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Comment by _wldu | Hacker News Reader

Walmart makes this rather obvious. I was walking down a medicine aisle the other day, and I looked up and saw my face on a screen with green lines outlining it.

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Last time I was in a Walmart, it felt like they were doing everything they could to communicate they didn't want me to shop at their store.

* Gates at the main entrances

* Cameras everywhere

* "Security" walking through the store in clearly marked uniforms

* Self checkouts with UX that clearly communicates a lack of trust.

All that seems like they don't want you to steal at their store by giving deterrent cues. Which parts were practically inconvenient, or slow you down?

Stores used to make customers feel good about shopping there. Adding elements that make your store feel more like a prison don't help here.

I guess the management at those corporations is so bad they do not realize they are driving profits away by spending money to make it feel like a prison.

Or management is using tons of experience and data to do what they have to do to stay in business in a 2% profit margin business, inconveniencing customers if they have to in order to prevent losses so they do not have to close the store.

I think it's on a store-by-store basis. My grandfather works at a Wal-Mart in a small town with a large minority population and said they average 10-12K in merchandise stolen each month. The store is open 24 hours, but they still only have 1 security guard working 9-5 because they'd lose more money from lost sales due to minority groups typically having bad experiences with authority figures and avoiding the store.

This is easily noticeable if you have experience visiting stores in poorer parts of a city and the same brand stores in a richer part of the city.

$12,000 a month? That's almost nothing for a store like Walmart.

Nothing only if the other stores subsidize that particular store. In reality they will just close unprofitable stores.

I don't mean it's nothing like they should simply absorb the costs, nothing as in a very low number for a Walmart.

"This decision must be correct because management is making it" is a strange idea. Clearly they make mistakes. And clearly their data may not be sufficiently deep for "the new security measures make people not want to shop here so they stay away"

Of course every decision is not correct, but the previous responses were written as if the purpose of the decisions that management made was to inconvenience or harass people, rather than simply an effort to stay in business.

> the previous responses were written as if the purpose of the decisions that management made was to inconvenience or harass people

I didn't get that at all. A little bit of trying to discourage shoplifters. Maybe you read a different thread.

If they have to harass people to stay in business, perhaps they shouldn't stay in business.

Whether or not they should stay in business will be determined by the success of a competitor offering customers something different.

I would not bet on it though.

It's not about inconvenience or efficiency. It's the hostile signaling Walmart is communicating to their customers.

I go to the Target just down the street, and it's the exact opposite experience.

Home Depot does this now, and it's starting to alienate me. They are conveniently located, but in various places in the stores (presumably in the areas where commonly shoplifted products are kept), they have cameras with screens and as you walk by they ding at you so you'll notice they are recording.

I don't like getting treated that way, so I've started shopping more often at Lowes, even though it takes a couple minutes longer to get there.

Lowes uses facial recognition tech in their stores. The camera is there all the same. https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22576236/retail-stores-fa...

That is unfortunate. But I will admit that the confrontational method Home Depot uses is more off-putting to me than just knowing that there are cameras doing facial recognition. I assume HD is also using that technology, or will be soon.

One of the reasons they have the loud ding is to alert an associate working several aisles there is a customer there so they can go assist them. How that works in practice is debatable.

Looks like Home Depot made a commitment to not use facial recognition? https://www.zdnet.com/article/backlash-to-retail-use-of-faci...

Personally I prefer the "hey we are filming you" notices to the silent approach where they use facial recognition tech that is feeding into a large database.

Just like i prefer notices in my websites that they are data harvesting than the silent approach.

> One of the reasons they have the loud ding is to alert an associate working several aisles there is a customer there so they can go assist them.

I sincerely hope they don't believe that's what customers are experiencing, though. And I've never had an HD employee zip on over to help me out when I've been browsing electrical parts. I have, however, started being a little immature and occasionally flip off the camera when it dings at me. Such a rebel I am ;-)

target has far more effective anti-theft, but it's far less intrusive, apparently. https://www.paypath.com/Small-Business/why-target-is-the-wor...

Is facial recognition less intrusive, or more convenient? I’d argue the latter.

I agree. Facial recognition is far more intrusive, and far more convenient.

The problem I have with face recognition is what to do about it? Some stores are polite enough to make it obvious, so I know not to shop there, but I can't trust that the other stores aren't also doing it and keeping it quiet.

This has me stumped.

That's surprising to hear. All of the San Francisco Targets recently started closing at 6pm in response to shoplifting.

The Target near me has so many camera domes in the ceiling that I question if they are all even cameras.

I don't have a huge point to make, other than it isn't always as easy as going to another store. To be clear, I don't think you are saying that it is.

It depends on the target. Theft was so bad at one that I used to live near, that they installed a police substation specifically for the target within the building.

It just makes for a shitty experience. I grew up in a blue-collar family and still dress that way, even though I'm firmly upper-middle class now. I took my wife to a high end mall for a her birthday one year, and when we were looking at designer purses, the security in the store followed us the entire time, presumably because their typical customers don't wear jeans, tshirts, and sneakers. We noticed the security in all the stores were doing it, and eventually we just left without buying anything because we didn't like being treated like criminals because of how we dress. Even though we could easily afford to buy things there, we haven't been back to that mall since.

They weren't "treating you like criminals" they were just bored!

Except plently of people do wear jeans, tshirts, and sneakers. And probably don't get scrutinized like that. I would consider other factors like cleanliness/neatness, grooming, haircut style, watch & phone styles, etc.

