When Walmart's anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.
Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech::When Walmart’s anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.
I’d get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone’s time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it’s not about preventing theft. It’s about proving a point: that corporations control you.
I’m sorry but I don’t think that makes very much sense.
Retail theft is a real problem for a company’s bottom line. Enough so that Target is pulling out of San Francisco, IIRC. And self-checkout is one of the easiest ways to pull it off.
Why would a corporation frantically seeking quarter over quarter growth spend money to “prove a point” about control?
Hey remember when they gave you free bags, bagged it for you, and rang you up? That was kinda nice. Now the price is three times as high and all that service stuff is gone. The day before Thanksgiving is going to be hell this year at my supermarket
I can’t remember the last time I let someone ring me up at Walmart. Self checkout was always faster because most of the attended registers were closed. Most of my adult life I’ve bagged myself and idk if I’d want to go back tbh. The tech is annoying to deal with though
Trust me it was nice. Value adds keep going down and prices keep going up. Keep hearing how everyone is unemployed and how CEO pay keeps rising. Biggest shareholder of Walmart has a mega yacht, maybe could have spent some of that money hiring people at the register.
Whatever, enshitification continues. Now if you excuse me I want to watch a fifteen second yt vid and will have to watch a 30 second ad first from some alt-right “news” service that hates trans people.
Ahh yes the value of getting something for free for almost 2 decades goes down the moment they actually want people to watch the ads or ask people to pay.
I can’t even count the number of Epoch Times ads I have gotten telling me how the media invented trans people. I keep blocking them but they keep coming back. Do you support that ad as well? How about the Prague-U ones where a woman explains how the Southern Strategy is a myth? This morning I got one about the Turtle Twins, the author explained how slavery wasn’t really all that bad.
Those free plastic bags deteriorate into toxic materials that are presently all over the inside of your body. You had to wait in a slow line for people to bag the wrong things together and sometimes scan the same thing twice. Now I have my own canvas bags that last forever, I never scan my things twice, and my shit is bagged with the right things together based on where they go in my home.
My body is fine but thank you for your “sincere” concern.
I went on the fast lines, maybe you need help with this. The trick is to look for lines that are shorter not longer. Easy mistake to make.
I never had an issue with the cashier making a mistake and I have never been so freaken insane that I need to have the items in my bag in the reverse order of removal. Maybe they made so many mistakes scanning you because they were distracted by your fugly bag and advice on what order to put things in. You don’t want to waste a single half second of your life putting groceries away. That could add up over an entire lifetime to a whole minute or so!
Like a lot of the crap in your body that is hurting you its not obvious until you get a health issue or cancer later and then noticeable statistically not individually EG you look at two populations and one had more folks with a much higher incidence of cancer or auto immune diseases or what have you. The fact that its not obvious doesn’t make it any less real. Those free bags were closer to free cigarettes.
I used to manage cashiers and handled 10 of thousands of transactions and observed more. Like any human beings they do occasionally make mistakes. If you haven’t noticed anyone EVER making a mistake ringing you up it means you don’t pay attention.
I don’t tell cashiers how they should bag things because that’s obnoxious but I do know that I do a better job of not putting fresh things with meat or things that are liable to be squished with canned food or all the non-food items together.
If you avoid 4 minutes waiting once per week and 2 minutes putting away things over your life you will save over 300 hours. You aren’t liable to be awake for much more than 100 hours a week so that is like 3 weeks of your life.
Could you just not follow the math. Do you not believe I was an illustrious supervisor of cashiers, or do you just not believe microplastics are bad for you?
I agree with you that canvas bags are better overall, but IMO we should move back to paper. It’s WAY easier to reuse paper products, gardeners love the paper bags, and they break down quickly even if they are littered somewhere. There are some tradeoffs, such as transportation costs being higher because they are thicker than single use bags, but if you compare paper to multi-use bags, it’s a fairly moot point.
Also, I’d still rather someone bag my shit for me. I’ve had so many things broken or otherwise damaged by the cashier haphazardly tossing my stuff into the cart just so I can walk 5 foot and take 10 minutes to pack my own stuff. Personal preference, but it should be given as an option imo.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. In the olden times, a bagger (or the cashier) nicely packed the stuff into bags making sure not to break shit. All the stores around me now just yeet shit back into the cart after scanning it with no regard to what it lands on or if it breaks.
