Very convenient. There are random checks by the staff, one out of 20 times maybe.
The US is rapidly backsliding from a high to low trust society so things like this are simply not possible in many areas. A few trials like this ran near me and shut down months later.
The US isn't rapidly sliding anywhere.
America is in super state of being both, high and low trust.
And by judging the current world trends it will collapse to one state pretty soon - the dead cat scenario i am afraid.
https://thecounter.org/supermarket-robot-automation-ai-organ...
> Not that there is a lot of data to suggest that this oft-discussed recent spike in retail crime is even real. In an earnings call earlier this year, for example, the CFO of Walgreens admitted that his company had perhaps “cried too much” about theft, and that its product losses had actually declined in the previous quarter.
It's still financially viable to assume a little extra theft risk here because you take a tenth of the time at checkout and use less than half the person time as regular self checkouts (which use a tenth of the time a manned checkout does). They massively increase throughout in large, busy stores.
The recent problems have been:
District Attorneys deciding property crime is selectively enforceable for social justice engineering, and a knock-on effect of the police not bothering to do their job while having the gall to collect a paycheck they didn't earn.
Political divisions where a growing demographic of self-destructives wish to throw a Molotov cocktail into functional civilization. This explains why COTUS can't elect a Speaker of the House.
We've seen plenty of issues with police that wildly escalate a situation, in ways that result in things like "burn-half-the-city-down riots".
In that atmosphere, it might be an intentional goal to minimize the number of "low value" police encounters. Stopping a shoplifter might recover $100 of merchandise, but you have to get it right an awful lot of times to recover for every time a trigger-happy cop loses his cool and the city has to pay a seven-figure settlement.
That is one way of putting it. Another and in my opinion more correct way is to conclude that some groups of people are looking for reasons to burn half the city down and find it in "police brutality" or "racism". When the police is just as brutal towards different groups of people the cities do not burn down.
You can have a look at the areas which gave heed to the calls to "defund the police" to find out whether that has led to a decrease or increase of crime. If the police were the cause of these problems you'd expect fewer problems when there are fewer police encounters. In actuality the result is the opposite and what most people who do not hold with the narrative expected: less police leads to more crimes committed.
No, reducing police presence in these dystopian areas is not the solution. A better trained police force with better tactics might be. Giuliani managed to turn New York around so it can be done if there is the will and the opportunity to act upon that will.
Giving up and giving in will lead to streets empty of stores instead of streets with empty stores which will promptly be followed by claims of "discrimination" and "structural racism" because there are no shops in those areas without a single person asking why those shops left. Giving up and giving in is not an option.
Many police departments in big cities are severely understaffed. Seattle is at 60% where it needs to be, and has the lowest number of officers since 1992 (while population is much larger than then).
Couple that with just being a bad job: you get blamed for not doing enough, doing too much, and...really, there are just way better jobs out there these days that offer as much money for a lot less stress.
Best thing since sliced bread IMHO, very quick and easy. Most stores have reduced cashier stands from eg. 10 to ~2.
In Partner Card [1] stores such as Viru Keskus supermarket (Kaubamaja Toidumaailm), one can download Partnerkaart app [2] to use their phones to scan for products.
I personally am a big fan of this one, since for some reason my phone's barcode scanner is greatly faster and more accurate than the market's own scanners.
[1]: https://www.partnerkaart.ee/et/ [2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/partnerkaart/id1615988287
Apart from produce, I'd prefer home delivery that eliminates the scanning and transportation effort entirely.
I suspect a better approach than gig economy grocery delivery would be dedicated refrigerated vans and trucks with drivers who work directly for the seller. Gig economy drivers don't keep things at a proper temperature and can't seem to deliver consistently.
In general, where I am in the US, gig economy workers are rude, short tempered, don't read direction notes, and sloppy.
Theft (things like putting unscanned $200 beef tenderloin roasts unscanned at the bottom of a bag) was so bad they canceled it within months. I miss it, it was super convenient.
They're now trialing camera-based machine vision cart attachments that are slow and annoying.
But yes, I miss it too.
