Some years ago, a Microsoft millionaire decided to open a coffee shop in Kirkland. There were no prices posted. The idea was the customer ordered coffee, and paid what he thought it was worth. I asked the cashier several times what a reasonable price would be, and I would pay it. She absolutely refused to give any hint what a reasonable price was, and said I could pay nothing if I thought it was worth nothing.
I don't recall what I paid, but it was probably too much. I felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. I didn't want to underpay and take advantage, and I didn't want to overpay and be a sucker.
It didn't last long, next time I was in the neighborhood it had disappeared.
I remember a wine bar in the 1990s in Washington DC like that. It was even worse because while people can generally ballpark what a cup of coffee (or a fancier drink like a latte) costs from experience, wine can vary tremendously in cost. Was I drinking a $3 glass of wine or a $15 one? I generally had no idea. But like your coffee shop, it wasn't long for the world.
In a related story, my dad told me about a popular cafe in Los Angeles during the Depression that was the same model, pay what you think the meal was worth. They had lots of business. Occasionally someone would pay nothing, and would be met by other customers outside, who would beat them up, saying "this cafe is one of the good guys, don't you dare take advantage." And word would get out.
There was a business, Lentil as Anything, that operated on a similar principle here for years. There was a pretty big customer segment that ate there often and paid nothing though.
It went out of business last year. Very sad. Just mismanagement more than anything,
My bank is a community-oriented one, and works on a "pay what you wish" model, but it's careful to suggest tiers: X pays for your account, X*2 pays for someone who can't pay, Y funds whatever.
Pay what you wish model? I sure would love my mortgage to be a 30 year at 0.01% APR. Something tells me if all the rest of the customers asked the same that bank wouldn't be around very long.
Its not a bad thing for both parties to be up front with what is reasonable to them.
Wine gets a lot of "marketing" around it before you've had it, in order to mark up the prices. As consumers you're conditioned to expect to pay high prices for certain metadata about the wine.
The question should be, in a double blind glass of wine, how do you know what it's worth?
There are a number of leftist and anarchist owned cafes around that operate at least partially on a pay what you can, or PWYC model for parts of their menu. Places like Lazy Cow Bakery in Seattle or The Anarchist in Toronto (https://theanarchist.ca/).
As someone who has been homeless and penniless, and now makes a senior engineering income, I really really appreciate the places that do this.
BTW, after reading their interesting web site, I don't think they are leftists at all. Their business model is based on making money through voluntary agreements and exchanges.
"our workers get part ownership of the bakery and to make decisions about their wages and work hours"
Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism.
"Located inside our bakery is our free community fridge & food pantry. Donations are welcome anytime during normal business hours."
>> "our workers get part ownership of the bakery and to make decisions about their wages and work hours"
> Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism
Sounds like workers (part) owning the means of production, so socialism. A cooperative, where workers participate in ownership and decision making, is something inspired by socialist ideas and ideals, so it's pretty leftist by definition. The fact that it takes place within the framework of free* market capitalism doesn't make it an extension of the latter.
> Socialism is the government providing goods and services, which requires coercion.
No, this is flat out wrong, on so many levels.
First, this is not what socialism is. Go read a few books on the matter, a ton have been written. The short of it is that the focus of socialism is workers and them owning the means of production. Historically socialism has been about fighting against the (existing) government for that, and replacing the traditional power structures (e.g. the soviets/workers councils that popped up in Russia).
Second, a government providing services is called common sense and is a component of everything outside of (very specific types of) anarchy. Goods is another matter.
> Free market means voluntary exchanges
Depends on one's interpretation. E.g. there's a drastic power imbalance in the vast majority of labour relations. That's why there have been so many regulations to restrict the abuses resulting from that imbalance. So an absolutely free market does have a significant involuntary component to it (child/dangerous/very long labour).
I'm genuinely curious where you picked up this mental model.
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of socialism, no doubt, but what you are describing isn't socialism.
Other comments have provided some things to look into, but if genuinely want to learn, I'm happy to explain and answer questions. Who knows, maybe it'll arm you to have stronger arguments against lefties like me, maybe it'll make you go, "oh that's all they want? Shit, I agree with at least some of that." Or maybe you'll still be (incorrectly) convinced that socialism is when "the government does stuff."
I'm surprised more places aren't doing this. These self checkout devices are incredibly popular and usually understaffed. Walmart in my experience is the only place doing this right. Every time I end up there I go through self checkout and invariable have to get all my bags checked against my receipt.
Otherwise it's on the honor system. That never works. But I'm sure there's some actuarial equation to this.
