At my grocery store, they are using image recognition for self checkout. Bananas show up as bananas automatically, and if you select otherwise, I imagine it flags the item or purchaser. Shouldn't be long before the store figures out who is regularly overriding the image recognition for the purposes of theft.
Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for stealing low price items.
Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.
Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.
Please explain to me which part they are automating.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.
I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.
I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?
Sure, but I deliberately choose my grocery store to increase the probability of having an actually skilled cashier. And I’ve never had a skilled bagger, including excellent cashiers. Doing it right is worth some of my time.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.
Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.
Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.
The "too bad" is most people lacking the understanding that you don't steal from a store, you steal from honest shoppers who keep the store open for you to steal from.
Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.
None of the other automating technologies like this in the past ended up causing job loss. We used to employ hundreds of people 24/7 to connect phone calls...
if a store does not want to hire capable staff to perform an essential function, they should not expect laypeople to perform that action for free (or at higher cost, as we've seen with grocery prices in the US as human cashiers are reduced) at the same level as a trained staff member.
we do not have to accept this decision to reduce staff and raise prices as a matter of course. plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't.
If GuinasEyebrows does not want to drive an appropriately security-hardened armored vehicle, then they should not expect that I will not jimmy the lock and hotwire it. If you see me drive it away, no you didn't.
People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.
With about a month of practice you could learn to pick 95% of residential locks.
So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s
Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.
Living in low trust societies sucks.
I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.
Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.
It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?
That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?
There's a disconnect because all of the accused corruption are big picture things people barely understand happening with shady political influence, corporate structure to avoid taxes, defrauding investors and those kinds of things.
When do these people that glorify their stealing interact with actual low-trust-society events from corporates? Almost never. They just hear about it on the news and social media influencers sharing stories.
These are people who have no idea what being shaken down for a bribe is like, have always benefitted from strong consumer protection laws, generous refund policies, and all around honesty in most every corporate interaction and the complaints they have are minor compared to their proud theft.
How often are you short changed at the store? Lied to about the weight of something you were sold? Received an adulterated or diluted product?
> plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
By everyone who uses any tool invented in human history. You are drawing an arbitrary line at self checkouts for some reason, but I am sure you have no problem with the millions of other ways automation has benefited you, obviously including using a computer to express your ideas on a forum hosted by a business that invests in other businesses that use automation as their springboard to success.
I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.
If people are needing to steal food to survive we need to radically work on changing society so that doesn't happen, not just then a blind eye and ignore it.
But no, most people in the US aren't stealing from grocery stores to feed their kids, they're stealing from stores to resell on black markets.