And the flat platform types, are you referencing the kind that are normally seen in Home Depot? The ones typically that go 6 inches from the floor and look like a pallet jack? With those again you can find them in Sam’s club and Costco but you won’t see them in a “typical” grocery setting
Several Walmarts I’ve been in have asked to see my receipt, the answer is always the same: “No Thank You”, and if they persist I just ignore them.
This is actually different than how stores like Sam's Club or Costco work - these stores can force you to show the receipt because a condition of membership is that you must show the receipt. But in a store "generally accessible to the public" e.g. a non membership style store such as Sam's Club or Costco in the USA store employees cannot detain you or otherwise force you to show a receipt for something that you paid for - as grandparent says it's your property at that point.
I typically show the receipt at Walmart if its not going to be an inconvenience for me. But the other day I had bought a heavy car battery and a jump starter kit and my hands were full and I wasn't about to put all of that down to show off a receipt. So I politely declined and kept walking and that was it. It's kind of like cops and searching your vehicle - they can always ask and you can always decline. They have the technology to figure out if you're actually stealing or not, so if they know you are, and they know, then they'll simply just ban you from the store. If not, then they aren't going to arbitrarily ban you.
But surely there is a legal basis to prevent you from leaving the store with groceries before you have paid for them. When you walk through the normal checkout and they ask you to put everything on the conveyor so that they can scan it, are you allowed to say "no thank you" and just walk out? If that is not OK, I fail to see the difference.
Receipt checking, by definition, always happens after the transaction has completed and the payer has taken possession of the groceries, hence the receipt. So receipt checking is always a practice to verify that your already lawfully purchased groceries match up with what you are removing from the store. This is a practice, while rooted in a perspective that benefits the store, that you have no obligation whatsoever to comply with.
The store, as mentioned above, has no obligation to let you back into the store (they can ban you), but they also have no right to detain you and force you to prove that you own your belongings as you are leaving either. And a store is not going to ban someone unless they are completely sure they have stolen something. So in practice there is really no issue with telling receipt checkers to pound sand for trying to verify my lawfully purchased groceries. I usually don't, because it feels standoffish for no reason sometimes, and you risk encountering someone that doesn't fully understand the law correctly. But if I have a good reason, as mentioned above, I will definitely tell them to pound sand.
I realize now rereading the thread how these two scenarios became conflated, because OP responded to the "before purchase" scenario that you provided with an "after purchase" scenario. So we are really talking about two different scenarios here.
That isn't true. Just being rude to staff can get you banned from many stores. If you don't like their policy of checking receipts, they can ban you, although they can't really enforce anything without a trespassing order, at best they can just refuse service.
Also AFAIK in the States it’s quite easy to get a “trespass order”. My understanding is that in most jurisdictions you simply tell the person they are in trespass and they are required to leave the premises or be subject to detention by authorities if they don’t. Now your typical employee may not be able to just hand that kind of order out due to some internal policy but in theory any agent of the business would be able to do it. There’s no real additional paperwork or legal process that needs to happen outside of a verbal exchange
There isn't really. The store can call the police, and when they show up, they can stop you from leaving. But...ya, that doesn't work out very well.
I imagine in Europe you would just become a social pariah and might get a knock at your door by police (at least in Switzerland...), while in the states...they can't do much, there is no social pressure.
I was also once in the position of acting as witness in the loss prevention office when one of my classmates was caught (no chase) stealing fishing gear. Awkward.
1. If someone is willing to steal from a store, who knows what else they are willing to do? Retail workers do not make enough money to potentially put themselves in harm's way over a $200 beef tenderloin roast. 2. It's doubtful whether a retail worker even has the legal authority to physically detain a shopper. I surely wouldn't put up with it as a shopper, and would make a stink. And at that point you're back to #1: Will the next shopper you detain make a stink, or will they get violent? 3. For liability reasons, companies don't want their employees getting harmed, so most stores' guidance is to not interfere.
I find them mostly convenient. the only times I've every had a staff come over is when I've done the wrong thing and the machine needed staff assistance to progress or when the machine did the wrong thing and I needed the staff to progress.
It amuses me to read (and I see it a lot) people outraged that staff may come over and check what they're doing and not cheating the system somehow, outraged at the lack of trust being perceived.
Do they not remember the old checkout system was a complete lack of trust scenario. Every single item you want to buy was checked by staff.
The self checkout is a HUGE level of trust being given to the customer.