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Comment by sunkenvicar | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always felt like a criminal when I leave Costco. I am forced under threat of membership cancellation to show my receipt, cart contents, and bag contents to an employee.

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I am fine with the Costco policy since its in the terms of membership and Costco is a club. If you're random retailer and wanting to search for people who haven't agreed to anything since the store is open to the public, that is a problem.

How does this in any way differ from any other retailer, except that Costco adds an admission fee?

Waving a magical membership wand over my head doesn’t change any of the material facts.

You literally consented to it in writing when you became a member.

It's arguable whether this is legal even if you signed a contract. There are many legal rights that can't be signed away in a contract (e.g. someone has the right to beat you up, etc.)

> It's arguable whether this is legal even if you signed a contract

If you ever take Costco to court, I'll follow along curiously.

In a lawsuit-hungry country like the US, I'm not sure how long a large company like Costco can get away with something illegal in their contract.

Signing a contract that says "you can look in my bag" doesn't seem like it would be one of the automatically void unconscionable contracts.

A lot of fulfillment companies search their employees when they leave. Its only time I've seen metal detectors used when leaving a building.

On the corporate side, I am required to disclose all my financial dealings including non-public equity deals(stock options in startups I work at) to my wife's work. If I don't, she can get fired.

No one reads the fine print.

It’s relevant because that membership, which is the one thing that sets Costco apart, is also their only remedy.

They don’t get to chase you down. They don’t get to hold you. They can’t call the police. (Well, they can, but the police won’t give a shit.) All they can do is refuse to let you buy more stuff from them.

Everybody gets to do what they want. Costco can ask to check your stuff. You can refuse. Costco can cancel your membership. None of these things are problematic.

There have been stories about Costco exit check not being about theft at all, it’s mostly about checking for possible errors or fraud on the part of the cashier

I've had them catch mistakes before, like an item being double-scanned. I was actually pretty impressed that they looked at the total count on the receipt and cross-checked it against the contents of the cart.

Back when Costco accepted Discover and allowed cash-over on purchases, when I took cash over, I would be asked by the receipt-checker, "did you get your $30?". On two separate occasions, I had in fact forgotten. One of those, I was given the missing cash immediately without question. The other time, the manager was skeptical but agreed to close and count the drawer, and I received the $30 immediately after that process.

Same at Home Depot, the ceaseless beeping informing to the presence of surveillance when any movement is detected is enough to drive you insane. I’m just looking at drill bits for crying out loud! They even have a screen showing you a supposed live feed of the security room where people are presumably supervising the feed from the surveillance camera...

Worse yet, at our kroger (0), in many higher margin aisles are cameras and lcd screens hanging from the ceilings. They turn on to show the customer that they see us. You could possibly cover your face, but I'm pretty sure store personnel would ask you to leave.

My much more sardonic and dark view are that these cameras and the associated "kroger loyalty card" are going to an internal database to show how we travel through the store, what we look at, and how long. Of course, theft is an incidental plus to stop.

We already know for quite some time that Target (1) uses your credit card as the user hash, much like a loyalty card. There's no opting out of this one.

(0) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kroger/@39.1636963,-86.589...

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

> You could possibly cover your face, but I'm pretty sure store personnel would ask you to leave.

Now that sounds like fun. Is there a store like this on the San Francisco Peninsula so I can try it and see what happens?

Uhh, I have no clue. But I would assume that every major store that has cameras (all!) probably feed their video output to a ML classifier for facial recog and dwell times/locations in aisles. And if I were constructing such a system (I'M NOT!), I'd also tie it to the cash registers for complete path history and item purchase history, whether you use a 'shopper card' or not.

The only way I think you would have legal standing with a full shorud over your face is if you're a female Muslim adherent. In that case, I think you'd be defended by the 1st amendment protections. Then again, that also sounds like a 2-5 year legal battle assuming SCOTUS would even get involved. But you being in SF, the 9th circuit would likely go in favor of 1st amendment.

Long story short, our freedoms and relative anonymity are probably completely fucked. And those that demand privacy/anonymity are few and far enough between that we would be easily profiled in other ways.

> Target (1) uses your credit card as the user hash, much like a loyalty card. There's no opting out of this one.

Does Target still accept cash?

Another one I've heard of is stores using wifi and bluetooth to track shoppers by their smartphones. This is possible even with bluetooth turned off in some cases.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...

Have they ever actually checked you that closely? Every time I leave Costco, it’s a cursory glance, a swipe of a marker (which prevents receipt reuse), and that’s it.

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