I'm pretty sick of misguided/enthusiastic Loss Prevention people, and these digital systems amplify their hijinks.
The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up behind me and very persistently told me that I hadn't scanned something. Annoyed, I pointed on the screen where it showed I had. His eyes went wide, and he spun around, and quickly hurried away, no apology.
If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't code that intervention/confrontation as their mess-up, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still got dinged as suspicious, to cover their butts.
We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. And I have even recently seen a street person in a chain pharmacy here, simply tossing boxes of product off the shelves, into a dingy black trash bag, in the middle of the day. Somehow none of the usual employees around. Yet there's often employees moving to stand behind me at that same store, when I use their self-checkout. (Maybe my N95 mask is triggering some association with masked bandits, yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? But an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go when they have symptoms.)
> yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa?
They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.
The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.
>Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that.
There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)
The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.
Plus, like everybody in retail, LP’s measured performance indicator is how busy they look when management is around. The best way to do that without getting in a fight is to annoy people who don’t actually have anything to hide.
Don't know how it is in the states but in most places in Europe using violence against a violent person is likely to end up very badly for you, even if you are a guard and have the necessary permits and training. You are not going to risk being fined or jailed to stop some criminal from shoplifting from a store that is not even yours.
I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.
(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
Someone has never worked retail. They know they can get away with it because pretty much any corporate store has a policy that employees can't try to stop them. An employee at a local REI was fired for trying to stop one of the daily thefts they were having.
Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.
Getting rid of checkout clerks, forcing customers to use self-checkout, and then surveilling and policing said customers to make sure that the unpaid labor they are now performing is done flawlessly is just so dystopic.
IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.
I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.
self-checkout at a grocery store is so maddening. There are enough edge cases (discounted items, multiples, lack of barcodes, special deals) to make it painful if you have anything more than a few staples. And I'm sure it's also part of the disgusting push to barcode & box produce which is a negative for everyone but the suppliers & stores.
>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss
I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.
Less relevant, but reminds me of my all-time favorite grocery store LP encounter, near MIT. The chain was running this big promotion with lots of tear-open prize tickets that are either coupons or game board pieces, so I had been visiting often, to buy ramen noodles (one ticket per package!) and I had a small stack of coupons in my wallet. I was checking my coupons for this visit in the middle of a center aisle, and was returning my wallet to my back pocket, when this nice middle-aged probably church-going woman store employee walked up, looked at me, and the "oh!" expression on her face said she was very surprised that I was stealing. She hurried off. When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in, by sprawling across both the lane and the conveyor. The young checkout woman says to him, annoyed, "Not you again." The guy strikes up a conversation with me. "That's a nice backpack. ... If I had a backpack like that, people would think I was stealing something." It was an ordinary cheap bare-bones store-branded backpack. He's getting close to illegally detaining me, which would go extremely badly for him. To de-escalate, I do my best folksy code-switching, and pretend not to know what's going on. My hyperobservant mode also kicked in: there was abnormal maneuvers of multiple people from the other side of the checkouts. One young guy coming up with the others, my eyes dark to him, he sees I see him, and for some reason gets a look like he's noping the f right out of whatever is going down, and he spins 180 and quickly walks away. Eventually, this friendly and sensible person, who I took to be the manager on duty, comes up on the other side of the checkout, and we have a friendly conversation about the ticket promotion. I think she immediately realized that I was a good-natured MIT type, not a shoplifter. And I would guess she thought the LP guy was a clown who risks getting the store sued someday.
Appreciate the story, but what's the hangup about naming these companies?
It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.
Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.
It’s common sense to avoid putting things in your pocket in stores. What’s with the creepy write up about this? You sound like you were going to spaz out and attack multiple people if this escalated. Why not simply open your backpack and show them what’s inside? A lot of MIT types look like they haven’t been outside in months , school shooter types , so I don’t get that analogy either.
> When I get to the checkout, this middle-aged guy acting a bit like a drunk comes behind me and boxes me in
Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?
The idea of a supermarket or department store is kinda
“new-ish” (on some historical level), right? Like it is a post 1900 invention I think. Before this, most stores were full service. You go up to a merchant in the bazaar, or the grocer behind his stall, with a list, and they go into the inventory to grab the stuff for you.
The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.
We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!
Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.
> We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service).
The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.
These exist in retail space now, but you can't go there. DashMarts are full-service general stores that delivery drivers stop at to pick up orders. It's like a ghost kitchen but for Dollar General. If they'd open up a "civilian" window then I'd visit every day.
Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.
Any LP system will have false positive and false negative. If we can have a perfect LP system without false signals, I think self-checkout systems would have been more wide spread by now.
