PSA: remember, if you see someone stealing essentials like groceries or whatever: no, you didn’t.
Remember, if you see someone stealing groceries, they’re not poor, poor people don’t seal.
🦭
FLEX TAPE MOMENT
I SAWED THIS CART IN HALF!
Yee-doggy! Just cut, peel, stick and seal! Imagine everything you can do with the power of Flex Tape!
Ribbit
Hmm? See what?
stealing essentials
stealing only essentials, you mean.
Steal a bit of food for today, didn’t see anything and the food bank may just be too far. If I’m on the ball, I’ll try and pick up the tab. You touch the earbuds or lego, though, I’m finna report it.
I’m a grocery store worker and I’d rather just lower our stock count by 1 than have to go stand lookout at the exits of the store. Big chain supermarkets budget for theft and it doesn’t affect the workers.
I understand the whole “why should I pay for things when they don’t” dilemma but people stealing non-essentials likely suffer in other ways
The dilemma isn’t why should i pay when others don’t. It’s “do i want to live in a society where people steal?” Because if the answer is yes you have no right to complain when people steal from YOU. Sounds like people on here don’t want to be stolen from but are okay when people steal from others especially a faceless corporation. Grocery stores have thin margins though and have to raise prices for shrinkage, inflating an already inflated index. For what so someone can have some electronics they don’t need?
Yes i am absolutely okay if people steal from a faceless corporation because one of the parties is people and the other is, again, a faceless corporation
So what if i steal from the government because it’s faceless too? Cheat on my taxes etc.
Go for it if you’re anything like most people in the country the money coming in from your taxes vastly dwarves what should be coming in from corporations and rich people.
Source?
According to the tax foundation 42% of all tax revenues come from the top 1% and 63% comes from the top 5%.
https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income-tax-data/
If you mean capital gains tax that’s a different story. Should be raised imo.
FYI here’s the tax mix by type: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/sources-government-revenue-united-states/#:~:text=Corporate income taxes accounted,U.S. tax revenue in 2021.&text=Source%3A OECD%2C “Revenue Statistics,taxes and property taxes.
Corporate taxes are low but the majority of filings are done at an individual. Every corporation distributes its income to shareholders by dividends or capital gains which are claimed on individual filings.
Private property is not the same as personal property lmao.
Also grocery stores are hiking prices to make more profits for execs, not “because of theft”. I actually think stealing from grocery stores is a bad idea for simple practical reasons (the cost of being caught is way higher than what you save by doing it), but I don’t think its unethical <.<
When is it ethical to steal then id love to hear your thoughts? Can i steal from you?
I don’t care that people steal food from a corporation that had 26 lanes only two of which are open. No, I don’t steal but I also make enough money that I want for nothing.
There are food banks. Pay for their groceries if you want. If you advocate stealing you have no right to complain if you are stolen from.
Plus we pay for stolen groceries through higher prices. So honest people also hard-done by have to pay more.
I’ve got news for you: they increase prices regardless of theft.
Sure do. But they increase it even more when theft occurs.
Grocery prices spiked by 35% in my area over the course of three months. It wasn’t because of theft, they claimed it was because of inflation (bullshit).
Right after they jacked up the prices, theft went up. So you’ve got it backwards, actually.
You know what the geniuses in corporate office did about the increased theft? Spent $18k per store to install railing to fence the customers in.
Right after they did that, theft went up again.
Prices have fuck all to with theft, and everything to do with the idiotic decisions made by the greedy retards at the top.
Spent $18k per store to install railing to fence the customers in.
Fire codes?
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That’s not at all how prices are set in a Market as per all the applicable theories of Economics (and in practice).
Any profit-driven sellers (i.e. all except maybe a mom-and-pop shop with soft hearted owners) will charge the most that they think buyers are willing to pay, so if for example a seller becomes a local monopoly in an essential good, they’ll pump prices up because customers have no other options (with nothing on the cost side pushing it) and will act similarly when cartels are formed.
This is very much proven again and again by observeable reality - market competition goes down prices go up, completelly independently of costs.