Multi use plastic bags are a moronic half measure agreed. What some places are doing is using paper for disposable bags and selling actually long term re-usable bags for a little more like a 2-5 bucks a bag mostly.
Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice “pay by cash” without a “back” button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.
Some loss is the expected result of replacing workers with customers. Even cashiers who are paid and trained to check out customers have a failure rate of about 1%. Walmart treating their customers like criminals for things that routinely happen to even their own trained and incentived employees is ridiculous.
Perhaps they should be paying the customer with savings since they’re saving so much money not paying a full-time checkout attendant per register. The customer is now the employee.
Meh, I don’t mind using self-checkout when it’s actually self-checkout. I hate standing in lines and my anxiety doesn’t do me any favors so I’m all in favor if the system actually works.
Why do people get hostile when they are showed a video of themselves moving items to the bag without scanning the item? Why not just accept your fate at this point and pay or give the goods back?
This leads me to think about how Walmart’s focus on cheap low quality goods with stores placed in areas where finances are often tight has created this “I want it but can’t afford it” despair.
You walk into this soul-less, hyper efficient box store and it’s easy to notice they have a lot of stuff but not a lot of staff. And the staff are not exactly motivated to care about theft.
It’s not a long shot to start to think it would be easy to get away with grabbing something, because perhaps Walmart is an easy target. But the efficiency of the place is where that mistake falls short.
The truth is, there are very few businesses with as sophisticated an anti-theft system. Walmart is dealing with petty theft on a global scale and understands exactly how much it costs them, especially if they are perceived as an easy target.
Walmart has the technology to wait until the number of thefts from a single person exceeds the local felony levels and only then press charges. It’s a trap, and ripping off Walmart is a lot less profitable than it might seem.
I caught someone stealing a felony amount of alcohol by using their young children(<5) and they acted like I was the wrong one in the situation.
You got caught, accept the consequences of your actions. Nope, I am the bad guy because I recognozed someone who stole a felony amount of an unnecessary product the other week, watched them on the cameras, and called the police station next door to wait in the lot for them.
They also didn’t show in court and got a warrant for it.
I don’t understand that level of incredulous lack of accountability for your own actions.
I don’t shoplift because I’m fairly fortunate to be able to work a job that pays a living wage. Yet every single time I use a self-checkout (not just at Walmart), it flags an employee for something; maybe I left a prescription in the cart (you have to pay for those in the pharmacy). Maybe I’m shopping with my wife and her purse is in the cart. Once it thought I was stealing my own kid.
If you don’t trust me to do a thing, don’t let me do a thing. It feels like harassment.
If we shop at chain grocery stores we’re self-checking (and destroying local businesses). If we buy from Amazon we’re supporting billionaires and destroying local businesses. If we shop at mom&pop stores we’re paying too much for less in an age of inflation. Good luck getting everything you need from side-of-the-road vegetable stands (who skirt tax and have no liability). We can’t win.
Normalize leaving your groceries in the cart and leaving the store, and finding another store that doesnt make you bend over backwards to pay for your shit.
Ohh man i fucking hate self checkouts with a passion the soulless passive agress voice. The voice annoynecemnts to scan rewards card to take groceries to take recipt the 3 different “would u like to dobate to x” that constantly swap wheres the yes and no button is. Then sometimes it just fucking freezes and cos the bloody product isnt heavy enough to detect and it wont give me the ability to scan something till the other thing has been put down. I have no multiply button so if im buying 30 of something then i have to get a godamn employee to go into the employee section and hit the multiply button or my inabiloty to remove something once scanned. It all pisses me ofd so much. I do however have to say aldi has figured it out and i hope they dont go down the route of everyone else.
It almost pisses me off as much as ordering food via a qrcode and then being asked for a fucking tip. Im in australia we dont tip cos we have a fucking decebt minimum wage. But why does the fucking robot need a tip it disnt have exemplary service its a fucking machine.
I’m thankful my grocery stores have a mute button for self checkout. It makes for a much less stressful experience, I don’t know why they have it narrate so much junk.
As for your issues with the inability to remove things, I do know the trick. (I can’t speak for non-us self check out kiosks) As someone who worked as an attendant for the kiosks, the main cause of setting off the thing is picking your bag up before the scale has settled. The scale isn’t just checking that the weight has increased by a certain amount, it’s also waiting to make sure the weight is balanced. The issue with that, is the intuitive thing to do when your bag is full is immediately put it in your cart to make space. So the best thing to do is put your item in, wait a few seconds then you’re set to move the bag. With the small things not registering, could be uncalibrated scales. I have never ran into the multiply issue, as the ones I’ve all been to have scan guns and you can just shoot the barcode a bunch.