I was accused of not paying for certain items at a grocery store recently, and I explained that I bought those at another store. The LP person didn’t even ask to check the receipt from the other store. I proceeded with packing my groceries and went home.
I wonder if we can recognize that store people would want to reconfirm if we have correctly paid for the things we thought we bought, and we just answer them. No need to assume ill intent.
These are orthogonal. Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? Indeed, seems like separate groups should be enforcing both?
However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.
I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.
Some time ago I had a mild case of cerebral palsy, enough to slightly distort my facial features. And sure enough that made the AI flag me frequently for 'grocery frisking' by suspicious personnel in the supermarket where I am regular customer for years. That means nothing anymore. The supermarket is a factory, and you are a shopping trolley, a wallet, and a potential thief.
Yeah, none of it really works anymore. I'm at the point where my desired approach is, "Give everything away and people be f*cking adults about only taking what's needed, and good stewards of what's taken." It's obvious that all of the socioeconomic guardrails do exactly zero, because downstream of "rich people doing whatever the f*ck they want" is "poor people also doing whatever the f*ck they want, just more desperately". Let there be chaos for a moment, and when everyone realizes that shortages and waste suck, we'll self-organize a better protocol. But these thousand bandages over the festering wound of a culture with a completely disordered relationship to goods can't keep it all together but for so long.
The vast majority of people believe what the government tells them, and the government tells that that Covid is no longer happening and you have nothing to worry, everyone has returned to work, and masking is now only something that criminals use to hide their identity.
We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.
When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).
The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.
Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).
This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.
In my teenage years I worked at a k-mart that hired a Loss Prevention guy sometime after they hired me.
The LP guy caught a few non-employee shoplifters, but there kept being more loss until eventually an employee - one who had been there a long time - stole something on camera. It turned out to be the employee who had installed all of the cameras, but apparently he just got brazen/sloppy.
After that he got arrested and I never saw him again, and a few months later the LP guy moved on because the store's losses had dropped to more acceptable levels.
My wife is diabetic, which means she is at higher risk from covid. My parents are old.
I have a duty to my family to protect them, and if that means wearing a mask to reduce my risk of getting covid, then their safety overrules my own comfort.
I have a duty to protect my fellow citizens. Some of them are also vulnerable to covid, though I don't know them personally.
The scientific proof of association between school (esp school start) and the spread of disease goes back over 100 years. I see no reason it would be different for covid, perhaps even stronger for covid where many college age people would be asymptomatic or low symtpoms.
In a town of big-name universities, where people are constantly coming and going from all around the world, and the reality of students living and socializing heavily, in cramped conditions, often with little sleep... Covid still seems to be "in the air".
Most people no longer wear masks in stores here, but there are some. And some employees do as well. Including the person at/near the customer service desk of the grocery I mentioned, I think the last 2 times I was in there.
Home Depot's self-checkouts are using this facial ID to build/maintain their shoplifting database — this tracks thefts by the same person across multiple visits, and is used over time to build up a case against errant self-checkout-ers (i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier).
There is also CCTV AI (whether artificial intelligence, or actually indians) which can intervene with your self-checkout process to "remind" you that you didn't actually scan everything.
Beware that face detection may not be an issue under BIPA if it's not storing biometric markers [1], only a hash. As an engineer, and concerned citizen, I'd say that's a thin line as far as privacy protections go, but apparently the law disagrees and face detection tech suppliers are well-aware on how to monetize on the discrepancy [2]
In any case, the plaintiff will most likely be able to take the case to discovery.
Probably discovery and a settlement to avoid a trial on this. BIPA has statutory payouts which will cripple you (rightly or wrongly). Statutory fines can be an awesome way to vindicate the public's rights and stop companies being assholes. It's way easier to litigate and settle a case than using torts.
I've noticed at supermarkets here that of the dozens of times those 'you haven't scanned something' warnings have come up, only one time the item hadn't actually scanned when I thought it had. Every other time has been a false positive for me. They're pretty dodgy, the workers always seem pretty frustrated with it as they go around clearing them for people (sometimes a handful of people waiting, falsely accused by the machines)...
All of the places around here that had first-gen units with a scale on the packing side (to make sure you actually scanned eg a banana and not a two pound block of cheese, yet were constantly wrong) have replaced them with newer versions that don't have scales or any other way that I can see to validate that what you scanned is what you put into your bag.
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
Fun fact: the self checkout attendant usually has a button on a portable device that can remotely unlock your session.
They aren't allowed to use it and instead are required to physically walk up, move the customer out of the way, and push the same button on your screen.