Cost pressures will only push prices up in a market with actual competition when it affects every seller (for example if input prices go up, certain taxes go up, or there’s an event that most sellers can use as an excuse to up prices, such as widespread news of inflation in which case they informally act as a cartel would) or if the cost pressure is so large that it will bankrupt a seller that won’t raise prices (so the seller has no option than to raise prices to try and survive, even at the risk that customers will just walk away).
This theory of yours as well as the “if companies pay less taxes they’ll raise salaries” and other such Economically-ignorant theories that ignore basic market principles and causality, seem to be immenselly popular with people with certain political-faiths who have never actually run a business or worked with Markets.
Fuck economists. It is about as accurate as astrology. Except most government officials don’t take astrology seriously so it doesn’t matter as much.
I suggest you read some books about Behavioural Economics.
But yeah, most of what you see out there from Economists is really Politics, not Science.
However those observations about price making are also from Finance, and those are immensely pragmatic people (as they put real money on the line) - you might disagree with their morals (what morals, eh?!) but they certainly are putting their money where their mouth is.
Are they? Because last I checked
A. Those experts are beaten out by random stock picker software over long term.
B. The entire industry requires the government bailing them out, regulating their small competition out of business, huge infusions of cash via the Fed, and a complex legal structure that pretty much limits your investment options to stocks and bonds or your mattress.
C. For people who claim to be able to predict the future they sure need other people’s money a fair amount. Pensions, managed market accounts, 401Ks, trusts. If you really could best the market you would never team up with anyone since all they would do is open you up to liability
D. When those wall street scumbags do take over the management of a company the company consistently fails. It turns out pledging to Skull and Bones after daddy got you into an ivy doesn’t mean you can run a retailer or a tech company. Who knew? Remind me how Toys R US, Sears, and Fluke multisystems are doing.
E. There is a link between growth in finance and poverty for everyone else. Which makes sense since it sucks away people from productive work to unproductive work. As Wall Street grows in the US incomes for everyone else have fallen.
Economics is bullshit lies that aspires to the accuracy of astrology. Economists are shills with zero integrity. Financial bros are conmen.
But thank you for your reading suggestion. If I ever want to read up on mathematical models that have no connection to the real world based on a sociopathic paraody of humans I will. Everything you want to know about the types of people who become economists can be understood if you know who their hero is. Homo economis a being of pure self. Is there any in particular book you can recommend? If so what chapter is titled “fuck the diabetics, let them mortgage their house for insulin”?
I’ll copy the response I used when someone else responded the same way:
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
You say nobody’s encouraging it but have you read the image that is the OP of this post?
I have one I can reuse for that, too:
Do you understand the difference between being amused by a meme and having a nuanced stance on the topic the meme is addressing in real life?
This is just straight up gaslighting.
“We’re not condoning it, we’re just promoting an amusing meme that condones it.”
This.
Respectfully stfu and leave that on reddit
Make him
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No.
🍆
Wait you can post emojis
👌
This changes everything Jerry
There are food banks, don’t steal.
Sometimes they run out. Or are 2 hours away. Or are in a bad part of town. There are tons of reasons why someone would be desperate enough to steal food.
Nobody’s encouraging it. All we’re saying is this: as a direct result of the deficiencies inherent to our society and the socioeconomic structure it perpetrates, some people need food but can’t get it through legal means. Categorically refusing to make an exception for exceptional cases is implicitly saying that those people deserve to die.
Ribbit
Inflation was never natural. What’s happening now is its logical result, not an exception.
Well, sorta.
You can say that the War In Ukraine was not natural (definitelly man-made and entirelly avoidable) and the imposition of Sanctions on a oil producing nation was not natural (it was a choice, even if the only reasonable one), plus all the increase in the money supply and decrease in the cost of debt from ZIRP which devaluated money (hence inflated the currency-denominated value of things) were also not natural.
However the effects of those things were natural consequences, and that includes Inflation, which came in via increased energy prices, increased realestate prices (cheaper debt and the rush up the yield ladded of “investment” money pushed those up) and just the straightforward devaluation of money.
However it seems that most of the inflation, at least beyond a certain point (this stuff was already happenning before the War) was not from the natural effect of those other things but rather companies taking advantage of the situation to, in a cartel-like fashion (not actually a Cartel in legal terms because they didn’t get together and agree to do so) pumping up prices in tandem to increase profits.