Huh, I’ll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.
Not all of them have mute buttons. My local grocery store used to allow you to mute the register but they disabled the function, I am assuming on the basis of reducing theft. When you’re typing in a PLU for a given produce item, they want the machine to announce what it is so the self checkout monitor can hear if you rang your asparagus in as (much cheaper by weight) bananas. It also announces the price of whatever you just scanned in, which to me seems excessive.
This is just one store, though. There’s another local grocery chain with better self-checkout registers that you can mute, but by default they don’t even do all of the announcing that the other one does anyways. I try to support the store with the worse self checkout when I can because it is a union shop whereas the other is non-union, but it is frustrating as a customer when the non-union store is just a better experience most of the time.
If it was for old people, I can’t imagine why they would have taken away the ability to just mute it if you don’t need it. When the transaction finishes, it unmutes by default for the next person.
I just don’t think it being audible is for the attendant as you can’t hear them with so many sounds, and you have a screen already that shows everything. For old people seems to be the most obvious, but why would they remove the mute of that is the case. In all reality it’s likely some corporate decision, that in their testings made them more money with no mute button vs with mute button. When I worked at a huge national grocery store chain (ahold) it seemed like every decision was made by people who’ve never worked in a grocery store. So wouldn’t surprise me if the reason was some nonsense.
Damn wish i cpuld shoot the barcode a bunch thr ines im forced to use make u put down every item before u can scan another so no double scanning to count 2 items
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I bought jelly and the age restriction went off. The clerk came and I had my ID out to check. We both had a laugh
I’d get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone’s time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it’s not about preventing theft. It’s about proving a point: that corporations control you.
I’m sorry but I don’t think that makes very much sense.
Retail theft is a real problem for a company’s bottom line. Enough so that Target is pulling out of San Francisco, IIRC. And self-checkout is one of the easiest ways to pull it off.
Why would a corporation frantically seeking quarter over quarter growth spend money to “prove a point” about control?
How about this. If self check out is a problem go back to paying cashiers.
Hey remember when they gave you free bags, bagged it for you, and rang you up? That was kinda nice. Now the price is three times as high and all that service stuff is gone. The day before Thanksgiving is going to be hell this year at my supermarket
I can’t remember the last time I let someone ring me up at Walmart. Self checkout was always faster because most of the attended registers were closed. Most of my adult life I’ve bagged myself and idk if I’d want to go back tbh. The tech is annoying to deal with though
Trust me it was nice. Value adds keep going down and prices keep going up. Keep hearing how everyone is unemployed and how CEO pay keeps rising. Biggest shareholder of Walmart has a mega yacht, maybe could have spent some of that money hiring people at the register.
Whatever, enshitification continues. Now if you excuse me I want to watch a fifteen second yt vid and will have to watch a 30 second ad first from some alt-right “news” service that hates trans people.
Ahh yes the value of getting something for free for almost 2 decades goes down the moment they actually want people to watch the ads or ask people to pay.
I can’t even count the number of Epoch Times ads I have gotten telling me how the media invented trans people. I keep blocking them but they keep coming back. Do you support that ad as well? How about the Prague-U ones where a woman explains how the Southern Strategy is a myth? This morning I got one about the Turtle Twins, the author explained how slavery wasn’t really all that bad.
Those free plastic bags deteriorate into toxic materials that are presently all over the inside of your body. You had to wait in a slow line for people to bag the wrong things together and sometimes scan the same thing twice. Now I have my own canvas bags that last forever, I never scan my things twice, and my shit is bagged with the right things together based on where they go in my home.
My body is fine but thank you for your “sincere” concern.
I went on the fast lines, maybe you need help with this. The trick is to look for lines that are shorter not longer. Easy mistake to make.
I never had an issue with the cashier making a mistake and I have never been so freaken insane that I need to have the items in my bag in the reverse order of removal. Maybe they made so many mistakes scanning you because they were distracted by your fugly bag and advice on what order to put things in. You don’t want to waste a single half second of your life putting groceries away. That could add up over an entire lifetime to a whole minute or so!
