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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout.

I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…

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That video was staged, at Target electronics need to be paid for in the electronics department where there is no self-check out. In addition Target has the best Loss Prevention in the business, including let shoplifters continue until they accumulate enough goods that their crime is a felony.

Partner spent a significant time working at Target, can confirm

Their Loss Prevention is so advanced that FBI has collaborated with them for case help

https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-for...

I also worked there briefly in my teens, they are a great employer.

Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology.

Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-inv...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...

> Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology.

Can confirm - my wife called in a complaint about some graffiti / vandalism or something that was obscene in a target, and when she got a call back from a rep they were able to pinpoint everywhere she went in the store to determine which sign she was talking about...

they have the best marketed loss prevention: by getting nerds to talk about, people are like, ooo i shouldn't shoplift at target

of course, without any real data, how would anyone know?

Every self checkout around here has an employee staffing ~6 terminals. They're supposed to be watching for things like that. Usually theyre just staring vacantly into space, which I get, that job pays nothing and provides 0 mental stimulation.

When you see a TV being purchased, though, it wouldn't be hard to just watch that it in fact got checked in as such.

> Usually theyre just staring vacantly into space

That's far from my experience. Usually they're overworked with a backlog of customers having some kind of issue needing attention. It usually takes a few minutes to flag one down when I need them to take a coupon or check and ID, because they're already busy doing something for another customer.

Same experience here. The one "monitor" employee is busy nearly full time helping out with some issue some customer is having, such that they simply can't be monitoring that everyone's items are ringing up as the actual item instead of "bananas".

But every terminal also has a spycam hanging above it to either "give the appearance" of a big-brother overlord watching to encourage honesty, or is recording everything so that someone can review footage later if some issue is discovered.

Depending on the store those cameras are definitely processing the feed locally to flag shady stuff. I've had a few times I've done something "odd" (not stealing anything but definitely not the normal flow of scan a single item and put in a bag) and have had those systems freak out on me, and the only part of it being weird it would have known was the camera feed.

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