Workers at TJ Maxx and Marshalls are wearing police-like body cameras

I gotta say, I'm getting pretty annoyed how there are people that shoplift and encourage others to shoplift, and then get a Surprised Pikachu face when the stores either close or put in more draconian measures to prevent shoplifting. People brag about using self-checkout to steal or get something at a significantly reduced price (like ringing up your steak as bananas), and then get pissed when stores demand to check receipts or shut down their self-checkouts entirely.

It's not corporate simping to point out that businesses exist to make money, and if theft is so rampant that they're not making money, they're going to close those locations.

The same problem exists with police too, since their body cams can be "turned off", or go missing, or the data get "corrupted". Although, you might want yours to be capable of live-streaming to the cloud so it can be saved there.

I'm surprised schools don't have cameras yet, as that is where some of the most vulnerable populations are. Especially to deal with bullying.

Once everyone is recording their point of view, and it can be referenced to later, then disputes should be more easily resolved.

But then the problem moves up to how does one know the video has not been altered.

I was the assistant manager of the store, and for some reason my boss decided that she was going to pit the new employee against me. So she would tell the new employee I was talking bad about her, then get on me for things I allegedly said to/about her. It was obvious to me because the things she was claiming I said were things I'd never tell an employee.

I finally got tired of it and said "Okay, if you're going to keep accusing me of saying things that I'm not, I'm going to buy a bodycam and will gladly let you show me where this is allegedly happening in my footage."

After that, all of the accusations stopped. The new employee realized that we were being played, and we ended up being pretty good friends.

Customers can certainly get frustrated or upset, but time and time again I've seen that happening because the front-line staff either directly or indirectly provoked a hostile response to begin with.

The most common direct cause I've seen is simply a staff member providing objectively poor service. This can include ineptitude, a lack of care, making mistakes, a bad attitude (such as disinterest), slowness, language barriers, lying, and taking personal phone calls while in the middle of assisting customers, among others.

Indirect causes would be company policies that harm the customer, equipment/facility/utility outages that prevent services from being delivered, long waits, and so on.

The vast majority of customers I've ever been around or dealt with have had much better things to do with their time than hassle retail or other front-line staff. The customers get upset because the retail staff, or the businesses the staff represent, are impeding the fast and successful completion of the transaction at hand.

I suppose similar discussions were probably held around the launch of google glass.

In fact, I can’t think of a single place in any major city where I would be able to escape surveillance. Even parks these days have cameras on light posts.

Even when I walk my dog in the suburbs, I am passing doorbell cameras on nearly every home, and I have no right to that footage and cannot compel the homeowner to delete it.

And to your point about crime, violent crime has been trending down since the 90s. I don’t actually think surveillance helps reduce crime, as is evident in the rise of shoplifting in retail lately.