I have never had my receipt inspected leaving a Walmart. I’ve heard about this, and perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I wonder if they only do this at stores with high shrinkage. In other words, only the bad neighborhood Walmarts.
I knew someone who would routinely shoplift clothes from Walmart. They'd essentially change all the clothes with new ones while at the store most times they'd go. They were never challenged leaving even though they'd walk past the greeter wearing a completely different outfit than when they came in.
Not that I endorse such a thing, I did not approve of that person's actions. I mentioned it once when leaving, the greeter shrugged.
Some places just price in the shrink and honestly don't care.
I worked in grocery for a decade until going into accounting. The labor saved by self checkout is ridiculous. The hours for front end staff were reduced by an order of magnitude in my time there. They were always pushing us to pull people to self checkout to reach the required utilization rates and other ridiculous measure-targets. It started at 20% self checkout utilization rate, then creeped up over the years to 60%. Of course that means less staff.
It's a distributed system. You can almost always scan faster than a cashier and you know exactly what quantity and item you intended to buy. Moreover, a cursory (rather than colonoscopy level) scan of "big ticket" items that are commonly stolen is probably more than sufficient to deter most thieves.
The walmart bill check fails when you purchase many items. Having bags checked creates distrust and wouldn't be necessary if they hired employees to scan.
It's kind of sad that some kind of tedious bag check is "doing it right". If you have to go through that, why bother with the self-checkout at all instead of going through a human cashier?
Where I live, the self checkouts in all stores are basically unmonitored, don't have any item weight consistency checks, and basically the only thing that causes staff to be summoned is buying something that requires agree verification. In the last three years, I've exclusively used these and not once have they checked my bag. Seems to work, at least in that nobody has tried tightening their systems.
(Of course what works in a high trust society won't work in low trust ones, and vice versa.)
The UX is right but the business logic is strange. It's obvious it's entirely possible to casually walk out with goods you didn't pay for. I've done it a few times by accident and returned to pay.
How many people don't return to pay? If you have say, 70,000 unique customers in a year the loss could add up quickly. The only way I could imagine this working is having some flex in the budget for theft that is being used up by these systems. In that case, it might be that "encouraging" people to steal smaller, cheaper items may save you on theft of big ticket items. So much so it's worth it.
I've noticed Walmart does automated monitoring of self checkout. Once I got flagged at checkout when I placed the scanned item directly in my shopping bag instead of the designated shelf; the person who came to inspect my lit up station showed me the video excerpt from a camera overhead that detected the movement discrepancy.
In the UK self-checkouts are very common even in the smaller supermarket chain shops.
I use them in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Waitrose, you name it. In fact, in Waitrose you can scan and bag as you go, without even having to weigh anything. At the end, you go to a checkout machine, scan its barcode, pay for the items you've scanned and go.
Once I was chosen for a random bag check (it happens at the checkout - the machine tells you and an employee comes over). They sampled about 50% of my bag and the system unlocked so I could finish paying and go.
It seems to work fine. More shops are beginning to adopt this system.
That system is superior to the system I've experienced in America which is either a mandatory door check of your bags, or no check at all. There doesn't seem to be an in-between at all in any place I've been to.
I used to use a similar system for a local shop, the day they picked me out for a bag check, I took each item out, left it on the floor, had the guy okay it and walked away.
There needs to be punishments for false accusations, unfortunately the best I could do was waste a little bit of the stores time.
I was not accused of anything. The system randomly selected my transaction for a check. The employee performing the check didn’t make me feel accused at all at any time either, she was very nice and clearly would have rather been doing something else in fact.
I’ve been using this system frequently for years and had to go through this check exactly once.
I love this random sampling technique. Flying into Mexico once, I noted they used a random bag check up on entry--a light would indicate if you had to go to the bag check line.
It was unbiased and heartless so you couldn't play it cool and fool it.
Sure, there was like a 3/4 chance (or something) you'd get through with your weed, but it wasn't worth the risk and penalty.
I confess that the moment I saw self check out being installed at a grocery store in 2000, I felt the future was at hand. 22 years later, I go out of my way to avoid them. I hate self check out. Have I become a Luddite? Lazy?
I think I just really like the convenience of someone else ringing all of that up and putting it into the bags, etc.
Edit: perhaps the future is to charge customers more who want full service. You can either check out and bag your own, or for some price more you get full service where someone else does it.
I use both, with an internal evaluation about which is faster. Self-checkout is always slower, because you must complete one item at a time, and I don't have the codes for the produce memorized. With the cashier he can scan multiples at a time, has all the codes memorized, and I bag while he scans.