Of course inflation is natural. Unless we are all gonna share the same $100 forever it has to happen at least without some sort of perfect foresight so the correct amount of money can be issued.
What isn’t natural is somehow people are convinced they should be held hostage by business.
When somehow we are convinced taking out a loan that you have to pay on for eternity (selling stock) that is not natural.
When somehow limited resources (our time) has less value then an unlimited resource (money) that is not natural.
It sounds like you’re saying why you think inflation is a good idea, not why it’s natural.
Why not share the same $100 forever? As the value of $100 increases, we can just divide it up into smaller and smaller bills.
We should be trading our limited time for another limited resource, not an unlimited one. At the time of the trade they’re always equal, but labor in the past should be worth more than that, not less.
Dividing $100 into smaller and smaller pieces is the exact same thing as making money which causes inflation? If you divide it into 200 parts of fifty cents each and you only need 199 then someone has an extra fifty cents.
Grocery stores are pretty much the definition of a perfectly competitive industry. The profit margins are always between 1 and 3%. The only reason they raise prices is because they have to.
Thay was true once. It hasn’t been for decades.
Name a grocery store with a higher margin than 3%
Whole Foods has to be. The few times I have been there I was disgusted by the prices. Mother fuckers, I just want some apples. I don’t need certified that some old hippy said they were all natural.
I wasnt disputing your margins report but that it makes for perfect competition. Why are you assuming low margins necessarily lead to better competition? With low margins, volume dictates the winning business in the unregulated marketplace. Big businesses monopolize and then one day have more leverage over their margins than the marketplace itself. Not a problem when antitrust laws are enforced but those laws have had their teeth pulled for the last 30 years.
So why are the major chains making billions more the last few years?
Which chain?
Nobody’s encouraging it? Can you not see the meme you are commenting on?
Do you understand the difference between being amused by a meme and having a nuanced stance on the topic the meme is addressing in real life?
Do you take all memes seriously?
Apartheid apologist strikes again. Do you believe you’re a good person mate?
Fuck the downvoters. This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here. Might go back to Reddit.
This is #trashy. Didn’t realize there were so many teenagers in here.
Says the person using hashtags lmao
I dare you to bruh youre not brave enough to stand up to the theives on Lemmy and return to the Homeland
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out
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Oh no, they’d rather just raise prices to cover the shrinkage.
…Or just raise prices because they want to increase margins and lie and say its because a massive increase in theft or inflation or whatever they want to say and then laugh about it on a public earnings call that you can raise prices however you want because consumers still have to buy certain goods no matter what.
“We have not seen any material reaction from consumers,” P&G CFO Andre Schulten said. “So that makes us feel good about our relative position.”
There it is folks. Straight from the horse’s mouth. They won’t do what’s in the best interest of humanity without “material reaction” (ie; an arsonist or maybe even something more extreme.)
Not an American, isn’t there a limit on how you can raise prices? At least in my country we have "SRP"s (suggested retail price) and whoever exceeds that will need a good reason to do so, and simply citing theft will not be an enough reason.
We have the MSRP (Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price), but that’s not given for every product, but more importantly it’s exactly what it sounds like; a suggestion. There’s no governing body to make sure stores are in line with MSRP.
If they concluded that they could raise prices to increase profit, they’d do so regardless of theft rates. Those are separate issues.
Well… I suppose they’d have to lose more than minimum wage… in my state that would be ~$14/hr. Let’s call it 20/hr because of benefits and incidental cost of staffing.
Do your part! (/s)
Where I’m from you still have to go through someone who makes sure all of the shit in your cart is in your receipt, it adds like 30-60 seconds and it’s a single employee for six checkouts.
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Criminal until proven otherwise for checking that you didn’t miss anything in your cart? That’s extreme, people do make mistakes, if you actually want to steal you can still pocket stuff, the employee likely won’t give two shits since that’s a job for a security guard like it’s always been.
If you’re paranoic about being perceived as a potential criminal that’s fine, you do you, but labeling any sort of basic control as an accusation is not cool, might as well label the presence of a security guard as such.
