What makes more sense is store sized vending machines. Pay for what you want and it is dispensed. Order on site or online. I'm surprised no one is doing this on a wide scale yet.
Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]
Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.
Everything that is old is new again.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store#Innovations_1...
That way they only have to hire two employees. One to drag carts around the parking lot and one to drag keys to all the locked cabinets of soap and shampoo and diapers and whatnot.
With robots doing the picking and packing the employee problem becomes reduced, but it might take some serious innovation to reliably get customers to leave with more products than they went to the store to buy.
But I think people still do it, I don't know if they still do it but Costco would check your receipt against what was in your trolley when I shopped there, if I remember correctly (10+ years ago).
They don't check at the food court, either. Wouldn't surprise me if people have stole stuff via the big pizza boxes.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/costco-winning-war-against-re...
I think you'd be surprised.
And in any case, some shoplifters will obviously be dissuaded by the need to get a fake or stolen card in the first place.
The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.
With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?
The truth is I expect stealing from a delivery van is ultimately simpler... or simply stealing the package off the porch easier still. The issue isn't the ease or difficulty.
Where I expect consumer delivery businesses to do better in the face of theft is on the cost of theft (assuming a certain scale in the delivery business). Given the economies of scale of a warehouse and the delivery model vs traditional retail locations, I bet means the loss for any item stolen from the van is less than that of the same item stolen from a traditional retail location.
This is only true in ways that don't matter, because you count "any population" being large enough to obviously include miscreants. Most people do not shoplift, and therefore there are MANY ways to slice a population which will not include shoplifters.