I agree with the top level comment but this one reeks of toxicity, so unnecessary
Like a lot of the crap in your body that is hurting you its not obvious until you get a health issue or cancer later and then noticeable statistically not individually EG you look at two populations and one had more folks with a much higher incidence of cancer or auto immune diseases or what have you. The fact that its not obvious doesn’t make it any less real. Those free bags were closer to free cigarettes.
I used to manage cashiers and handled 10 of thousands of transactions and observed more. Like any human beings they do occasionally make mistakes. If you haven’t noticed anyone EVER making a mistake ringing you up it means you don’t pay attention.
I don’t tell cashiers how they should bag things because that’s obnoxious but I do know that I do a better job of not putting fresh things with meat or things that are liable to be squished with canned food or all the non-food items together.
If you avoid 4 minutes waiting once per week and 2 minutes putting away things over your life you will save over 300 hours. You aren’t liable to be awake for much more than 100 hours a week so that is like 3 weeks of your life.
We are just lying now I see.
Could you just not follow the math. Do you not believe I was an illustrious supervisor of cashiers, or do you just not believe microplastics are bad for you?
Switching from single use plastic to multi-use plastic has greatly increased carbon emissions of production. You also have to reuse the new plastic bags over 100 times for them to break even, emissions wise. (https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-cotton-bags/)
I agree with you that canvas bags are better overall, but IMO we should move back to paper. It’s WAY easier to reuse paper products, gardeners love the paper bags, and they break down quickly even if they are littered somewhere. There are some tradeoffs, such as transportation costs being higher because they are thicker than single use bags, but if you compare paper to multi-use bags, it’s a fairly moot point.
Also, I’d still rather someone bag my shit for me. I’ve had so many things broken or otherwise damaged by the cashier haphazardly tossing my stuff into the cart just so I can walk 5 foot and take 10 minutes to pack my own stuff. Personal preference, but it should be given as an option imo.
I don’t understand. You’ve had cashiers break your shit, and therefore you prefer they do the bagging?
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. In the olden times, a bagger (or the cashier) nicely packed the stuff into bags making sure not to break shit. All the stores around me now just yeet shit back into the cart after scanning it with no regard to what it lands on or if it breaks.
Multi use plastic bags are a moronic half measure agreed. What some places are doing is using paper for disposable bags and selling actually long term re-usable bags for a little more like a 2-5 bucks a bag mostly.
This post has reminded me that I should go steal from Walmart soon.
Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice “pay by cash” without a “back” button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.
customers should get a discount for using an SCO.
Some loss is the expected result of replacing workers with customers. Even cashiers who are paid and trained to check out customers have a failure rate of about 1%. Walmart treating their customers like criminals for things that routinely happen to even their own trained and incentived employees is ridiculous.
The definition is wrong. There’s nothing “self” about them if an employee has to hold your hand throughout the entire process.
Perhaps they should be paying the customer with savings since they’re saving so much money not paying a full-time checkout attendant per register. The customer is now the employee.
Meh, I don’t mind using self-checkout when it’s actually self-checkout. I hate standing in lines and my anxiety doesn’t do me any favors so I’m all in favor if the system actually works.
Why do people get hostile when they are showed a video of themselves moving items to the bag without scanning the item? Why not just accept your fate at this point and pay or give the goods back?
This leads me to think about how Walmart’s focus on cheap low quality goods with stores placed in areas where finances are often tight has created this “I want it but can’t afford it” despair.
You walk into this soul-less, hyper efficient box store and it’s easy to notice they have a lot of stuff but not a lot of staff. And the staff are not exactly motivated to care about theft.
It’s not a long shot to start to think it would be easy to get away with grabbing something, because perhaps Walmart is an easy target. But the efficiency of the place is where that mistake falls short.
The truth is, there are very few businesses with as sophisticated an anti-theft system. Walmart is dealing with petty theft on a global scale and understands exactly how much it costs them, especially if they are perceived as an easy target.
Walmart has the technology to wait until the number of thefts from a single person exceeds the local felony levels and only then press charges. It’s a trap, and ripping off Walmart is a lot less profitable than it might seem.
I caught someone stealing a felony amount of alcohol by using their young children(<5) and they acted like I was the wrong one in the situation.
You got caught, accept the consequences of your actions. Nope, I am the bad guy because I recognozed someone who stole a felony amount of an unnecessary product the other week, watched them on the cameras, and called the police station next door to wait in the lot for them.