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What second check?
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My bad, I thought self checkout was when you scan your items yourself
I’m kinda surprised I’m seemingly in the minority of preferring self check. At least before they handicapped all the regular self checkouts and forced everyone to do self checkout. When it was truly optional, especially when it was “20 items of fewer” style, it was so much faster because I’m usually not buying a huge cart worth of items, and I can bag my own way. However now that Susan with her month’s worth of groceries for her family of 4 is also in self checkout, it makes it less efficient.
Even when Susan is taking a huge cart through, a single queue for multiple service providers (self checkout) is always going to be theoretically more efficient than multiple queues - one per provider (one line for each cashier). The best of both worlds are places that have a single area to corral you into line, and a row of cashiers where you can go to the first available.
I once was that guy who took a cartful of groceries to the self-checkout. The goddamn thing had to call staff no less than 6 times because we couldn’t fit everything on that damn scale.
I’m not doing that again.
I can’t even blame you that much when places like Costco do their damnedest to get everyone in the self checkout line. If you’re not paying attention it’d be easy to roll through there with stuff that doesn’t really work well for self checkout.
Here’s the thing most people don’t understand. It’s possible to bag your stuff elsewhere. You can scan your stuff, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their stuff at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart to self checkout, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I’m out the door before Nancy and her 10 items. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your stuff. If everyone just took their stuff to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their stuff, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.
Here’s the thing most people don’t understand. It’s possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I’m out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.
Many grocery stores have scales in the self-checkout bagging area. If you scan a can of soup, you’re going to take that can, put it on the bag scale but not into a bag, scan your other items, put them onto the bag scale but not a bag, and then take all of your loose items and put them one by one into your cart? How is that efficient?
That’s literally what you had to do in Germany in Lidl - even with a cashier there wasn’t even room enough to bag it there at the till and the whole thing was even shaped so that you could park your trolley in such a position that the cashier would directly put things into your trolley.
Not only that but everybody (including other customers) clearly expected you to operate within that system (for example, moving your trolley in a timelly fashion to the right “docking” spot to recieve the scanned products) and, if you paid with cash, get the change, free the area near the till and do the whole “store the change properly in your wallet” elsewhere were you weren’t wasting other people’s time.
You had an area you could go to and bag your stuff or you could take to trolley to your car and transfer the goods to the trunk there (in my case, this being Berlin, I had a bicycle with removeable cargo bags, so took the trolley there and then at home just unhooked the bags and carried them upstairs to my appartment).
I’ve never seen that anywhere else here in Europe, even in other Lidl stores (I’m now in Portugal and after Germany it’s all frustratingly slow and inneficient). I suppose a certain cultural mindset is probably required for people to naturally fit into such a system (were if everybody does their bit, everybody gets to pay and GTFO much faster).
Oh, and there were no self-checkouts there and the cashiers were amazingly fast, which makes all sense: self-checkout is really just using amateur and untrained - thus slow and inneficient - “cashiers”, so self-checkout tills would probably use more space and make the thing go slower.
Here’s the thing most people don’t understand. It’s possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I’m out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.
Here’s the thing most people don’t understand. It’s possible to bag your shit elsewhere. You can scan your shit, put it back in the cart, and literally go anywhere else and bag it up. Everybody and their mother are taking the time to bag their shit at the checkout and holding everyone else hostage while they figure out where to put their bananas and lube. I routinely take a full cart of shit, scan it all with the handheld scanner, and I’m out the door before Nancy and her 10 shits. The whole point is that the POS is just there to pay for your shit. If everyone just took their shit to the giant area in front of every store, or to their car to bag their shit, no one would be holding anyone up besides the truly inept.
Not to mention Susan has no idea how computers or barcodes work.
Everyone I go to the checkout, I get followed by the mall cop. I know it’s just me because I don’t see it happening with anyone else as it is too obvious. Thing is I would never think to steal anything. Never will. I know what I want to buy and I know if I have enough or not.
I think they follow me because I’m brown. Oh to have the privilege to roam around a store free and even deal in villany and mischievous behaviours.
I’m a boring white guy. I’ll steal something in your honor.