Ok so Ive heard this rumour spread around a lot and I still have yet to hear anyone back this up with anything beyond just speculation and hearsay. It also doesn't make sense.
This premise assumes two things for it to be true:
1. These stores have the technology to detect when you started a checkout transaction with an item, but said item was not scanned.
2. These stores have the additional technology to detect the cost of this item (afterall, if they're aiming for a threshold then they have to have some sort of monetary figure here).
I don't doubt that machine learning object detection can say, track a banana versus an apple. But I sincerely doubt its reliable enough where it can classify Mandarin oranges versus regular oranges.
If the tech was reliable enough to do EITHER of these two technical abilities (let alone both of them at the same time), then the grocery would simply employ this technology as part of the self checkout process itself. Screw prosecuting people, just have them use this wizzbang auto detection self checkout where no scanning is needed.
Finally, I sincerely doubt that even with enough instances that you'd be successful in a prosecution that you actually could prove intent to shoplift versus say the much more likely fact that you forgot to scan an item or poorly scanned it. Again, to prove a serious intent then would subsequently have to build some sort of pattern analysis (i.e. you always stole expensive cheese or something) to make it obvious.
Has there been even a single prosecuted case someone can actually point to? It really doesnt make sense. I also could see this being thrown out because an argument could be made that the company sitting back and letting this continue to occur without intervention is tacitly allowing it to continue and thus sets a precedence that its allowable.
Why guilty? The Indians are doing their job that stupid tech companies pay them for. The phrase has nothing to do with Indians but rather with unmasking the "AI washing" done by companies trying to drive up stock prices.
Without justifying the theft, isn't it weird that they get rid of cashiers at registers which would scan your items, and thus prevent theft, put computers in place and then rely on software to shift the burden of solving theft to the public?
How would that work? If they have video from a year ago that looks like a person pocketing some item, what good is that without them showing that the person actually had possession of the item after they left the store?
This is another example of the poor being punished harder. A desperate mother who steals repeatedly will reach felony levels and spend years in prison or face deportation, but a rich teen who steals for fun will stay below felony and get away Scott free.
Im not sure we should allow such premeditated charge stacking, it is just further weaponizing the law and fueling our prison industrial complex for zero gain to society. Who is to say many of those people wouldn't have stopped after being caught and charged the first time? Imagine if cops sat on the side of the road not pulling people over, just recording minor traffic offenses in a file, and then a year or so later drop 10+ charges on a person all at once and turning the collective charges into felony reckless driving charges? People would be outraged and nothing of worth would be gained.
Or if your dealing with forgetful / tech confused old people. Now your putting 75 year olds in jail when a sooner alerting system would've made them notice if they were not using it correctly.
Seems like proper punishment is only way to get deterrent effect. Or the courts to do their job. So to me this sounds like workable way, stack up the habitual offenders and send them to jail for a few months to few years setting them on straight path.
What you're describing is essentially the exact point system used for traffic infractions in many countries over the world. Driving 10 km/h above the speed limit? No biggie, you pay a fine. Do it three times? We take your license.
Time to change your laws and/or prosecutors I'd say so those 'minor thefts' can and will be prosecuted resulting in fines which need to be paid - no ifs and buts. Get them early and get them (hopefully not that) often and you may be able to keep the majority of 'proletarian shoppers' on a somewhat less crooked path. If crime pays more people commit crimes, if shoplifting is not dealt with more people shoplift.
> i.e. to get them above a theft threshhold, at which point prosecution becomes easier
This feels like it should be illegal. Holding back on reporting or prosecuting until you think you're more likely to get a conviction or a bigger conviction, feels close to entrapment.
To do otherwise is just unnecessarily vindictive, showing that it's the punishment that matters more than the prevention.
The issue is that in many states now prosecutors refuse to prosecute for crimes under a certain threshold, cops often won’t even bother taking a report.
A year ago my wallet was stolen. The guy went on a shopping spree until my cc companies started denying charges. In each store he made sure to spend less than $500, so individually there was no crime worth reporting. I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
The point is that from the store’s point of view the only way to prevent it is to wait for it to be a crime the SA will prosecute. It’s honestly shocking to me that people in these comments rush to defend thieves stealing power tools and stuff from Home Depot. There’s no argument to be made about them “stealing food for their staving families” this is very clearly purely about crimes of opportunity by selfish degenerates who have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of society.
And btw, it’s possible that Home Depot does report every crime, but the only time anything happens is once it reaches that threshold that progressive SAs determine is worth prosecuting.
