7 ms·

I was in college when self checkout became a thing and it took us all of about 45 seconds to realize that you could just check everything out as bananas. Steak

I was in college when self checkout became a thing and it took us all of about 45 seconds to realize that you could just check everything out as bananas. Steak was weighed and priced at 4011 (banana code) as the stoned teenager cashier paid no attention. Everything on the receipt was literally Bananas

stavros 6mo ago
Couldn't you also not just check stuff in? These are all obvious drawbacks, it's not really a high-scrutiny environment.
- manarth 6mo ago
  Most self-checkouts I've come across have weight validation – "Unexpected item in the bagging area". Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.
  - junon 6mo ago
    This is a more expensive form of shoplifting though, idk why even bother with the banana thing, as hilarious as it is.
    - manarth 6mo ago
      Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.
  - stavros 6mo ago
    Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    You can build a socioeconomic graph of the country by how anal the unexpected item in the bagging area sensors are. Some places will detect a fly farting on the damn scale, others can take three or four kids climbing on it before it complains.
    - ApolloFortyNine 6mo ago
      The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart. The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
      - bombcar 6mo ago
        The only time I had Walmart bitch at me was when it thought I hadn't scanned an item - it was all camera and not weight. And yes, the grocery ones all seem to be tuned really high.
    - Jeremy1026 6mo ago
      There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.
- rogerbinns 6mo ago
  That is something you can do in cahoots with a regular cashier and the reason places like Costco check your receipt. The cashier just has to fake scan an item, and nobody would notice. Receipt checking makes it possible to get caught.
DangerousPie 6mo ago
Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!
- FatherOfCurses 6mo ago
  Too bad the store owners introduced a way to give customers more control over how merchandise exits their store.
  - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    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.
    - kennywinker 6mo ago
      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.
  - WarmWash 6mo ago
    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.
    - jrm4 6mo ago
      And where do you account for the absolutely countable number of lost jobs in this equation?
miki123211 6mo ago
IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.
- dfxm12 6mo ago
  It sucks that we have to do extra labor and expose ourselves to this kind of legal risk all because a grocery store doesn't want to staff workers. It's not even like they pass these savings onto us...
  - culi 6mo ago
    That's true, grocery stores made record profits during covid. I've sometimes toyed with the idea of an "open sourced" grocery store that's extremely transparent about every detail. Think electronic price tags that give you a complete breakdown of the cost of an item, cost of labor, cost to account for "loss", over/under-supply, etc. I feel like there's a niche out there for hyperinformed consumers
    - Hilliard_Ohiooo 6mo ago
      That's basically Costco, the price they pay is what you pay, the system paired down to bare necessities, and it is incredibly popular.
      - the_sleaze_ 6mo ago
        Costco mandates a maximum of 11% margin on goods in the store and aggressively monitor suppliers on that cost. One of the reasons I like costco actually 10% or so is a fine margin to pay.
        spockz 6mo ago
        That is actually quite nice. I’ve been toying with the idea of mandating this 10% maximum margin for products and services on every for-profit company. Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit? This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the increased oil prices. The same as the overheated graphics cards.
kvuj 6mo ago
People like you are why we are living in an increasingly lower trust society, with for example having items behind locked door in shops. Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.
- dfxm12 6mo ago