Ha, yeah. I like it when I set off the alarms at stores and then ask, you want to look at my stuff? They just wave and say, naw, your good. Couldn’t get caught if I tried.
I’m a white guy with a big nose and a solid beard, and I get “random” TSA security checks just about every time I fly. It’s almost as if there is a reason for all this
spoiler
Its definitely racism
See what you need to do is act just suspicious enough to keep their attention on you for no reason, and off the people who actually are stealing.
Teamwork makes the dream work!
Yeah that’s not what I do. I just get tagged by racist people apparently
Their own damn fault for trying to cut corners by eliminating cashier jobs
It really should be 5% off if I have to scan my own crap. Especially the way CVS et al do it. Home Depot is the only one I don’t care about because they just give you a wireless scanner and let you go to town, it’s honestly faster that way and mutually beneficial.
Yeah I really hate it when they give you self checkout but make everything function way way worse than what the cashier uses. I’ve never even considered shoplifting before but I’ve come pretty close on machines that refuse to scan because they’re stuck on something 5 items ago when I’m moving quickly. Especially if it still beeps when I scan new items but refuses to actually scan it because it’s hung up on something that it was slow to get the weight of – really throws me off. It’s not my job to baby your machine for you. I’m not getting paid for it. Just let me scan my shit and go.
They are giving you a discount already by not increasing prices.
Bullshit lol
asfasfasdf
I was a cashier. Cashier jobs suck.
The problem is society in general. We SHOULD be getting rid of every non-rewarding job we can. But we also need to support the people that would otherwise have these jobs.
It’s become like a hobby of mine to not pay for a single item every time I check out at Walmart or Kroger. Fuckers have their margins higher than ever and their starting pay is $12-14/hr. If they want to reduce theft then they can hire people to actually work some of the 20 empty check out lanes they have.
Don’t do that, they keep track. When you go over $1k, you get fucked and picked up for a felony.
That sounds absurd. There is easily 5000 regular shoppers in a grocery store. Plus people buying there irregularly. They would need to reliably identify every single one of them, with face recognition only having 80-90% accuracy. and If we talk 5$ missacounted per shoppinge once a week that is 4 years of shopping.
The amount of data needed to be stored and analysed for that is insane.
And then we are not even at the point, where they can prove theft on every single instance, because they need to prove that the system did not malfunction, or a simple user error occured.
I call bullshit on that.
You think Kroger can’t process that much data?
I know Target does it for sure.
i’ll believe it, when i see the first convictions coming out of it. On a side note, AI face recording all your customers and for years storing exact data, when they came and went, what they bought and ehat they alledgedly have stolen would be extremely illegal in the EU.
Hmm, interesting read! Seems like some track and others don’t.
Not in the US and on private property. You wave all privacy rights when you enter their store. Also in public places as well. Want privacy, stay home in the US… Just saying…
Are you being sarcastic? There is 1 person manning 10 checkouts and cameras that aren’t monitored. As someone who worked in the Front End of a grocery store for many years, I can tell you that they don’t have the resources to keep track of 99% of theft.
It’s a thing, but not for what everyone is talking about. Walmart LP in problem stores is intense and for serial shoplifters they will actually track… but it usually only takes two trips because they are stealing electronics or some shit. They aren’t counting in ten dollar increments items skipped in the self checkout one trip at a time lol.
Walmart has AI keeping track of theft at self checkout. They don’t use that as a basis for in-person stops, but they still record it.
And they have a small team of plainclothes people looking at camerad and sometimes straight up following people around the store.
Speaking of cameras, in addition to regular cameras, in the big metro areas there are around twenty 360 degree cameras that can see across the entire store at any time, even when playing back a recording. If you have line of sight, it sees you.
I am mostly just familiar with Kroger’s LP, but in my experience their loss prevention is pretty ineffective. They have a lot of cameras installed, but they aren’t being constantly monitored. There are actually only a handful of loss prevention personnel, and they spend the majority of their time walking around in stores. They will occasionally catch someone trying to steal a whole cart of groceries or a kid stealing a pair of earbuds. The majority of theft is actually either at self-checkouts or people walking out the doors with pockets full of merchandise. There are also people who regularly get caught stealing, and loss prevention will always keep an eye out for those people.
