All grocery stores were like this a hundred years ago. You didn't walk around the store shopping but instead you would give your order at the counter and a shop

All grocery stores were like this a hundred years ago. You didn't walk around the store shopping but instead you would give your order at the counter and a shop assistant would fetch the stuff for you. Though I think this was more about customer service than a shoplifting deterrent. Much the same as my father hates self checkout because he sees scanning and bagging items as an employee's job, not his. The innovation of self-service shopping was novel enough that Clarence Saunders, founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, was granted a patent on the business model in 1918: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1242872A https://patents.google.com/patent/US1242872A So I guess we're come full circle back to the old ways of retailing.