So I look at the lines, the amounts in carts in the lines, who is in the lines, and make my guess which is faster.
Self checkout would be a great idea, if you used the same software the cashiers used.
Unfortunately, like every software made since 2010, its gimped so that it doesn't scare people, so its too slow. I used a scanner at home to scan my books (they are just usb keyboards, so surprisingly easy to integrate in e.g a spreadsheet), and the scan was so quick. I could go through all my grocecies in basically no time if all I had to was scan them.
So I always pick the cashier, and then start reading on my phone while standing in line. This essentially reduces the wasted time close to zero, even if it does not reduce the wall time to zero.
I had a really strange experience at a self checkout just two hours ago. The employee monitoring the terminals suspected I was entering items incorrectly (intentionally), and came over to review my basket and what I’d entered.
She became flustered when she saw everything was correct, then began rapidly and somewhat forcefully checking the rest of my items through. Was it that she didn’t trust me? Was I doing something that looked suspicious?
Maybe there’s a lot of shop lifting and their job security is at risk when it occurs on their shifts. In any case it made me regret choosing self checkout – I’ll definitely think twice in the future.
Ironically my wife steals things in self checkout constantly and I never have (nor would I), but somehow I’m the one who gets picked out for a thorough check.
I feel for that employee, anyways. I was a little frustrated and bothered by it at first, especially when she began checking my items through for me. Then I realized she must deal with people being pretty awful and lying to her all the time – I wouldn’t last a day.
>> Ironically my wife steals things in self checkout constantly
Not to pass judgment on your wife or anything like that, but I’m very curious: Has this changed the way you feel about your wife or her judgment?
I was just thinking to myself that if my wife said that she stole things constantly through self check out, I would advise her that it would be wise to stop. To me it’s reckless, you may never get caught, but you might get caught, and who knows what incident that might create.
I can scan things faster than the register can take it. It gives me a beep, I move on. Then I see the register is missing items, and getting out of sync with the scale function. Most things I buy are light-weight, so the computer decides to just fudge it and move on.
(And if you notice after the fact that you've moved it onto the belt, you can't take it back, the system will hang and block you from going on until you put it back).
I'm not trying to steal, just their hardware can't keep up, and I'm not going to slow down to watch to make sure every beep corresponds to a successful item rung up.
What would you say of the case where you do all your grocery shopping and they close the full service checkouts right as you wrap up and force self checkout? You’ve agreed to shop with the intention of having a cashier and they unilaterally change the terms after you’ve invested your time… I’d say unilaterally changing goods received is just as much theft as unilaterally changing payment.
In that scenario you have a choice - pay the additional cost of being your own cashier or don't and leave without your goods. Importantly both you and the store are agreeing on what's being sold and what's being paid. The agreement is what constitutes consent, or shopping versus theft.
We’re very open about it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with her philosophy about why it’s circumstantially acceptable, and she’s well aware.
I’m not concerned about her getting caught (I think that would be a good thing), I’m more so concerned that the activity contributes to rising prices, it’s a detriment to the commons in a sense, it should have a real impact on her conscience, and it’s laughably unnecessary. We earn so much more than the median income for our over priced region; we could pay double for everything and barely feel it.
If it's just for fun and not a lot then the enjoyment she gets is probably worth more than the thing being stolen and the negative externalities of it. Some men do martial arts to practice violence, if she wants to practice thievery and it's not really hurting anyone then it's not great, but why not? We all have thieves in our family tree.
And you can reasonably guess that the "incident" it will create will be proportionate to the value of the thing being stolen. If you cause a scene over someone else not paying for a $2 candy bar, you're the asshole.
Do you share a rewards account at that store with your wife, who steals things constantly? It wouldn't surprise me if the sales system could recognize suspicious customers and flag them for review based on a rewards number/account.
It's something I wondered about whenever I see those fully-automated store prototypes. Whenever you have a system like that you'll soon find out how much creativity the most mischievous people have. The ability of people to get around this stuff is pretty much limitless in ways you can't even imagine when you put safeguards in.
I think they'll pretty much only work out in places that have such strict laws and culture around theft that people don't even attempt it.
For those who didn’t read the article, they’re not ending “self-checkout” with dedicated lanes and scanner machines.
This is a smartphone app system that they briefly rolled out and have now paused/abandoned. It did not require going through a line at all, which presumably made it much easier to ‘accidentally’ not scan an item here or there.
We're not just talking about self-checkout, but an app that bypasses checkout completely.