Is it really any different than the thief who steals things just under the felony limit...but does it every day?
In Texas the felony limit is $2,500. Is stealing $1000 on Monday, $1000 on Tuesday, and $1000 on Wednesday really so much better than stealing $3,000 on Monday?
Maybe you could argue they aren't doing their best to minimise losses and such aren't eligible for a full recovery of their losses, but not that the perpetrator didn't commit the offense.
I make it a point not to use self-checkout systems because I want to support human interaction even if basic, and contribute to jobs for humans. And cash (most self-checkouts here are card-only).
Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
You don’t want to pay people to do that and put yourself in a higher theft situation, then you haggle the customer even more by treating them like a criminal.
I had one of these happen at a self checkout the other day where the system did object tracking and it turns out I had many duplicate items to scan so I used the same item scan code to save time even though its weight system forces me to do one at a time I can at least have a prealigned code handy. I ended up doing some tricky hand switching between items (crossing over) while doing it quickly and that tripped up the object tracking system, so an employee came over and reviewed the video of my checkout right in front of me… at a grocery store for a $2 item.
The anti consumer sentiment is high for an economy based so highly off consumerism.
> Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
I've seen this sentiment in recent years, but with respect to time, self-checkout was always faster than human cashiers. You didn't need to wait while the cashiers did procedures like counting the money in the drawer and waiting for a supervisor to sign-off on it. The lines were unified so that your line was served by 4-8 checkouts rather than 1 cashier (or 2 as is the case with walmart). That meant that any issue with a particular customer e.g. arguing over pricing presented on the shelf vs on the system, needing to send someone out to verify the shelf, didn't affect the time you needed to wait as much. They were a very positive thing for customers when they were introduced.
Basically, instead of having to get in a line of 3-6 people and having to wait for each of those to be served before you by one cashier, you just instantly check-out with usually no line.
With respect to labor, it's basically the same. That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
>Yea, where’s the theft of my time and labor for now performing part of your business transaction process you should be performing by hiring staff to check me out.
Yikes, the entitlement. Should they also have someone push your cart around the store and load it for you?
If you don't like it, you have the freedom of association to use a different store.
Same. And indeed a losing battle. Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend. Maybe it is because it is a means to face away of all the big challenges humanity faces. Being social in complex society requires skill and effort, causes stress. Facing life challenges, and the doom and gloom. The easy way is to flee that, to extract oneself, and technology is bliss here.
Why would I want to wait in line for 5 minutes, when I could be on my way?
Life goes by fast. I’d rather spend those small minutes lost with my loved ones or back to doing things I enjoy more. Over my lifetime that’s a lot of time.
I only shop in person at Whole Foods because it’s two blocks away. Every Tuesday they have some nice discounts and it’s fun to walk the aisles. Otherwise I just deliver groceries from Costco every 2 weeks or my Amazon prime subscriptions.
Why continue purposefully at a disadvantage? Makes no sense.
> Society is being dehumanized, and humans embrace this trend.
Well... that's because capitalism incentivizes us to do it wrong. Instead of the dreams of the early sci-fi writers getting real - aka, robots and automation do the majority of the work, leaving humans time to socialize - we have it even worse nowadays, with even with the work force of women added to the labor pool, there still are constant political pushes to expand working hours or to even make it legal to hire children again.
If the profits from productivity gains over the last decades would have been distributed to the workers, either in terms of purchasing power or in free time, we wouldn't be in this entire mess.
Same, I refuse to use them. I'm not going to support making cashiers redundant.
On top of that I don't want to be in a position where I get accused of shoplifting when I forgot to scan something. I'm simply not trained on the 7+ different self-checkout terminals they have around here.
This is why I don't understand people who support mandatory online / one-click subscription cancellation. Support jobs and require people to call-in to a human to cancel. That's a human-centred system that contributes to jobs.
Not sure if this is the same for the USA, but worker shortage is the main reason why self-checkout became popular here in Europe at least. Aging population, very low birthrate and higher educated people all contributed to this problem (although not for all countries in the EU).
Self-checkouts are not the only place where facial recognition is used. Of course overhead cameras have long been present at actual staffed checkout counters. The new risk today is that every credit card POS device has a camera built into it as well. I go around and put little black stickers over them when I encounter them. These cameras are well-hidden and not disclosed at all.
Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
Like imagine being in the era when electricity was becoming more prevalent and I’m sure some people were complaining about some ideal then as well.
That said I do agree that self checkouts should not be using methods beyond what’s reasonably necessary.
>Don’t you think it’s selfish when a small minority of people hold on to some fading ideals in a world where people are genuinely better off with more efficiency?