  Think about blaming the grocery store replacing workers with no one in particular before you blame some college pranksters. Grocery stores in general consolidating, laying off workers, leaving them without pay/benefits, taking advantage of greedflation, etc., is a bigger drain on society.
  - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
    Ah yes, let's blame some shadowy "big grocery" rather than point our fingers at individual bad actors.
    - cwmoore 6mo ago
      Why deal with problem systems when we can punish someone we caught? That is your thought process?
      - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        Is it possible that grocery stores are reducing positions to save money? Is it not possible that it is a feedback loop? Why are we blaming the grocery store for replacing labor with machines? Why don't we decry the grocery that hires only 2 people instead of 3? And since when is stealing a prank?
        Shalomboy 6mo ago
        It sounds like you've never done a prank or been hungry, so I can't imagine what standing you feel you have to weigh in on this.
shrubble 6mo ago
I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout. I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…
- hnburnsy 6mo ago
  That video was staged, at Target electronics need to be paid for in the electronics department where there is no self-check out. In addition Target has the best Loss Prevention in the business, including let shoplifters continue until they accumulate enough goods that their crime is a felony.
  - gavinray 6mo ago
    Partner spent a significant time working at Target, can confirm Their Loss Prevention is so advanced that FBI has collaborated with them for case help https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-forensics-lab/ https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-for... I also worked there briefly in my teens, they are a great employer.
    - culi 6mo ago
      Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology. Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-invasive-billionaire-bought-surveillance-hq https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-inv... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-target-tgt-police-surveilled-black-neighbors-in-inner-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...
      - happyopossum 6mo ago
        > Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology. Can confirm - my wife called in a complaint about some graffiti / vandalism or something that was obscene in a target, and when she got a call back from a rep they were able to pinpoint everywhere she went in the store to determine which sign she was talking about...
compton93 6mo ago
That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items. Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.
- bpoyner 6mo ago
  That's _bananas_.
  - InexSquirrel 6mo ago
    But definitely not nuts.
- Hilliard_Ohiooo 6mo ago
  I think the point was that they COULDN'T have just walked out with them, BUT, by learning then going through the motions of a typical check out this A+++ hacker was able to bypass a normal security layer.
- conductr 6mo ago
  The visual risk of walking out without paying is much greater than the risk that anyone actually investigates AND tries to track him down for it. Back when I was a kid it was common to still just have simple price tag stickers on every single item. We’d pull off a cheap sticker and put it on an expensive item. If they noticed, we’d just shrug and say “oh Nevermind then” when they found the right price. The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, believe it or not they even knew how to make change back in those days /s. So you couldn’t always get super aggressive.
  - JCTheDenthog 6mo ago
    A year or two ago I had a cashier ring up my zucchini as cucumbers because he apparently couldn't tell the difference. Young guy, looked barely 18. I have no idea if he overcharged or undercharged me as a result, but I didn't care enough to point it out because he seemed like the type who would have needed 20 minutes to figure out how to change it (or would have needed to call down a manager for help) and I didn't want to waste any more of my time (or his).
austhrow743 6mo ago
You know you can just walk out the door with the items without using the scanner at all right?
tamimio 6mo ago
Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up. On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.
- cwmoore 6mo ago
  Not careful enough
mtlmtlmtlmtl 6mo ago
At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags. And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
prettyblocks 6mo ago
Back in the day when I was in HS, kids would go to Borders and swap the stickers from cheap books onto expensive computer books.
neuralkoi 6mo ago
Yesterday I went to Walmart, and at the self-checkout the system quirked out and an attendant came by. She reviewed some sort of draconian overhead cam video of me trying to locate a tag out for a product to scan. Gave me "guilty until proven" innocent vibes. Are these systems actually effective?
- nozzlegear 6mo ago
  The self checkout at my preferred grocery store (Hy-vee, an upper midwest chain) has started using these overhead cameras to confirm that you're purchasing everything you ostensibly have in your cart. Except it always flags us for the Starbucks drinks we're carrying (Hy-vees usually have a mini Starbucks shop inside them). More annoying though is that it flags us for the 5 gallon water jug refills that we manually punch into the self-checkout kiosk, because the surveillance system isn't satisfied unless the heavy ass jugs of water leave the cart, slide across the scanner and then get placed in the bagging area – anything else is possible theft. All this has done is train us to keep the carts out of the camera's viewing angle. It doesn't care if you keep pulling handfuls of groceries out of hammer space, as long as there's no cart in the frame.
  - Marsymars 6mo ago
    My decision on whether to use the self-checkouts at Costco often comes down to "do I want to remove these heavy items from my cart?"
  - kccqzy 6mo ago
    I don’t use self checkout systems that have weighing scales that require items to be moved from the cart to the bagging area. I either avoid self checkout at these stores or stop going to such stores altogether. I shop at my neighborhood Whole Foods and Home Depot; the self checkout systems don’t have this requirement.
- ApolloFortyNine 6mo ago
  Sam's club has 'the arch', and one time when I did self checkout I did miss an item (thought I scanned it and I didn't apparently) and so far that's the only time they've actually checked the cart, the rest I was just waved through. So seems pretty good. Obviously erring on the side of having an employee double check makes sense when their profit margins are generally single digits. One missed tshirt means they lost money on your $300 cart.
babylon5 6mo ago
What about the cameras on those things? Overhead? Did you pay cash?
kls0e 6mo ago
that's nuts
duped 6mo ago
The rest of us have to suffer with a lot of bullshit because a tiny fraction of the population engages in blatant antisocial behavior.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
busterarm 6mo ago
There's a tiktok literally floating around right now where somebody sticks a banana band on a cyberpower PC at Walmart and checks out at the self-checkout. Then the receipt checker at the door checks his receipt and waves him on through.
jmyeet 6mo ago
This was I think effective early on but now there are many systems to detect this "fraud". I say "fraud" because I honestly have zero sympathy for these companies who are doing anything but paying people a living wage to do a job and that goes for Walmart in particular. I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute. Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do. Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.
Denatonium 6mo ago
Systems like Everseen make that approach significantly riskier than it used to be. A live video of you checking out is run through image classification software, so if you scan a steak as 4011, it'll pause the checkout flow and call the SCO (self-checkout) attendant to watch the video of you scanning the item. They then have to approve the scan, at best leaving you publicly humiliated.
zarmin 6mo ago
Rule #1 of working at a grocery store: you will remember 4011 for the rest of your life.
walthamstow 6mo ago
Are you me? I also did this at university in Britain circa 2010. I went for onions and carrots mostly. I'd go to the meat or fish counter and get lovely bits of fillet, then check them out weighed as onions.
DANmode 6mo ago
Are you still a serial thief?