New York (CNN Business)In 2019, Wegmans, the cult-favorite northeastern grocery chain, rolled out a new mobile app that allowed customers to scan, bag and pay for groceries while they shopped and then skip the checkout line altogether.
My local little Sainsbury does that. I use it all the time. It's very handy.
The larger one a bit further away let's you do all of that except that there's still a checkout for paying at and they do a re-check of a few items every so often.
I used the SCAN app exactly once about a year ago and loved it. However it only worked that one time. Every other time it could not connect.
It was truely great, it put so much trust in you. Self-checkout stations don't let you remove items, but this app let you edit the cart as you liked. Scanned something twice, not a problem. Put something back? just remove it.
Checking out was a 30second task, and it did feel a little weird. I had a whole cart full of stuff, scanned my phone, paid, and left. I put a lot of care into making sure everything was there and accurate, but I can see how easy it was to abuse. Easily could have not scanned half the things in there.
An interesting thing was that it didn't actually save much, if any, time. Maybe even took sightly longer overall. Scanning with the phone every time you added something means pausing in the store to do it, switching between scan mode and shopping mode wasn't seamless for me. Putting something back after you scanned meant fiddling with your phone for a little bit. Maybe if I was able to do it more then once it would have become significantly faster.
If someone is desperate enough to steal food for their child, I'd rather have Kroger write off the loss than see a kid go hungry.
I can't bring myself to think that the other outcome (Kroger saves $3, child good hungry) is the just outcome.
Should we have great social safety systems that prevent anyone from going hungry? Yes. Do we? No.
So in the absence of support and safety nets, I'm just not going to fault anyone who is dealing with the stress of "my child is starving but I can't afford food" and decides to pocket a couple containers of mashed carrots and peas.
Every state has support for children, pretty much every largish church will as well, along with thousands of charities. Children are the least likely people to be not have help. It is possible a parent doesn't know about these resources but they are there.
I feel the same way about your personal belongings, socialismisok. What does it hurt if someone steals your catalytic converter once in a while, or smashes your window in, or mugs you. Small inconveniences, oh well. They probably needed it more than you did. I volunteer your stuff to be donated to such charitable causes.
You know what though? Whoever stole that shit was in more desperate situation than I'm in. Insurance covered it, I moved on. Hardest part was the emotional burden of having someone in your stuff.
Now, Kroger? Kroger doesn't have feelings. They won't care because they can't care. They write off the loss, same as if an employee broke a bunch of jars or as if they couldn't sell the product before it expired.
Again, I'm not saying all theft is good. I'm saying some theft might not be inexcusable.
I'd wager almost all shoplifting has nothing to do with organized crime. You'll get the occasional junkie trying to steal and then sell something moderately expensive like laundry detergent, but mostly it's individuals taking a crime of opportunity for themselves. At least it seemed that way when I worked in a grocery store for a while based off our inventory and security.
A couple blatant alcohol grab and runs by homeless alcoholics, a couple small luxury items like a nicer cut of meat that someone didn't want to pay for, small items like candies or toys, and a couple necessities or staples like loaves of bread (and I do feel bad for anyone stealing cheap bread).
Those goods are just as capable of being fenced as any other, and we already have social safety net programs for people who actually need them but can't afford them.
13.5 million household in America were not able to secure enough food to meet their needs last year.
That's about 10%, or about 30,000,000 people.
If we had social safety net programs that solved food insecurity, I'd think different. But when one in every ten people can't get enough food? I'd say we don't really have safety nets or of we do they have huge holes in them.
Good call. Given the stigma and shame in the US associated with being poor, that number probably does undercount people who skipped meals but didn't want to admit it.
Oh please. It doesn't matter if I yelled my face of, rung a fucking klaxon and a search light at the person. If they run, the store is going to do jack shit about it because theft is cheaper than a workplace injury.
And if you had a baby that you cannot feed, apply for WIC or whatever. Don't steal.
You ever applied for food stamps? I have. If your kids are hungry right now, you aren't getting WIC instantly. And you ever live on $50 month for food? I have, it's not easy. I guarantee you that getting nutritionally sound meals prepped on that kind of benefit is near impossible.
That seems unnecessarily harsh to me. Sometimes you get in to a car accident or develop cancer when you don't have a support network around. Sometimes life happens.
Good I very much hate self check-outs. Maybe if they offered discounts for use, maybe if they worked better, but the current practice of just off-loading labor on the customer I do not like.
