my effort to get free stuff as an indication that I am not a thief, it only demonstrates how useless your paradigm is.
So get off your high horse. Maybe next you can write some grandstanding general comment about the countless other occurrences where something was wrong on a receipt but people didn't go back afterwards because the error was in their favor. Or I can even give you some fodder - I also defraud the stores by changing out my surveillance nym every few months. Meanwhile you can continue missing the forest for the trees and letting slide the emergent-complexity abuses caused by the wholly logical implications of absolutist morals and laws.
I bet you're one of those people that actually waits in a line to exit the store, so that the security guard can recheck your receipt and give you a gold star. How many are you up to now?
Most criminals think they are geniuses because they figured out how to outsmart the system. They are not. This is a trait highly correlated with low IQ. Real brilliant people don’t constantly seek the ego boost of exploitation.
False positives and the human reaction to being accused of theft will kill these. Honestly a sticker that says "automated theft detection system in operation" will be more effective
There's a 24-hour Kroger near where I used to live that would routinely shut down the last human cashier around 10PM, which was about an hour too early.
This resulted in a nightly backup at the two self-check lines they'd leave open, sometimes taking 20+ minutes to check out.
Even as someone who prefers to self-checkout: It was a mess.
Target often runs large metro stores with TWO cashiers. I once went into the Target on 14th St in Manhattan and saw just a single human. Most customers are already conditioned to go through the self checkout.
I am all for these setups because I can check out faster in many cases and I can bag it as I want it bagged. saving money or not its the convenience which sold me
This exactly, in the US the norm is for cashiers (or baggers) to put just 2 or 3 items in a single plastic bag, and if you bring your own reusable bag they usually have no idea how to deal with that, unless you get a pro-level cashier who will then pack things in nicely.
Retail is a major source of employment in America for those without technical skills. The increase in automation at the checkstand are forcing people out of one of the few jobs they can get. I like automation, but we need to do something for the middle aged mom/dad who is not likely to ever be trained to be a coder or technician. It is time for a universal basic income. Or they could just thieve from the robots to make ends meet.
I did once abuse the self-checkout myself, but I felt justified:
The tag on the shelf said the crackers were buy-one-get-one-free. But when I rang them both up, it charged for both. Instead of calling an attendant, I just voided one of them but walked out with it. I'm basically a criminal mastermind.
In most of the groceries stores around me, discount logic is applied after the the total is completed. So voiding after you completed scanning and were ready to pay would have been legit, but maybe not so much if you didn't wait until payment time.
It's an expression in English to refer to an item being charged to a customer. It is referring to old-fashioned cash registers that used to ring a bell after the cashier entered the price.
Ahh right. I'm actually British but never heard that before, thought it was refering to making a phone call. Those cash registers are before my time :)
It's not worth it. Imagine if they posted video of you on their FB. Many wouldn't believe your justification. You should have just voided both of them and left them there.
I've never had a store refuse to honor the posted price when it rang up incorrectly. I doubt they would bat an eye when you explained and showed them their signage.
Additionally, most states impose strict penalties for products that are incorrectly advertised. Whether it is intentional or not.
In the store's perspective, the case was theft. They couldn't tell the machine wasn't taking the proper discount, and they likely wouldn't do the research to uncover the truth.
If 850K is the amount of shrinkage for 21M of in-store sales then a store that delivers groceries can offset the cost of delivery due to the corresponding reduction in shrinkage.
To avoid false accusations of theft, avoid self-checkout. YMMV.
I understand that people are abusing the system. I can accept that the store has an interest in loss prevention. But I'll never feel comfortable with being checked up on. As a stubborn person, I'll have to start shopping somewhere else when this happens. This means a less convenient location. Where's the time savings in that?
Many here bring their politically charged economic analysis into it. For me I've always wanted to just get home without any undue awkward/impolite scenarios. Nor do I want to navigate the menu system for produce.
Waiting in a longer line is relatively cheap for the peace of mind gained.
What level of shoplifting do the Amazon Go stores encounter? A lot less I would guess.
Napster was "overcut" by the iTunes Music Store, and then streaming finished off music piracy. You really can combat stealing through better purchasing experiences.
The banana trick works almost equally well when a cashier is checking your product. Mainly because nowadays, they just mindlessly scan all the products on the belt, and do little actual checking. This clip describing shopping at the Dutch Albert Heijn supermarkets isn't far from the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWB_ev0dK8o
It's not quite the same if you pay for groceries with your own money (cash) instead of having some giant corp. promise to pay the grocer in a couple days (credit card).
Plus I wouldn't want to support any store that didn't have at least a couple real check-out lanes.
I've never told anyone this, but Bill's next bit in that clip about customer service, I actually did that last year.
I had this big mess with my whole flight itinerary, and I was stuck at an airport for like 30 hours with nothing to do.
I got the airline's customer service on the phone. They were refusing to compensate me, I was livid but I just did exactly what Bill said: Don't curse and they can't hang up.
I talked really, really slowly. The intercoms in the airport would sound off periodically and I'd just wait until they stopped then ask the rep to repeat himself. So he'd repeat a point that he already made like 15 times. And I'd just keep feigning that I misunderstood the point he was trying to make.
I just kept talking in an infinite circle about common law, and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and running through all these increasingly ridiculous hypothetical scenarios of overbooking and flight delays and which party should be liable in those scenarios and for what reason, and on and on...
Bill is right about them not being allowed to hang up. I had him on the phone for over an hour.
He kept it together for a while, but toward the end I could tell that he was starting to crack. Then he made some unprompted comment about how he didn't care because he was getting paid to deal with me, and shortly after that, the line just abruptly cut off mid-sentence.
I got a callback the next morning offering me a $200 airline certificate, a hotel voucher, and a meal voucher.
True story.
At the time I was just really angry about my travel getting screwed up, and especially about not having a place to sleep, and being stuck in an airport terminal. And all that anger just channeled into this game of calmly wasting that guy's time.
But in hindsight, what I did was a very unjustified and shitty thing to do, and I was rewarded handsomely for it. And that guy may have been reprimanded through no fault of his own. I don't feel great about it and won't be doing it again.
Honestly though I hope they don't go away just because everyone abuses them. I really like the self checkout machines and being in control of how long the transaction takes instead of up to the whims of which cashier I've chosen (although if the markets would just do a little research on queuing theory and make us all like up in one single line for the human cashiers, that wouldn't be a problem).