stavros 6mo ago

Couldn't you also not just check stuff in? These are all obvious drawbacks, it's not really a high-scrutiny environment.

manarth 6mo ago
Most self-checkouts I've come across have weight validation – "Unexpected item in the bagging area". Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.
- junon 6mo ago
  This is a more expensive form of shoplifting though, idk why even bother with the banana thing, as hilarious as it is.
  - manarth 6mo ago
    Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.
- stavros 6mo ago
  Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  You can build a socioeconomic graph of the country by how anal the unexpected item in the bagging area sensors are. Some places will detect a fly farting on the damn scale, others can take three or four kids climbing on it before it complains.
  - ApolloFortyNine 6mo ago
    The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart. The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      The only time I had Walmart bitch at me was when it thought I hadn't scanned an item - it was all camera and not weight. And yes, the grocery ones all seem to be tuned really high.
  - Jeremy1026 6mo ago
    There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.
rogerbinns 6mo ago
That is something you can do in cahoots with a regular cashier and the reason places like Costco check your receipt. The cashier just has to fake scan an item, and nobody would notice. Receipt checking makes it possible to get caught.

DangerousPie 6mo ago

Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!

FatherOfCurses 6mo ago
Too bad the store owners introduced a way to give customers more control over how merchandise exits their store.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  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.
  - kennywinker 6mo ago
    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.
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  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.
  - jrm4 6mo ago
    And where do you account for the absolutely countable number of lost jobs in this equation?

miki123211 6mo ago

IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.

dfxm12 6mo ago
It sucks that we have to do extra labor and expose ourselves to this kind of legal risk all because a grocery store doesn't want to staff workers. It's not even like they pass these savings onto us...
- culi 6mo ago
  That's true, grocery stores made record profits during covid. I've sometimes toyed with the idea of an "open sourced" grocery store that's extremely transparent about every detail. Think electronic price tags that give you a complete breakdown of the cost of an item, cost of labor, cost to account for "loss", over/under-supply, etc. I feel like there's a niche out there for hyperinformed consumers
  - Hilliard_Ohiooo 6mo ago
    That's basically Costco, the price they pay is what you pay, the system paired down to bare necessities, and it is incredibly popular.
    - the_sleaze_ 6mo ago
      Costco mandates a maximum of 11% margin on goods in the store and aggressively monitor suppliers on that cost. One of the reasons I like costco actually 10% or so is a fine margin to pay.
      - spockz 6mo ago
        That is actually quite nice. I’ve been toying with the idea of mandating this 10% maximum margin for products and services on every for-profit company. Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit? This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the increased oil prices. The same as the overheated graphics cards.

kvuj 6mo ago

People like you are why we are living in an increasingly lower trust society, with for example having items behind locked door in shops. Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.

dfxm12 6mo ago
Think about blaming the grocery store replacing workers with no one in particular before you blame some college pranksters. Grocery stores in general consolidating, laying off workers, leaving them without pay/benefits, taking advantage of greedflation, etc., is a bigger drain on society.
- hrimfaxi 6mo ago
  Ah yes, let's blame some shadowy "big grocery" rather than point our fingers at individual bad actors.
  - cwmoore 6mo ago
    Why deal with problem systems when we can punish someone we caught? That is your thought process?
    - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
      Is it possible that grocery stores are reducing positions to save money? Is it not possible that it is a feedback loop? Why are we blaming the grocery store for replacing labor with machines? Why don't we decry the grocery that hires only 2 people instead of 3? And since when is stealing a prank?
      - Shalomboy 6mo ago
        It sounds like you've never done a prank or been hungry, so I can't imagine what standing you feel you have to weigh in on this.

shrubble 6mo ago

I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout. I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…

hnburnsy 6mo ago
That video was staged, at Target electronics need to be paid for in the electronics department where there is no self-check out. In addition Target has the best Loss Prevention in the business, including let shoplifters continue until they accumulate enough goods that their crime is a felony.
- gavinray 6mo ago
  Partner spent a significant time working at Target, can confirm Their Loss Prevention is so advanced that FBI has collaborated with them for case help https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-forensics-lab/ https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-for... I also worked there briefly in my teens, they are a great employer.
  - culi 6mo ago
    Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology. Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-invasive-billionaire-bought-surveillance-hq https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-inv... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-target-tgt-police-surveilled-black-neighbors-in-inner-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...
    - happyopossum 6mo ago
      > Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology. Can confirm - my wife called in a complaint about some graffiti / vandalism or something that was obscene in a target, and when she got a call back from a rep they were able to pinpoint everywhere she went in the store to determine which sign she was talking about...

compton93 6mo ago

That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items. Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.

bpoyner 6mo ago
That's _bananas_.
- InexSquirrel 6mo ago
  But definitely not nuts.
Hilliard_Ohiooo 6mo ago
I think the point was that they COULDN'T have just walked out with them, BUT, by learning then going through the motions of a typical check out this A+++ hacker was able to bypass a normal security layer.
conductr 6mo ago
The visual risk of walking out without paying is much greater than the risk that anyone actually investigates AND tries to track him down for it. Back when I was a kid it was common to still just have simple price tag stickers on every single item. We’d pull off a cheap sticker and put it on an expensive item. If they noticed, we’d just shrug and say “oh Nevermind then” when they found the right price. The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, believe it or not they even knew how to make change back in those days /s. So you couldn’t always get super aggressive.
- JCTheDenthog 6mo ago
  A year or two ago I had a cashier ring up my zucchini as cucumbers because he apparently couldn't tell the difference. Young guy, looked barely 18. I have no idea if he overcharged or undercharged me as a result, but I didn't care enough to point it out because he seemed like the type who would have needed 20 minutes to figure out how to change it (or would have needed to call down a manager for help) and I didn't want to waste any more of my time (or his).