I didn’t work in loss prevention, but I would occasionally have to review security footage in the security office. The cameras, even in the newer stores, were pretty low resolution and had a lot of blind spots. They are put there as a deterrent more than anything else.
I assume Walmart probably has better loss prevention than Kroger, so you could be correct. Though, I doubt all Walmart stores have AI SCO tracking or 360-degree-recording cameras.
My experience is as a manager in three different high-loss stores in a metropolitan area. I assure you, the cameras are very good.
Now, when you’re zooming across an entire store the image does “bounce” up and down a bit, but it’s still good quality.
With the AI, I think it’s still in development. Again, it isn’t used as a primary means of apprehension, but it’s definitely a tool in the arsenal.
I was at a Meijers a few weeks ago (midwestern chain kind of like Wal-Mart but nicer) and the self-scanner started flashing for the clerk when we finished. When the clerk came over, it played a video of me scanning one of the items, and the clerk could see if I had tried to slip something in the bag without scanning it. It was interesting to see.
It may have triggered because we’d bought alcohol, which had to be paid for separately in a special part of the store, and that was still in the cart. But I don’t know for certain what triggered it, and, if he knew, he didn’t say so.
Yet a bunch of articles just came out recently showing Target does exactly that.
I’m so far below $1k that it isn’t a worry, it’s only small dollar items. That and they aren’t catching me every time, even with all the cameras. Even if they did know every single time I “missed” an item at self check out, I’d be surprised if I’d taken more than $100 of food by now. That and they’d have a hard time proving it was intentional every time and not a simple mistake.
I was never trained to run their register, so mistakes are bound to happened.
This is a really bad idea. There are better ways to stick it to Walmart without stealing and I assure you it doesn’t look heroic. You’re just stealing.
guys look at me! I am very smart because I steal from walmart to rebel against the evil capitalist overlords! time to get validation for my actions from reddit!
Nah, this is Lemmy
diffrent website, same people
r/lostredditors
I really confused the person monitoring the self checkout on one occasion several years ago.
I paid with cash, and was supposed to get something like $2.17 back in change. The machine gave me the seventeen cents just fine, but instead of two dollar bills, I got a one and a ten.
It took a couple tries to get the worker to understand that the machine gave me too much back.
If that was me I was trying to help you lol.
Next time just accept your Bank Error in your Favor card. Corpos ain’t hurting lol
I’ve had people try to slip me deals when an error occurs but I’m so genuinely in the moment I can’t see it. Leads to awkward exchanges where they’re trying to push free food on me and I’m just like “nah just a mistake bruh here ya go!”
And then facepalm 10 minutes later when the situation catches up.
This and flirting lol
Relatable.
Fuck self checkout all my homies hate self checkout
Everything is 4011!
Bananas!
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It does what it’s told
People actually hate these things?
Hufffhhjjbd
It might be regional. Where I live they just skip the whole call the manager thing and the manager is the one monitoring the self checkout line and is the one you go to to ask for help. Thankfully I don’t buy much of anything that’d be 21+ so I don’t mind just going to the one open cash register to do that there.
It also depends on the system it’s using, as well as what you’re buying.
If you’re buying anything thay requires ID, or requires being brought in from the back (a fridge, for example), or if you just have a ton of stuff, yeah, don’t bother with self-checkout. But if you’re just going in to buy a phone cord or a soda, yeah, sure.
And there are some god-awful self-checkout OSes that scream at you to PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA, or HAVE YOU SCANNED YOUR FREQUENT SHOPPER CARD? and those can piss off and die. But there’s some that don’t do that, and are set up to actually be user-friendly!
The Home Depot near me somewhat recently changed out their self-checkout machines with UI and UX in mind, and holy shit, it makes so much of a difference. The screen is very uncluttered, high contrast colors are nice for drawing attention to the usual buttons to push, and the buttons per screen (scanning > payment type) change the side of the screen the buttons are on so if you just spam-tap, you won’t accidentally hit the wrong button.
don’t bother with self-checkout
Not always an option lol my local CVS doesn’t have anything else.
