Wegmans ends self-checkout app after too much shoplifting
cnn.com
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I don't recall what I paid, but it was probably too much. I felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. I didn't want to underpay and take advantage, and I didn't want to overpay and be a sucker.
It didn't last long, next time I was in the neighborhood it had disappeared.
Not exactly. I value my honor, and honor is what you do when others are not looking. The cashier had no idea who I was.
As I've remarked before on HN, my father told me that honor is what separates men from animals. And men get to choose whether they are men or animals.
It went out of business last year. Very sad. Just mismanagement more than anything,
It makes you comfortable about the experience.
Its not a bad thing for both parties to be up front with what is reasonable to them.
They have been around for 25 years.
The question should be, in a double blind glass of wine, how do you know what it's worth?
As someone who has been homeless and penniless, and now makes a senior engineering income, I really really appreciate the places that do this.
https://www.lazycowbakeryseattle.com/copy-of-order-form-1
BTW, after reading their interesting web site, I don't think they are leftists at all. Their business model is based on making money through voluntary agreements and exchanges.
"our workers get part ownership of the bakery and to make decisions about their wages and work hours"
Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism.
"Located inside our bakery is our free community fridge & food pantry. Donations are welcome anytime during normal business hours."
Sounds like charity, not leftism.
> Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism
Sounds like workers (part) owning the means of production, so socialism. A cooperative, where workers participate in ownership and decision making, is something inspired by socialist ideas and ideals, so it's pretty leftist by definition. The fact that it takes place within the framework of free* market capitalism doesn't make it an extension of the latter.
Socialism is the government providing goods and services, which requires coercion.
No, this is flat out wrong, on so many levels.
First, this is not what socialism is. Go read a few books on the matter, a ton have been written. The short of it is that the focus of socialism is workers and them owning the means of production. Historically socialism has been about fighting against the (existing) government for that, and replacing the traditional power structures (e.g. the soviets/workers councils that popped up in Russia).
Second, a government providing services is called common sense and is a component of everything outside of (very specific types of) anarchy. Goods is another matter.
> Free market means voluntary exchanges
Depends on one's interpretation. E.g. there's a drastic power imbalance in the vast majority of labour relations. That's why there have been so many regulations to restrict the abuses resulting from that imbalance. So an absolutely free market does have a significant involuntary component to it (child/dangerous/very long labour).
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of socialism, no doubt, but what you are describing isn't socialism.
Other comments have provided some things to look into, but if genuinely want to learn, I'm happy to explain and answer questions. Who knows, maybe it'll arm you to have stronger arguments against lefties like me, maybe it'll make you go, "oh that's all they want? Shit, I agree with at least some of that." Or maybe you'll still be (incorrectly) convinced that socialism is when "the government does stuff."
She became flustered when she saw everything was correct, then began rapidly and somewhat forcefully checking the rest of my items through. Was it that she didn’t trust me? Was I doing something that looked suspicious?
Maybe there’s a lot of shop lifting and their job security is at risk when it occurs on their shifts. In any case it made me regret choosing self checkout – I’ll definitely think twice in the future.
Ironically my wife steals things in self checkout constantly and I never have (nor would I), but somehow I’m the one who gets picked out for a thorough check.
I feel for that employee, anyways. I was a little frustrated and bothered by it at first, especially when she began checking my items through for me. Then I realized she must deal with people being pretty awful and lying to her all the time – I wouldn’t last a day.
Not to pass judgment on your wife or anything like that, but I’m very curious: Has this changed the way you feel about your wife or her judgment?
I was just thinking to myself that if my wife said that she stole things constantly through self check out, I would advise her that it would be wise to stop. To me it’s reckless, you may never get caught, but you might get caught, and who knows what incident that might create.
I can scan things faster than the register can take it. It gives me a beep, I move on. Then I see the register is missing items, and getting out of sync with the scale function. Most things I buy are light-weight, so the computer decides to just fudge it and move on. (And if you notice after the fact that you've moved it onto the belt, you can't take it back, the system will hang and block you from going on until you put it back).
I'm not trying to steal, just their hardware can't keep up, and I'm not going to slow down to watch to make sure every beep corresponds to a successful item rung up.
What would you say of the case where you do all your grocery shopping and they close the full service checkouts right as you wrap up and force self checkout? You’ve agreed to shop with the intention of having a cashier and they unilaterally change the terms after you’ve invested your time… I’d say unilaterally changing goods received is just as much theft as unilaterally changing payment.
(Which will usually actually cost them more than just stealing some small item which doesn’t justify either.)
I’m not concerned about her getting caught (I think that would be a good thing), I’m more so concerned that the activity contributes to rising prices, it’s a detriment to the commons in a sense, it should have a real impact on her conscience, and it’s laughably unnecessary. We earn so much more than the median income for our over priced region; we could pay double for everything and barely feel it.