They also didn’t show in court and got a warrant for it.
I don’t understand that level of incredulous lack of accountability for your own actions.
I don’t shoplift because I’m fairly fortunate to be able to work a job that pays a living wage. Yet every single time I use a self-checkout (not just at Walmart), it flags an employee for something; maybe I left a prescription in the cart (you have to pay for those in the pharmacy). Maybe I’m shopping with my wife and her purse is in the cart. Once it thought I was stealing my own kid.
If you don’t trust me to do a thing, don’t let me do a thing. It feels like harassment.
If we shop at chain grocery stores we’re self-checking (and destroying local businesses). If we buy from Amazon we’re supporting billionaires and destroying local businesses. If we shop at mom&pop stores we’re paying too much for less in an age of inflation. Good luck getting everything you need from side-of-the-road vegetable stands (who skirt tax and have no liability). We can’t win.
target reversible retina scanners
When their AI is well trained on social behaviours, they’ll start sending Minority reports
Normalize leaving your groceries in the cart and leaving the store, and finding another store that doesnt make you bend over backwards to pay for your shit.
Not so easy in a small town where the big box stores have killed local business.
Ohh man i fucking hate self checkouts with a passion the soulless passive agress voice. The voice annoynecemnts to scan rewards card to take groceries to take recipt the 3 different “would u like to dobate to x” that constantly swap wheres the yes and no button is. Then sometimes it just fucking freezes and cos the bloody product isnt heavy enough to detect and it wont give me the ability to scan something till the other thing has been put down. I have no multiply button so if im buying 30 of something then i have to get a godamn employee to go into the employee section and hit the multiply button or my inabiloty to remove something once scanned. It all pisses me ofd so much. I do however have to say aldi has figured it out and i hope they dont go down the route of everyone else.
It almost pisses me off as much as ordering food via a qrcode and then being asked for a fucking tip. Im in australia we dont tip cos we have a fucking decebt minimum wage. But why does the fucking robot need a tip it disnt have exemplary service its a fucking machine.
I’m thankful my grocery stores have a mute button for self checkout. It makes for a much less stressful experience, I don’t know why they have it narrate so much junk.
As for your issues with the inability to remove things, I do know the trick. (I can’t speak for non-us self check out kiosks) As someone who worked as an attendant for the kiosks, the main cause of setting off the thing is picking your bag up before the scale has settled. The scale isn’t just checking that the weight has increased by a certain amount, it’s also waiting to make sure the weight is balanced. The issue with that, is the intuitive thing to do when your bag is full is immediately put it in your cart to make space. So the best thing to do is put your item in, wait a few seconds then you’re set to move the bag. With the small things not registering, could be uncalibrated scales. I have never ran into the multiply issue, as the ones I’ve all been to have scan guns and you can just shoot the barcode a bunch.
Huh, I’ll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.
Not all of them have mute buttons. My local grocery store used to allow you to mute the register but they disabled the function, I am assuming on the basis of reducing theft. When you’re typing in a PLU for a given produce item, they want the machine to announce what it is so the self checkout monitor can hear if you rang your asparagus in as (much cheaper by weight) bananas. It also announces the price of whatever you just scanned in, which to me seems excessive.
This is just one store, though. There’s another local grocery chain with better self-checkout registers that you can mute, but by default they don’t even do all of the announcing that the other one does anyways. I try to support the store with the worse self checkout when I can because it is a union shop whereas the other is non-union, but it is frustrating as a customer when the non-union store is just a better experience most of the time.
I don’t think that’s the case. It’s impossible to hear those things when busy. Maybe that was corporate thinking. My best guess is for old people thh
If it was for old people, I can’t imagine why they would have taken away the ability to just mute it if you don’t need it. When the transaction finishes, it unmutes by default for the next person.
I just don’t think it being audible is for the attendant as you can’t hear them with so many sounds, and you have a screen already that shows everything. For old people seems to be the most obvious, but why would they remove the mute of that is the case. In all reality it’s likely some corporate decision, that in their testings made them more money with no mute button vs with mute button. When I worked at a huge national grocery store chain (ahold) it seemed like every decision was made by people who’ve never worked in a grocery store. So wouldn’t surprise me if the reason was some nonsense.
Damn wish i cpuld shoot the barcode a bunch thr ines im forced to use make u put down every item before u can scan another so no double scanning to count 2 items
Walmart and their customers deserve each other.