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Comment by heimatau | Hacker News Reader

> How do you prove that cashiers are recorded more than police?

You've never worked as a cashier. If one is behind the till, they have a direct camera on them for their entire shift.

Usually several cameras, all pointed at the cashier and their hands from different angles, with even more cameras littered throughout their workplace.

I have. It depends where you work. I am curious what the point of that is because cameras don’t determine whether cash is improperly removed from the register.

As I understand it, there's a lot more to it than stealing from the till. I used to work for a company that was peripheral to the security industry, so I got a lot of their literature. One was a pamphlet showing more than a dozen fiddles that are possible at the cash register. I've also read that most shoplifting is an inside job, at least involving an inside helper.

There's stuff like having a bar code on the palm of your hand, so you scan a cheap item while passing an expensive item through the scanner.

Shop lifting, even at point of sale, does not occur inside the cash register. To that end you would be monitoring the customer, which can include employees on the customer side of the transaction.

> Shop lifting, even at point of sale, does not occur inside the cash register.

But money-skimming does. I know someone who got fired for that... After being caught on camera.

How much was their till off?

I don't know. I was just a front of house, not a shift lead.

My understanding of what happened is that the till was counted as off, and then it was confirmed that it was them through the cameras.

There are anywhere from 2 - ~6 people who can open the till in the store at any time at that location, thus the need for the cameras.

Edit: Obviously not the best OpSec, but that was the workflow at that point, and hiring enough staff to make that not the case was non-feasible.

As a customer, I’ve simply been given the wrong change and been told that I paid with a $10 and not a $20. Most of the time I take their word for it, but once I was actually paying attention and had a manager come over and count down the til.

True. Granted, the marketing material that I saw was 20+ years ago, and the recording was still done with videotape. One product would superimpose a text feed of the register tape on the video, so they were recorded simultaneously.

> I have. It depends where you work.

Is the company that you worked for, are they still in business? I'd be surprised if they were. If they are, I'm curious how large this business is. B/c I suspect they are able to charge it (the losses) to the owners.

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