And you can reasonably guess that the "incident" it will create will be proportionate to the value of the thing being stolen. If you cause a scene over someone else not paying for a $2 candy bar, you're the asshole.
I wonder if she was trained to do that so that you'd think she just came to help.
New York (CNN Business)In 2019, Wegmans, the cult-favorite northeastern grocery chain, rolled out a new mobile app that allowed customers to scan, bag and pay for groceries while they shopped and then skip the checkout line altogether.
Not surprised it failed
The larger one a bit further away let's you do all of that except that there's still a checkout for paying at and they do a re-check of a few items every so often.
This is a smartphone app system that they briefly rolled out and have now paused/abandoned. It did not require going through a line at all, which presumably made it much easier to ‘accidentally’ not scan an item here or there.
I think I just really like the convenience of someone else ringing all of that up and putting it into the bags, etc.
Edit: perhaps the future is to charge customers more who want full service. You can either check out and bag your own, or for some price more you get full service where someone else does it.
So I look at the lines, the amounts in carts in the lines, who is in the lines, and make my guess which is faster.
I usually self checkout but I have an issue at least 70% of the time
Unfortunately, like every software made since 2010, its gimped so that it doesn't scare people, so its too slow. I used a scanner at home to scan my books (they are just usb keyboards, so surprisingly easy to integrate in e.g a spreadsheet), and the scan was so quick. I could go through all my grocecies in basically no time if all I had to was scan them.
So I always pick the cashier, and then start reading on my phone while standing in line. This essentially reduces the wasted time close to zero, even if it does not reduce the wall time to zero.
It was truely great, it put so much trust in you. Self-checkout stations don't let you remove items, but this app let you edit the cart as you liked. Scanned something twice, not a problem. Put something back? just remove it.
Checking out was a 30second task, and it did feel a little weird. I had a whole cart full of stuff, scanned my phone, paid, and left. I put a lot of care into making sure everything was there and accurate, but I can see how easy it was to abuse. Easily could have not scanned half the things in there.
An interesting thing was that it didn't actually save much, if any, time. Maybe even took sightly longer overall. Scanning with the phone every time you added something means pausing in the store to do it, switching between scan mode and shopping mode wasn't seamless for me. Putting something back after you scanned meant fiddling with your phone for a little bit. Maybe if I was able to do it more then once it would have become significantly faster.
On a side rant, is anyone else bothered as much as I am at how self-checkouts force this tediously slow pacing for doing each step. You can't just scan-scan-scan-pay. Instead its scan...."place item in bag"...pause... now you can scan the next item. Do it too quickly and it freezes up. The regular checkouts don't have this issue. Drives me absolutely crazy.
I'm curious if the shop-lifting challenge is similar in Norway. I would expect not, since it is a very trusting society, but I have never seen any real numbers on this topic.
I think they'll pretty much only work out in places that have such strict laws and culture around theft that people don't even attempt it.
Otherwise it's on the honor system. That never works. But I'm sure there's some actuarial equation to this.
Not that I endorse such a thing, I did not approve of that person's actions. I mentioned it once when leaving, the greeter shrugged.
Some places just price in the shrink and honestly don't care.
Where I live, the self checkouts in all stores are basically unmonitored, don't have any item weight consistency checks, and basically the only thing that causes staff to be summoned is buying something that requires agree verification. In the last three years, I've exclusively used these and not once have they checked my bag. Seems to work, at least in that nobody has tried tightening their systems.
(Of course what works in a high trust society won't work in low trust ones, and vice versa.)
How many people don't return to pay? If you have say, 70,000 unique customers in a year the loss could add up quickly. The only way I could imagine this working is having some flex in the budget for theft that is being used up by these systems. In that case, it might be that "encouraging" people to steal smaller, cheaper items may save you on theft of big ticket items. So much so it's worth it.
I use them in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Waitrose, you name it. In fact, in Waitrose you can scan and bag as you go, without even having to weigh anything. At the end, you go to a checkout machine, scan its barcode, pay for the items you've scanned and go.
Once I was chosen for a random bag check (it happens at the checkout - the machine tells you and an employee comes over). They sampled about 50% of my bag and the system unlocked so I could finish paying and go.
It seems to work fine. More shops are beginning to adopt this system.
There needs to be punishments for false accusations, unfortunately the best I could do was waste a little bit of the stores time.
I’ve been using this system frequently for years and had to go through this check exactly once.
Yes, thats the accusation.
It was unbiased and heartless so you couldn't play it cool and fool it.
Sure, there was like a 3/4 chance (or something) you'd get through with your weed, but it wasn't worth the risk and penalty.
And the line was processed really quickly.