I'm all for more efficiency. Me fumbling with self-checkout is the opposite of efficiency.
What's that? I should learn to do it better? How much would that cost in terms of both time and money? Multiply that by several hundred million, as compared with a few hundred thousand cashiers.
You're saying that (x)250,000,000 < (x)500,000, where x = the cost in time and money to become proficient in checking stuff out. Is that correct?
If so, your math seems a little off. AFAICT, the only folks who get the benefit of this "efficiency" are the store owners who, instead of paying folks to do the job, makes the customer do it instead.
What's that? Those savings are passed along to the customer? Give me even one example of this being the case. I've certainly never seen it.
The green box around his face in the image is evidence that it detected a face, but not that it had collected or stored identifying biometrics. It would be legal for a POS device to detect any face, e.g. to help decide when to reset for the next customer. But as I understand it, this would usually be enough to trigger discovery, where he could learn the necessary technical details.
Even if this suit fails, the store is vulnerable to continuous repeats by other parties. Written consent from each customer is the only viable protection. So the BIPA law may mean that face detection, not just recognition, is not practical in Illinois.
I was wondering this as well. The green box could simply indicate it detected a face, using something like YOLO, or even a simpler technique like some point-and-shoot cameras use to decide where to focus (on faces, obviously).
Detecting a face is not the same as recognizing a face in either engineering parlance or typical usage.
If I don't determine this is a face that I've seen before, I've not recognized the face (maybe I have recognized that there is a face there).
To recognize entails re-cognizing: knowing again what was previously known. Simply noticing that something is a face does not satisfy that; it is only detecting. Without linking it to prior knowledge, recognition hasn’t occurred.
The lawsuit alleges that they also collect the facial details, of which the green rectangle is no evidence. But maybe they'll look into it and find that this is indeed the case.
If it's not clearly defined then it would be subject to debate in court, and you could admit expert evidence of what facial recognition is to define it
My understanding of these systems is that the green box just detects a face to a) make it easier to scan hours of footage later looking for faces b) add a subtle intimidation factor against crime.
Is a picture of a face count as "biometric" information? I strongly doubt it and suspect this case will be thrown out.
It’s “face detection blocking” built into the camera/display. Otherwise, the video footage is just straight sent as ONVIF to the main DVR for whatever processing is done there (which could be a lot more nefarious).
Wren Solutions / Costar seem to be the main vendors of these “public view monitors” — such as the PVM10-B-2086.
Yes I think it is likely security theatre - "smile you're on camera!" type things.
In some stores here in the UK they have CCTV with a sort of attention getting dancing LED light ring around the lens which I assume is there to a) trick you into looking straight at it (and so get a clear shot of your face) and b) remind people that cameras are there doing something.
I highly doubt they stopped there. If they're doing that already, they're taking the time/expense to scan hours of footage later and they would absolutely go further and assign each face a risk score based on what they think happened during your visits. They will flag you next time so the LP person can know to watch you closer in real time. I personally don't think they are sitting on evidence to charge you with a bigger crime later like some comments suggest, but I do think they would like to know which of the 10 busy self-checkout registers are most important to watch in real time at any given moment.
Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off.
Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?
Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.
The trick is to shop at a high-shrinkage Home Depot where their self-checkout stations are all staffed by cashiers and you get concierge escort service whenever you purchase something locked in a cage.
I almost always prefer a staffed checkout vs. self checkout.
One time at the grocery store I watched a cashier clock out, shop for herself, then check out at the self checkout (!). I wonder if she recognized the irony.
Readit News
The most conspicuous one recently was at one upscale grocery chain within the last year. There was what I took to be a dedicated LP person who seemed to be lurking behind the self-checkouts, to watch me specifically, and I stood there until he went away. Then, as I was checking out, this employee came up behind me and very persistently told me that I hadn't scanned something. Annoyed, I pointed on the screen where it showed I had. His eyes went wide, and he spun around, and quickly hurried away, no apology.
If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't code that intervention/confrontation as their mess-up, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still got dinged as suspicious, to cover their butts.
We do seem to have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. And I have even recently seen a street person in a chain pharmacy here, simply tossing boxes of product off the shelves, into a dingy black trash bag, in the middle of the day. Somehow none of the usual employees around. Yet there's often employees moving to stand behind me at that same store, when I use their self-checkout. (Maybe my N95 mask is triggering some association with masked bandits, yet bearded street person with big trash bag full of product makes them think of lovable Santa? But an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go when they have symptoms.)