The difference between a mullet and stains on your shirt versus a nice haircut and an apple watch on your wrist.

It's not about being slowed down. It's about being treated like a criminal. I won't shop at stores that are like this simply because I see no reason to put up with being treated like that. And, if the store really has such a serious crime problem that these measures are necessary, I don't want to be there anyway.

> And, if the store really has such a serious crime problem that these measures are necessary, I don't want to be there anyway.

Neither do the people that shop at them, but they are too poor to have a choice. And the store’s management also does not want to spend money on these anti theft measures, but obviously they are having to do so to make it viable for the store to stay open.

In my experience, this is not a general Walmart policy, it is store-specific. Not too long ago I was looking for a product that only Walmart seems to keep in stock, but they don't keep much of it. And their online system is not very accurate. So in the space of two hours I visited four different Walmarts, ranging from one in a nicer area of town, to one in a poor area. Security was nonexistent at the first Walmart. The store was relaxed, there were plenty of associates, they were helpful, etc. The store was actually pretty nice, the only thing out of place was the weirdly low prices compared to any other store in that area. At the other end of the scale, the store in the poor area (which is also majority black, whether or not this is actually a factor in their behavior I can only speculate) had a half dozen security cars in the parking lot with their little flashing yellow lights. Gates at the entrance manned with security personnel, uniformed security inside the store. And the icing on the cake? They were checking 9 out of 10 people's bags on the way out of the store, sort of like Costco. Except me. Waived me right on through. Because I'm not black? I have no idea. But it sure did weird me out.

I know the bag check isn't the focus here, but I always just politely decline. After I've paid, I own whatever is in those bags and no, you can't look in them.

You can just decline in stores that anyone is allowed to just walk in and shop, but at places that you need a membership for, your membership contract usually requires that you let them look.

my friend employs the sunglasses and headphones technique where blatantly ignore them. They can't touch you, so they just shout a few times, and realize the futility and move on to the next shopper.

The availability of that option depends on your appearance: affluent middle-aged white people can usually do it but if you’re a teenager or match whatever demographic is poor in the area, you have to weigh that versus escalation possibly including armed police response.

Which escalations the store would have to weigh against a loss of business they should expect after racially targeting innocent (if so) customers.

Know your rights and exercise them, keep your chin up and communicate. Fear is a trigger of suspicion.

When has “I’ll never shop here again!” ever been a useful threat? Shops care about people in aggregate, not you in particular. And anyone they decide to bother is someone they already have decided they don’t care about the opinion of.

When "I will never" becomes "we demand".

> we demand

Can you name a few, or even one, consumer-level boycott in, say, the last 50 years, which actually accomplished its goal? Accomplished by the actual boycott alone, I mean.

Add up all the businesses that have failed and you'll find plenty that disrespected some of their customers.

Walmart is a much higher bar geopolitically, but bet they have to jump too when word gets out of malfeasance. But it is a prisoner's dilemma when they are the main one-stop value shop.

Especially when it's, say, Walmart which has built a business on crowding out competitors in an area — are you really going to spend an extra 40+ minutes driving somewhere else out of spite? The power dynamic here seems quite unbalanced.

I know a lot of tech people don't go to Walmart, but this also matches my experience. More brown neighborhoods have more security.

But important note: you can just leave. You don't have to let them check your bag. They aren't cops.

Apparently they have way too many customers. Business would be so great if it weren't for all the darn customers!

It depends entirely on the specific Walmart and the neighborhood where it's located. I've been traveling the US this summer and have stopped at many Walmarts. Some are well stocked, beautifully maintained stores that you waltz into and out of without a care or delay. Some are run like minimum security prisons, with cameras, gates, security and screens to show you you're on camera (mostly in the makeup isles).

Some Walmart are well stocked, spacious and clean. Some are ravaged, dirty and filled with tourists. It's really amazing the variety of quality.

I started to type "That's not facial recognition", then deleted it...

The green box that you're describing is recognizing that _A_ face is in view of the camera. This is often used for properly adjusting focus, exposure, etc... I suppose you could call it "facial recognition", because that's exactly what it's doing. But it's fairly benign and passive. This technology exists in my DSLR cameras that have no network connection and do not save any facial data anywhere in the image.

But then there is facial recognition that knows who you are, it's connected to a network, and it logs where you go - and these back-end systems correlate this data with other data that's been collected about you. Systems that know who you are are what is generally meant when discussing "facial recognition".

This article doesn't say.

Yes. But the only reason they need to identify what is a face in the camera is as a step in facial recognition. It's not like the security cameras are adjusting their focus or exposure.

Its just security theater as a theft deterrent. The idea is that if you see a screen with a green box around your face then you believe that they've got a good look at you and if you steal then they can use the images.

Walmart isn't investing money building networked cameras with the processing ability to perform facial recognition at scale in real time. It'd probably cost more money than paying employees to just watch people at the store exits.

It's entirely possible that they are only pretending to do facial recognition as theft deterrent.

They could also be recording the video and doing the facial recognition offline - the analytics aren't valuable in realtime.

I wonder how pervasive this actually is. I've worked a bit in retail technology and we put some sensors in live stores. Tracking dwell time and pings of wifi access points. They generated a ton of noise and almost zero actionable data. Every attempt failed to be deployed to a second store. We had some success with facial recognition but only in really funneled spaces where we could get a customer to look at a camera on purpose. And it was still only about 90% accurate.

They lose a lot to theft in those aisles. I didn’t particularly mind when I thought it was an anonymous noise maker, but you can’t trust that anymore.

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