Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work

Fast forward several years, there’s more staff stationed with self-checkout due to theft.

I think retailers are going to calculate the cost of headcount and theft and make a decision based on an equilibrium.

Of course, the best outcome for Walmart is to have an automated LP system to reduce staffing cost for the long term.

On top of that, you have to also account for the concept that the employees themselves might steal from the store.

Also, scanning 1 item while holding two of it in your hand.

I've also walked out of Lowes with a couple dollars in random hardware in my pocket before. Went in for some screws so didn't grab a cart, decided to pick up some other stuff since I was there, and stuffed them in my pocket temporarily. Forgot about them during checkout. I actually went back and paid for those though because I felt like such an idiot about it.

Technically it's your kids stealing, but since you are responsible for their actions, it's on you.

When this happens to me I usually let them know the next time I'm at that store (or if I discover it in the parking lot I go back in). Sometimes they charge me for it, usually they just say thanks for being honest.

Often the staff look like they are on autopilot and aren't reading anything and just going through their shift on muscle memory so I imagine this happens a lot. Is it stealing if you tried to pay but the staff did something on the machine and it didn't charge you? I don't know.

They tried this. Was a disaster.

Self checkout without that works well in many supermarkets, IKEA etc. There are losses but with random checks they are lower than the staff costs - so It's a win.

Who are you checking, the cashier or the buyer? My guess is a deterrent for some kind of collusion.

What’s the beef with my choice?

The article seems to be mainly about theft during self-bagging.

We didn’t have self checkout back then, though.

People take fruit and vegetables, and put the money in the box--or if the farmer is tech-savvy enough, through their phones. And even if a few people don't pay, they still get more money from their inventory than shipping it to a wholesaler or a grocery store. (As far as I know, direct to a local gourmet restaurant pays best.)

For an extra employee on the duty roster, you're probably paying minimum $7 per hour, every hour that store is open to the public--probably 16 hours a day, every day, for a big box. That's $41k per year, plus the per-employee costs for 2 or 3 people, which are probably another $60k, unless you're an employer that doesn't offer benefits (i.e. Wal-Mart).

The employee would likely have to stop $200/day of petty theft. That doesn't seem impossible, but the problem is that if you pay your employee minimum wage, they don't actually care that people are stealing from their employer, because they have no actual incentive to do anything beyond what is the bare minimum requirement to avoid getting fired, which may be just catching one shoplifter per day.

And then, after all, if one caught every shoplifter, every day, people would stop trying, and one might miss quota on later days. The person whose job depends on shoplifters has a perverse incentive to encourage shoplifting, just as cobra-catchers have an incentive to breed and release snakes.

So the problem is more that it's too expensive to hire someone at a rate high enough to make them care about doing their job well, instead of just keeping it indefinitely while gaming the right metrics.

I'm not sure how many high intensity "you're stealing!" confrontations really occur.