They do not want to confront trash bag man for good reason. What happened is people who don't give a fuck and have no problem with using violence realized there's nothing stopping them from loading up bags of goods and walking out of the store. "Oh you want to stop me? just try mother fucker." Even so called security guards want no part of trash bag man because there is a high chance of violence and most humans do not want to engage with that. Never mind these guards are paid very little and are nothing more than security theater. Pull a gun and those guys are going to be no more a guard than the cashier or a person in line.
The stores are left to fend for themselves as cops these days seem to care less and less. So I am not surprised they are employing all sorts of janky tactics to prevent loss.
There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security. (There are many more who don't actively enjoy it, but don't mind engaging in it and consider being competent at violence an important part of being a man.)
The pharmacy gives its security guards instruction not to use violence because they don't want to get sued when a guard seriously injures a thief: it is impossible at the scale of a chain of stores to subdue and detain thieves without some risk of killing some thief or seriously injuring him.
(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
Perhaps it had something going for it that we lost when we decided to forsake it.
Point being, willingness to engage in violence has nothing to do with it.
IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.
>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss
I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.
It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.
Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.
Is this a new jobs program? I've been seeing a lot of these middle aged/elderly guys with "Loss Prevention" on their shirts walking the aisles aimlessly in supermarkets and department stores. What's the point really when there are cameras everywhere?
The innovation of having customers grab their own stuff without supervision was required for all these massive super stores.
We shouldn’t compare the status quo of self-service with some shoplifting to an imaginary ideal of self-service with no shoplifting. We should compare it against the actual alternative of stores bottlenecked by clerks that can only serve one customer at a time (or at least stores small enough that a clerk can watch everybody doing their self-service). You have to pay those clerks!
Stealing is wrong. But some loss is a cost of doing business. People shouldn’t get irrationally obsessed about it, to the point where they think society is crumbling or whatever. Or make LP so annoying that they scare off normal customers.
The modern version of an old time "full service" store is an e-commerce warehouse in an exurb with quick delivery and that actually works just fine for a lot of things. It's a big component of why the retail sector has been struggling over the past decade.
Grocery stores have a low profit margin. In 2020 it was 3%. In 2024 it was 1.6%. That is not a good number. Assume this number is two times worse in California or other areas with spontaneous looting. Lots of empty shelves with pictures of products you can pick up at the counter.
https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...
Go outside and touch grass
I was accused of not paying for certain items at a grocery store recently, and I explained that I bought those at another store. The LP person didn’t even ask to check the receipt from the other store. I proceeded with packing my groceries and went home.
I wonder if we can recognize that store people would want to reconfirm if we have correctly paid for the things we thought we bought, and we just answer them. No need to assume ill intent.
Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money
However I suspect it's also an outdated claim. Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. In the past five years it has increased 100%+ in many areas. It has almost been normalized where some groups will proudly boast about how they've scammed and stole, especially at self checkouts.
I have zero problem with max enforcement. I'm not a thief and if you have a thousand AI cameras tracking my every move through the store, I simply do not care. I also don't see a particularly slippery slope about systems that highlight the frequent thieves. Further I appreciate that retail operates at a pretty thin margin, so every penny they save (both on labour and by catching/preventing thefts) is actually good for law abiding society. So more of it, please.
I haven't heard of a short-term Cerebral Palsy, but then again I'm not an expert.
We also live in a world where companies believe its perfectly fine to capture biometric data without disclosure or consent, despite the laws in many places saying directly to the contrary, and you don't have a choice because they fired all the cashiers.
When you bring it up they say, that's 15 levels above me (the store manager) we don't have a choice, its all up to corporate, this isn't happening, oh that green border it is, I'll make sure to forward your feedback to corporate (I won't buy anything from you, or come to your store if you do this).
The companies involved are running not on profit from sales, but rather from something else. I wonder what that could possibly be. This is what happens under monopoly, and this is how monopoly fails.
Is the company one of those companies who have been silently nationalized? Do they run on laundered promises from government instead? (money-printing).
This seems likely given they aren't changing their direction despite drops in sales.
so you're complaining, but also defending the position of the companies and intentionally refusing to name them.
its like you dont know you're in a class war here, and you'll be sick of these increasingly authoritarian practices until you fight back.
The LP guy caught a few non-employee shoplifters, but there kept being more loss until eventually an employee - one who had been there a long time - stole something on camera. It turned out to be the employee who had installed all of the cameras, but apparently he just got brazen/sloppy.
After that he got arrested and I never saw him again, and a few months later the LP guy moved on because the store's losses had dropped to more acceptable levels.
A couple of years later, the store closed down.