austhrow743 6mo ago

You know you can just walk out the door with the items without using the scanner at all right?

tamimio 6mo ago

Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up. On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.

cwmoore 6mo ago
Not careful enough

mtlmtlmtlmtl 6mo ago

At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags. And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.

prettyblocks 6mo ago

Back in the day when I was in HS, kids would go to Borders and swap the stickers from cheap books onto expensive computer books.

neuralkoi 6mo ago

Yesterday I went to Walmart, and at the self-checkout the system quirked out and an attendant came by. She reviewed some sort of draconian overhead cam video of me trying to locate a tag out for a product to scan. Gave me "guilty until proven" innocent vibes. Are these systems actually effective?

nozzlegear 6mo ago
The self checkout at my preferred grocery store (Hy-vee, an upper midwest chain) has started using these overhead cameras to confirm that you're purchasing everything you ostensibly have in your cart. Except it always flags us for the Starbucks drinks we're carrying (Hy-vees usually have a mini Starbucks shop inside them). More annoying though is that it flags us for the 5 gallon water jug refills that we manually punch into the self-checkout kiosk, because the surveillance system isn't satisfied unless the heavy ass jugs of water leave the cart, slide across the scanner and then get placed in the bagging area – anything else is possible theft. All this has done is train us to keep the carts out of the camera's viewing angle. It doesn't care if you keep pulling handfuls of groceries out of hammer space, as long as there's no cart in the frame.
- Marsymars 6mo ago
  My decision on whether to use the self-checkouts at Costco often comes down to "do I want to remove these heavy items from my cart?"
- kccqzy 6mo ago
  I don’t use self checkout systems that have weighing scales that require items to be moved from the cart to the bagging area. I either avoid self checkout at these stores or stop going to such stores altogether. I shop at my neighborhood Whole Foods and Home Depot; the self checkout systems don’t have this requirement.
ApolloFortyNine 6mo ago
Sam's club has 'the arch', and one time when I did self checkout I did miss an item (thought I scanned it and I didn't apparently) and so far that's the only time they've actually checked the cart, the rest I was just waved through. So seems pretty good. Obviously erring on the side of having an employee double check makes sense when their profit margins are generally single digits. One missed tshirt means they lost money on your $300 cart.

babylon5 6mo ago

What about the cameras on those things? Overhead? Did you pay cash?

kls0e 6mo ago

that's nuts

duped 6mo ago

The rest of us have to suffer with a lot of bullshit because a tiny fraction of the population engages in blatant antisocial behavior.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

busterarm 6mo ago

There's a tiktok literally floating around right now where somebody sticks a banana band on a cyberpower PC at Walmart and checks out at the self-checkout. Then the receipt checker at the door checks his receipt and waves him on through.

jmyeet 6mo ago

This was I think effective early on but now there are many systems to detect this "fraud". I say "fraud" because I honestly have zero sympathy for these companies who are doing anything but paying people a living wage to do a job and that goes for Walmart in particular. I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute. Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do. Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.

Denatonium 6mo ago

Systems like Everseen make that approach significantly riskier than it used to be. A live video of you checking out is run through image classification software, so if you scan a steak as 4011, it'll pause the checkout flow and call the SCO (self-checkout) attendant to watch the video of you scanning the item. They then have to approve the scan, at best leaving you publicly humiliated.

zarmin 6mo ago

Rule #1 of working at a grocery store: you will remember 4011 for the rest of your life.

walthamstow 6mo ago

Are you me? I also did this at university in Britain circa 2010. I went for onions and carrots mostly. I'd go to the meat or fish counter and get lovely bits of fillet, then check them out weighed as onions.

DANmode 6mo ago

Are you still a serial thief?