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Too bad the store owners introduced a way to give customers more control over how merchandise exits their store.
by FatherOfCurses 6mo ago
Too bad the store owners introduced a way to give customers more control over how merchandise exits their store.
- lotsofpulp 6mo agoAt 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 agoGood 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 agoThe "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.
- lamasery 6mo agoNot just that, getting unpaid labor. Self-checkouts aren’t automating anything, they’re just making the shopper do work for the store. I hope they’re losing money over it.
- yreg 6mo agoThey are automating quite a lot, since the wait times are much much lower. I choose the self-checkout counters >95% of the time.
- lamasery 6mo agoPlease 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.
- yreg 6mo agoThe 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.
- kennywinker 6mo agoThey understaffed, and it sucked. Now you do all the work and are apparently happy about it. Go figure.