If you do regular shopping self checkout isn’t really the place for that it’s more useful for few items
Yes but lots of places don’t give you a choice. Hell costco pushes you to self checkout all the time.
Lol
Produce all have a code you can just type in instead of having to search. It’s right on the sticker for things that have stickers, for things like sweet potatoes you have to look at the price sign and it will have the code on it, then just write it on the bag with a sharpie.
Yuhnjjjrrr
Why would you need to write that stuff down? You take it out of the cart type in the sticker code, weigh and put in bag
Because the produce that most of the grocery stores, I shop at is loose and I put it in a plastic bag that does not have a label on it. You have to write the number down. It’s not prepackaged generally.
I’m confused too, self checkout is the best thing ever, no social interaction and pretty much equally fast, while allowing for more checkouts in the same amt of space. Though tbf only if done properly. One store here started having them like 10 years ago and there was like a 10% chance each item that you’d have to call over an employee bc the scale didn’t work. Haven’t had any problems with the ones i encountered recently.
All the self-checkouts in Dutch supermarkets have handheld barcode scanners you take into the store with you, and it’s GREAT.
At Sam’s here in the US, you can use their app to scan your items and pay. It’s so much more convenient.
Same here in Sweden. I never go to the regular checkouts because it is annoying to queue. Just scan everything while shopping. Put the scanner back, pay and leave.
Also, is your username a Tolkien reference?
Yes it is!
Yes it is!
Yeah, we’ve got those in Tesco and it’s by far the quickest way to shop. Could even do with a super-express checkout just for those so I don’t have to queue at all with the people who inexplicably want to scan a massive trolley of stuff really slowly at the regular self checkout.
Unexpected item in bagging area!!!
People who can’t figure easy things out or are scared of electronics/anything newer than a butter churn sure are.
When do we get the employee discount for doing their work?
If you stand in line for 35 minutes with 20 angry folks waiting for the one dude to learn how the self checkout works … yea
Kinda the opposite for me really the space is always open and is quicker then waiting in line for the cashier
And you don’t have to have Human interaction.
That’s not self-checkout’s fault. I don’t hate self-checkout. I hate idiots.
True, but the user experience on those things is terrible… so… I dunno it kind of cuts both ways if you ask me.
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Oh, oops! I fortgot
I got march of shamed once because I genuinely forgot, it somehow shortcircuits my brain when I need to wait for approval, thinking I’ve already paid and walk out after waiting for the person to come tap some buttons :|
Not again, I’m so clumsy.
“I’m not good at learning new things and this is kind of like learning a new job just to shop here, haha”
Suck it Walmart.
Please use instance agnostic links in future. Since v0.18 they get generated automatically - like this /c/shoplifting@lemmy.ml
Her link works for me, yours doesn’t.
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I always see self-checkout as outsourcing the cashier’s job to a slow untrained amateur (the client) whilst doing away with paying for that work.
You need to be a sucker to choose to do work for the profiting of others without getting anything at all in return for it (at best, what you get is less slow checkout that the manned tills which they purposefully made worse than before in order to push you into self-checkout, which is not in fact better than what you had before, so not really a “benefit”).
Even in the most purely amoral “greed is good” judgement, it doesn’t make sense to do the work without at least getting a discount.
I get absolute no social interaction from some bitch faced employee who doesn’t even put stuff in my bag so I might as well do it myself.
It’s absolutelly possible to just go through the thing as if the cashier was an automaton, in which case it’s still faster than self-checkout.
Personally I like the challenge of getting a laugh out of a tired cashier (especially if it’s a pretty woman), but nobody forces you to engage that person beyond a purelly utilitarian acting your side of the process you’re part of whilst the cashier acts theirs as if you were both machines.
It’s a weird problem to have not to be able to stand facing another human who doesn’t really care about you enough (or has the time) to engage in small tall, whilst being fine with standing facing a machine with particularly unappealing software which cares not at all for you and won’t engage in small talk ever, but I suppose if using the machine solves your discomfort with machine-like human-action then it’s a valid reason.