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Did I just step into a time portal to 2022? Have you... been in a coma for the past several years? haha
I have a duty to my family to protect them, and if that means wearing a mask to reduce my risk of getting covid, then their safety overrules my own comfort.
I have a duty to protect my fellow citizens. Some of them are also vulnerable to covid, though I don't know them personally.
The scientific proof of association between school (esp school start) and the spread of disease goes back over 100 years. I see no reason it would be different for covid, perhaps even stronger for covid where many college age people would be asymptomatic or low symtpoms.
Most people no longer wear masks in stores here, but there are some. And some employees do as well. Including the person at/near the customer service desk of the grocery I mentioned, I think the last 2 times I was in there.
There is also CCTV AI (whether artificial intelligence, or actually indians) which can intervene with your self-checkout process to "remind" you that you didn't actually scan everything.
In any case, the plaintiff will most likely be able to take the case to discovery.
[1] https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/2024-bipa-de...
[2] https://alcatraz.ai/blog/face-authentication-vs-face-recogni...
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
Yes, I want 2 boxes of cereal.
I just find it easier to go to a cashier.
They aren't allowed to use it and instead are required to physically walk up, move the customer out of the way, and push the same button on your screen.
This premise assumes two things for it to be true:
1. These stores have the technology to detect when you started a checkout transaction with an item, but said item was not scanned. 2. These stores have the additional technology to detect the cost of this item (afterall, if they're aiming for a threshold then they have to have some sort of monetary figure here).
I don't doubt that machine learning object detection can say, track a banana versus an apple. But I sincerely doubt its reliable enough where it can classify Mandarin oranges versus regular oranges. If the tech was reliable enough to do EITHER of these two technical abilities (let alone both of them at the same time), then the grocery would simply employ this technology as part of the self checkout process itself. Screw prosecuting people, just have them use this wizzbang auto detection self checkout where no scanning is needed.
Finally, I sincerely doubt that even with enough instances that you'd be successful in a prosecution that you actually could prove intent to shoplift versus say the much more likely fact that you forgot to scan an item or poorly scanned it. Again, to prove a serious intent then would subsequently have to build some sort of pattern analysis (i.e. you always stole expensive cheese or something) to make it obvious.
Has there been even a single prosecuted case someone can actually point to? It really doesnt make sense. I also could see this being thrown out because an argument could be made that the company sitting back and letting this continue to occur without intervention is tacitly allowing it to continue and thus sets a precedence that its allowable.
That's a new one. It's clever but I feel guilty having laughed.
This feels like it should be illegal. Holding back on reporting or prosecuting until you think you're more likely to get a conviction or a bigger conviction, feels close to entrapment.
To do otherwise is just unnecessarily vindictive, showing that it's the punishment that matters more than the prevention.
A year ago my wallet was stolen. The guy went on a shopping spree until my cc companies started denying charges. In each store he made sure to spend less than $500, so individually there was no crime worth reporting. I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.
The point is that from the store’s point of view the only way to prevent it is to wait for it to be a crime the SA will prosecute. It’s honestly shocking to me that people in these comments rush to defend thieves stealing power tools and stuff from Home Depot. There’s no argument to be made about them “stealing food for their staving families” this is very clearly purely about crimes of opportunity by selfish degenerates who have no interest whatsoever in the betterment of society.
And btw, it’s possible that Home Depot does report every crime, but the only time anything happens is once it reaches that threshold that progressive SAs determine is worth prosecuting.
In Texas the felony limit is $2,500. Is stealing $1000 on Monday, $1000 on Tuesday, and $1000 on Wednesday really so much better than stealing $3,000 on Monday?
It doesn't feel close to entrapment at all.
Maybe you could argue they aren't doing their best to minimise losses and such aren't eligible for a full recovery of their losses, but not that the perpetrator didn't commit the offense.
I understand it’s a losing battle on all fronts.
You don’t want to pay people to do that and put yourself in a higher theft situation, then you haggle the customer even more by treating them like a criminal.
I had one of these happen at a self checkout the other day where the system did object tracking and it turns out I had many duplicate items to scan so I used the same item scan code to save time even though its weight system forces me to do one at a time I can at least have a prealigned code handy. I ended up doing some tricky hand switching between items (crossing over) while doing it quickly and that tripped up the object tracking system, so an employee came over and reviewed the video of my checkout right in front of me… at a grocery store for a $2 item.
The anti consumer sentiment is high for an economy based so highly off consumerism.
