Hacker News Reader

Comment by paleotrope | Hacker News Reader

The stated reason, "to check for overcharges" doesn't really make sense. Those door people know what everything costs in the store?

View on HN

They are checking that items were not rung up multiple times. My guess is something scans once but the cashier doesn't realize or isn't pay attention and scans it again by mistake.

Ok that makes slightly more sense, but I don't see how this could be very common. Or at least common enough to require a person to man the door.

I would imagine there is a scam where you buy two of a mid-price item and then go back and claim you only bought one and were double charged. Not sure how many times you can get away with that at Costco due to the membership, though.

I feel like a for loop could perform this task for a much lower salary than the receipt checker. There must be something else they're there for.

Said for-loop would also have to know and check against the contents of the cart. If you can do that, you don't need checkers at all.

I don't think that's true. If you want to know which cashiers are double-scanning items, you just need to know how many double scans there are per cashier. Then you can compare people against an average and retrain the cashiers that are significantly above the average.

How do you know if it’s a double scan or if someone actually bought two of something?

I’ve certainly seen cashiers see that you’re buying two of something and just skin one of them twice really fast and then put both of them in the bag.

Why would one cashier more customers buying duplicate items than another?

If you flip a coin twice and it comes up heads both times, it might be a coincidence. If you flip a coin 100 times and it comes up heads all 100 times, there is probably something up with the coin.

I'm assuming the goal is to actually avoid screwing those particular costumers, not just gather statistics.

No other store does this and everyone seems fine with it. I don't think anyone likes waiting in line after paying to leave the store, right? I certainly don't.

Sometimes the cashiers forget to hand you movie tickets or the consumer forgets that they need to pick up an item from the electronics cage. Once they caught that I didn't get the movie tickets I had paid for, felt really nice.

They're making sure that something you only have one of didn't get counted more than once, or vice versa.

An anecdote is not data. However yes - I’ve had a Costco receipt checker notice that I didn’t get a discount that I should’ve gotten, and insist that I go with them to correct the receipt and pay a few dollars less money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com