I’m gonna be honest, I fucking hate standard checkout. They are slow, there’s always a line and usually only 1 in 4 checkouts is open, at least that’s like it where I live. I know in the US there are like a thousand people working at checkouts and people use the cashiers as therapists or whatever, but that’s not it where I live. Usually self checkouts occupy 1/4 of the space, or even less, than a normal checkout, are faster and are always open.
Even better, where I live they’ve started implementing mobile scanners that you pick up when you enter the store, scan stuff as you go, and then checkout in literally 10 seconds. Just walk up to the self checkout machine, scan the special barcode and pay. There may be random checks where you need to go through a standard checkout and confirm the self scan. I believe they use an algorithm where, if your scans are usually correct, you get less and less random checks, until it’s basically none (or the opposite).
In the main supermarket where I live there are, iirc, 44-46 checkouts in total. 14 are standard checkouts, usually 6 or so open, then there are like 12 or so self checkouts and like 18 self scan checkouts. The standard checkouts occupy more than twice the space as all the others while doing a fraction of the throughput.
BTW, I believe the discount is the time I don’t have to wait in line. If you also want to sneak out something though, you do you, couldn’t care less, it’s not like you are stealing from the poor.
Well, as I’ve wrote somewhere else, I have some minor expertise in evaluating business processes because of my job and I lived in London (UK) during the time when the largest supermarkt chains really started pushing self-checkout (the retail market is quite concentrated there)
I’ve also seen some attempts at that done were I am now, Portugal, in some supermarkets as well as how cashier operation can be done extremelly efficiently at the Lidl supermarket I used to shop in when living in Berlin.
From my observation when they install self-checkouts the supermarkets will not only reduce the numbers of manned tills but seem to purposefully reduce the number of people manning the available tills so as to push people to use self-checkout, and this happenned both in that transition in the UK and here in Portugal for the few supermarkets trying that, all noticeable because checkout via manned tills becomes slower when self-checkout is introduced compared to before that, something which logically does not make much sense without the “pushing people to use self-checkout” motivation (logically, with more tills in total waiting times at any till, manned or not, would become shorter, not longer).
Also there’s an interesting psychological effect applicable here which is that time passing when waiting feels a lot longer than time passing when busy (such as when doing the actual self-checkout), which in this situation means that even if the total time from queuing to leaving is longer because it takes you longer to scan all articles and pay, it can feel shorter if the waiting time is shorter.
(A interesting “sciency” experiement here is to actually measure it with a chronometer)
So yeah, if you look at it from an “in the moment” and not at all systemic point of view, it does seem that when there are self-checkouts they’re faster than manned tills, both because you’re not really counting operating-time like you count waiting-time and because the supermarkets seem to very purposefully underman their tills when introducing self-checkout to push people into self-checkout, probably because their long-term objective is to cut down on manpower hence boost profits (which is also why they won’t give you a discount for using self-checkout as that would go against the whole profit-enhancing motivation).
LOL! “Untrained amateur”, like you need to complete a professional course to click a few buttons and scan a few articles. Unbelievable.
You obviously never been to a German grocery store. Those cashiers are intimidating!
Funny enough I just wrote a post about my experience with Lidl in Berlin when I lived there.
The previous poster has no clue at all about how that whole thing can be an extremelly efficient process with proper cashiers and cooperating customers that would actually become way slower if you used self-checkout instead.
(I actually have some minor expertise in evaluating Business Processes from my job and like to evaluate the efficiency of all kinds of work processes I’m looking at, and efficiency as a cashier has a lot more depth than button pressing and article scanning - for example, merelly memorizing the position of the barcodes in articles can easilly make a cashier go several times faster. More broadly, with all the time I have free whilst waiting to pay at the supermarket, I often entertain myself spotting the unneeded time waste and it’s amazing just how big of a fraction of time is spent with stuff like waiting for customers to put their change in their wallets).
Then again this being Germany and Lidl the cashiers are actually normal store employees that will do whatever needs doing, on proper employment contracts and paid significatly more than cashiers in most countries get, as Lidl is known for investing in its employees - and expecting them to be much more flexible in the tasks they’ll do - rather than deal with them as easilly replaceable “human resources”.
And I still don’t know how I eat bits of pie
Hard times