I've seen this sentiment in recent years, but with respect to time, self-checkout was always faster than human cashiers. You didn't need to wait while the cashiers did procedures like counting the money in the drawer and waiting for a supervisor to sign-off on it. The lines were unified so that your line was served by 4-8 checkouts rather than 1 cashier (or 2 as is the case with walmart). That meant that any issue with a particular customer e.g. arguing over pricing presented on the shelf vs on the system, needing to send someone out to verify the shelf, didn't affect the time you needed to wait as much. They were a very positive thing for customers when they were introduced.
Basically, instead of having to get in a line of 3-6 people and having to wait for each of those to be served before you by one cashier, you just instantly check-out with usually no line.
With respect to labor, it's basically the same. That's unless, in your part of the world, they let you use the self-checkout with huge quantities of groceries that need bagging. In my experience, there's (always?) a limit on the number of items for self-checkout.
Yikes, the entitlement. Should they also have someone push your cart around the store and load it for you?
If you don't like it, you have the freedom of association to use a different store.
Life goes by fast. I’d rather spend those small minutes lost with my loved ones or back to doing things I enjoy more. Over my lifetime that’s a lot of time.
I only shop in person at Whole Foods because it’s two blocks away. Every Tuesday they have some nice discounts and it’s fun to walk the aisles. Otherwise I just deliver groceries from Costco every 2 weeks or my Amazon prime subscriptions.
Why continue purposefully at a disadvantage? Makes no sense.
Well... that's because capitalism incentivizes us to do it wrong. Instead of the dreams of the early sci-fi writers getting real - aka, robots and automation do the majority of the work, leaving humans time to socialize - we have it even worse nowadays, with even with the work force of women added to the labor pool, there still are constant political pushes to expand working hours or to even make it legal to hire children again.
If the profits from productivity gains over the last decades would have been distributed to the workers, either in terms of purchasing power or in free time, we wouldn't be in this entire mess.
When a job doesn't need people, keeping a person there is not some kind of noble gesture. It's annoying.
On top of that I don't want to be in a position where I get accused of shoplifting when I forgot to scan something. I'm simply not trained on the 7+ different self-checkout terminals they have around here.
There are - currently - three-hUndred-and--fifty-seven -- people - inthequeue. Please wait
What exactly do you mean?
That the companies moved to self checkout because they couldn't get the staff?
Or people prefer self checkout because the manned tills are few in number?
The first is very very hard to believe
Like imagine being in the era when electricity was becoming more prevalent and I’m sure some people were complaining about some ideal then as well.
That said I do agree that self checkouts should not be using methods beyond what’s reasonably necessary.
I'm all for more efficiency. Me fumbling with self-checkout is the opposite of efficiency.
What's that? I should learn to do it better? How much would that cost in terms of both time and money? Multiply that by several hundred million, as compared with a few hundred thousand cashiers.
You're saying that (x)250,000,000 < (x)500,000, where x = the cost in time and money to become proficient in checking stuff out. Is that correct?
If so, your math seems a little off. AFAICT, the only folks who get the benefit of this "efficiency" are the store owners who, instead of paying folks to do the job, makes the customer do it instead.
What's that? Those savings are passed along to the customer? Give me even one example of this being the case. I've certainly never seen it.
Without me, there'd be no cart gatherer jobs.
I once said this without stating it as a joke, but was surprised to find people enthusiastically agreeing with me. /s
Even if this suit fails, the store is vulnerable to continuous repeats by other parties. Written consent from each customer is the only viable protection. So the BIPA law may mean that face detection, not just recognition, is not practical in Illinois.
Answer: File a lawsuit and use discovery to find out.
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If I don't determine this is a face that I've seen before, I've not recognized the face (maybe I have recognized that there is a face there).
To recognize entails re-cognizing: knowing again what was previously known. Simply noticing that something is a face does not satisfy that; it is only detecting. Without linking it to prior knowledge, recognition hasn’t occurred.
Is a picture of a face count as "biometric" information? I strongly doubt it and suspect this case will be thrown out.
Wren Solutions / Costar seem to be the main vendors of these “public view monitors” — such as the PVM10-B-2086.
https://6473609.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6473609...
“Face Detection Boxes (Neon Green, Front and Side Detection)”
In some stores here in the UK they have CCTV with a sort of attention getting dancing LED light ring around the lens which I assume is there to a) trick you into looking straight at it (and so get a clear shot of your face) and b) remind people that cameras are there doing something.
Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?
Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.
That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.
One time at the grocery store I watched a cashier clock out, shop for herself, then check out at the self checkout (!). I wonder if she recognized the irony.
Also, the HD nearest me has no fewer than 10 ALPRs in their parking lot. They've made absolutely sure that you're gonna get into the database.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...