What happens is that your identity is tied to these purchases and after a certain threshold you get flagged as a thief, essentially. At that point, you will get very increased attention (via checkout, purchases, and floor walkers), and after another threshold, will be trespassed and/or prosecuted.
But, you'll probably get away with a banana or few before you trigger the loss prevention threshold.
Of course, the smart thieves would just take whatever into a bathroom, open it up, then stuff it somewhere in a coat and walk out the door. Those were really tricky, since we couldn’t “prove” it since we didn’t have full video coverage (for obvious reasons) so we’d just trespass those people. We had a lot of off duty cops because our location was particularly bad, making $30 an hour to mostly sit around and play games on their phones and look intimidating standing at the front door and walking around the store.
I hate self checkout.
At my grocery store, it very often complains about something when I'm checking out. The person comes over, reviews the video and said you aren't doing anything wrong.
The answer is don't go to places where you self-checkout, and don't go to places with surveillance. There are still a couple of grocery stores in my town like that.
Ironically, some of the store security look exactly like you. They come in all shapes, sizes, grooming standards, styles, and tattoo levels. I've seen some in full-on Juggalo outfits and neck/face tattoos.
Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.
When I watched movies and TV shows I had this idea that thieves were all clever people who built smart systems to evade detection and steal right out from under big corporations. Some of those people might be out there operating undetected, but the average thief who gets caught is someone trying to abuse something as much as they can until they get caught. Some of them are so brazen (like the scan everything as bananas post above) that they must believe that nobody will ever check and if they do get caught nothing bad will happen.
The staff who watch these things have a good sense of what dollar thresholds the customer must cross before getting law enforcement involved.
I'm not sure it's the super system it's sold as.
A major supermarket chain in Australia (Coles) is literally a client of Palantir.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
All this has done is train us to keep the carts out of the camera's viewing angle. It doesn't care if you keep pulling handfuls of groceries out of hammer space, as long as there's no cart in the frame.
I scanned a drink, heard the beep, put it in the bag. I scanned a loaf of bread, heard a beep, put it in the bag.
Now, instead of the typical "Unexpected item in the bagging area" it now shows the overhead replay and locks the system out until an employee comes over to review.
Combined with their exit gates that don't open if they think you've not paid for something, and cameras that track you through the store it's feeling very unfriendly.
So seems pretty good. Obviously erring on the side of having an employee double check makes sense when their profit margins are generally single digits. One missed tshirt means they lost money on your $300 cart.
Personally, I always just say “no thank you!” and walk past the receipt checker at non members stores. They know me at Walmart and know I’ll refuse the receipt check and stopped bothering me.