Hacker News Reader

Every time I read one of these articles the naivety and tone-deafness from supermarkets over these self-checkouts amazes me.

"In order to make more money we made customers self-report their purchases during a cost-of-living crisis while we were booking record high profits and now these customers are _under reporting_ their purchases, how dare they!!"

They should've seen this coming from miles away.

View on HN

The way you phrase it (but maybe I get you wrong) suggests that the customers are somehow in their (moral if not lawful) right to do this because of previous policies from the supermarkets. They (supermarkets) may have been wrong, but so is stealing. They don't cancel each other out, nor do two wrongs become a right.

I'd say stealing is always a net negative effect for the whole.

But if you're saying that the entire context explains a lot of the behaviour, and could possibly be predicted, then yes I agree.

> booking record high profits

According to the opening paragraph of that article that's doesn't seem to be the case. €80 million in profit (with €100 million theft) is not all that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com