10 ms·

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

• neilv 1y ago
  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.
  • benchly 1y ago
    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.
    • 4ggr0 1y ago
      > I was repeatedly told to target black women not that i'm that surprised, but still shocking to read such things in 2025.
      • benchly 1y ago
        I should have specified that I worked LP in the early 2000's but I doubt much has changed, since bigotry and racism do not seem to ever go away, especially when it's woven into the fabric of an institution. Lasted a mere 6 months at that job before I decided I could no longer turn a blind eye, since by then it had become clear to me that the problem was not isolated to just a few LP associates.
        • 4ggr0 1y ago
          [flagged]
          • 1y ago
• rapnie 1y ago
  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.
  • pcthrowaway 1y ago
    I'm assuming you mean Bells Palsy, not Cerebral Palsy. I haven't heard of a short-term Cerebral Palsy, but then again I'm not an expert.
    • rapnie 1y ago
      You are correct, it was Bells Palsy, thanks for correcting me.
• bmn__ 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • ruszki 1y ago
    AFAIK improving on poverty is a more effective approach.
    • varelse 1y ago
      [dead]
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      It's not mutually exclusive. Just because poverty exists you shouldn't legalize theft, as that hurts both business and the community as a whole, since nobody wants to run a business and create jobs where there's a lot of crime so then the entire community spirals down into a shithole.
      • aaronbaugher 1y ago
        Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again. The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.
    • victorbjorklund 1y ago
      Not only poor people shoplift. Guessing the majority of shoplifting is done by people not living in proverty.
      • UncleMeat 1y ago
        Guessing is a great method of directing criminal justice policy.
• MisterTea 1y ago
  > 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.
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    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.
    • rob74 1y ago
      That can be seen at many levels of society. ICE also prefers to round up harmless immigrants that show up for court hearings, work in fields, wait at bus stations or deliver their children to day care rather than the "dangerous criminals" that they keep on boasting about. And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal in their view anyway, why bother?
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        Also: Local cops spend their time going after speeders and parking violators who they know won't be dangerous and they can safely farm for revenue, instead of looking for violent crime.
      • nomdep 1y ago
        > And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal... Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?
• cooper_ganglia 1y ago
  >an N95 is a good idea in a pharmacy on a college campus, where the Covid factories that are college students will go Did I just step into a time portal to 2022? Have you... been in a coma for the past several years? haha
  • bevhill 1y ago
    Peak COVID never ended. It's more important now than ever to stay vaccinated, maintain social distance, and mask up.
    • wizzwizz4 1y ago
      COVID is down from its peak, as I understand. It's just very much not gone, and by no means less nasty. We had the opportunity to wipe it out with a short, synchronised global lockdown, and we squandered it, and now it's like plague.
      • ebiester 1y ago
        We never had that chance because you cannot coordinate 8 million people, much less 8 billion. And nobody was going to shut down all the coordination points of society such as grocery stores, pharmacies, and hospitals. The CDC knew this at the time. The "flatten the curve" message was "slow things down enough until we know more and can avoid our hospitals from being overwhelmed and more people dying."
        • HankStallone 1y ago
          True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work? The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.
• no_wizard 1y ago
  Wage theft is the largest form of theft in retail, out numbering shoplifting by a good margin. Perhaps loss prevention should look at management for the stolen money
  • llm_nerd 1y ago
    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.
    • underlipton 1y ago
      >Maybe we should have max enforcement in both? You can't, resources are limited. >Shoplifting and other merchandise loss has exploded. I don't know that that's true. Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels. https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-know/ https://counciloncj.org/shoplifting-trends-what-you-need-to-...
      • llm_nerd 1y ago
        >You can't, resources are limited. Regulatory authorities and courts enforce against wage theft. Shoplifting enforcement is mostly up to businesses. >Shoplifting was down in most cities compared to pre-pandemic levels. Shoplifting reports to police were down in some cities (albeit up in others), but that doesn't necessarily track the actual data. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-incidents-jump-93-since-pre-covid-according-to-new-industry-study https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/shoplifting-inci...
• bee_rider 1y ago
  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.
  • khuey 1y ago
    > 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.
    • bee_rider 1y ago
      Good point. It might be worth thinking about how these costs are accounted for. In the case of the big store, loss is taken by the store (of course they pass that along as higher prices, but it is ultimately the store’s problem). For deliveries, a good chunk of easy theft (stealing off your porch) is the customer’s problem usually. There’s some unfortunate socioeconomic crosstab there, I think: if you live in a nice neighborhood, theft is less of a problem. If you work from home, you can probably set things up to not leave a package out for too long. Seems like the burden is falling most squarely on people who live in tough neighborhoods and have to actually go to work. In some places Amazon has (had?) these self-service lockers where you could pick up your purchases. (Might have been a very college-town centric solution, or something?). It could be nice to see that standardized and spread out.
• dml2135 1y ago
  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.
  • respondo2134 1y ago
    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.
    • fyrabanks 1y ago
      I was at a Whole Foods last year and was tired from driving for about 6hrs straight. I scanned one item, set up a paper bag on the right, and then mindlessly bagged every other item in my cart without scanning. I paid probably $3-4 on a $60 purchase. As soon as I got to the hotel and figured it out, I went back to correct the mistake--but imagine getting harassed or taken to the back for a careless error? I'm sure that happens more often than I hear about. (PS I am genuinely surprised their weight sensor, that flags an attendant, didn't go off. That thing usually trips if you breathe on it funny.)
      • vwcx 1y ago
        Given that Prime now displays itemized orders purchased at Whole Foods, imagine getting your Amazon account flagged/banned for your mistake...
      • 1y ago
• itsanaccount 1y ago
  > at one upscale grocery chain > a chain pharmacy 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.
• claw-el 1y ago
  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.
• nfriedly 1y ago
  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. A couple of years later, the store closed down.
• Hilift 1y ago
  > have a lot of shoplifting here in recent years. 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-store-chains-net-profit https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...
  • mplewis 1y ago
    > spontaneous looting Go outside and touch grass
    • bevhill 1y ago
      I mean, who even steals anymore? These people are so out of touch.
• jimmydddd 1y ago
  Any idea (besides the mask) why they picked you? Are you part of a visible minorty group?
• doka_smoka 1y ago
  [dead]
• underlipton 1y ago
  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.
• trod1234 1y ago
  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.