On a side rant, is anyone else bothered as much as I am at how self-checkouts force this tediously slow pacing for doing each step. You can't just scan-scan-scan-pay. Instead its scan...."place item in bag"...pause... now you can scan the next item. Do it too quickly and it freezes up. The regular checkouts don't have this issue. Drives me absolutely crazy.
In Norway, self checkout is more or less scan-scan-scan-pay. It works well, in my experience, and most stores also have the traditional regular checkout.
I'm curious if the shop-lifting challenge is similar in Norway. I would expect not, since it is a very trusting society, but I have never seen any real numbers on this topic.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadI don't recall what I paid, but it was probably too much. I felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. I didn't want to underpay and take advantage, and I didn't want to overpay and be a sucker.
It didn't last long, next time I was in the neighborhood it had disappeared.
Not exactly. I value my honor, and honor is what you do when others are not looking. The cashier had no idea who I was.
As I've remarked before on HN, my father told me that honor is what separates men from animals. And men get to choose whether they are men or animals.
It went out of business last year. Very sad. Just mismanagement more than anything,
It makes you comfortable about the experience.
Its not a bad thing for both parties to be up front with what is reasonable to them.
They have been around for 25 years.
The question should be, in a double blind glass of wine, how do you know what it's worth?
As someone who has been homeless and penniless, and now makes a senior engineering income, I really really appreciate the places that do this.
https://www.lazycowbakeryseattle.com/copy-of-order-form-1
BTW, after reading their interesting web site, I don't think they are leftists at all. Their business model is based on making money through voluntary agreements and exchanges.
"our workers get part ownership of the bakery and to make decisions about their wages and work hours"
Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism.
"Located inside our bakery is our free community fridge & food pantry. Donations are welcome anytime during normal business hours."
Sounds like charity, not leftism.
http://www.islandbreath.org/2010Year/11/101103jpmorgan.jpg
> Sounds like free market capitalism, not leftism
Sounds like workers (part) owning the means of production, so socialism. A cooperative, where workers participate in ownership and decision making, is something inspired by socialist ideas and ideals, so it's pretty leftist by definition. The fact that it takes place within the framework of free* market capitalism doesn't make it an extension of the latter.
Socialism is the government providing goods and services, which requires coercion.
No, this is flat out wrong, on so many levels.
First, this is not what socialism is. Go read a few books on the matter, a ton have been written. The short of it is that the focus of socialism is workers and them owning the means of production. Historically socialism has been about fighting against the (existing) government for that, and replacing the traditional power structures (e.g. the soviets/workers councils that popped up in Russia).
Second, a government providing services is called common sense and is a component of everything outside of (very specific types of) anarchy. Goods is another matter.
> Free market means voluntary exchanges
Depends on one's interpretation. E.g. there's a drastic power imbalance in the vast majority of labour relations. That's why there have been so many regulations to restrict the abuses resulting from that imbalance. So an absolutely free market does have a significant involuntary component to it (child/dangerous/very long labour).
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of socialism, no doubt, but what you are describing isn't socialism.
Other comments have provided some things to look into, but if genuinely want to learn, I'm happy to explain and answer questions. Who knows, maybe it'll arm you to have stronger arguments against lefties like me, maybe it'll make you go, "oh that's all they want? Shit, I agree with at least some of that." Or maybe you'll still be (incorrectly) convinced that socialism is when "the government does stuff."
Otherwise it's on the honor system. That never works. But I'm sure there's some actuarial equation to this.
Not that I endorse such a thing, I did not approve of that person's actions. I mentioned it once when leaving, the greeter shrugged.
Some places just price in the shrink and honestly don't care.
Where I live, the self checkouts in all stores are basically unmonitored, don't have any item weight consistency checks, and basically the only thing that causes staff to be summoned is buying something that requires agree verification. In the last three years, I've exclusively used these and not once have they checked my bag. Seems to work, at least in that nobody has tried tightening their systems.
(Of course what works in a high trust society won't work in low trust ones, and vice versa.)
How many people don't return to pay? If you have say, 70,000 unique customers in a year the loss could add up quickly. The only way I could imagine this working is having some flex in the budget for theft that is being used up by these systems. In that case, it might be that "encouraging" people to steal smaller, cheaper items may save you on theft of big ticket items. So much so it's worth it.
I use them in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Waitrose, you name it. In fact, in Waitrose you can scan and bag as you go, without even having to weigh anything. At the end, you go to a checkout machine, scan its barcode, pay for the items you've scanned and go.
Once I was chosen for a random bag check (it happens at the checkout - the machine tells you and an employee comes over). They sampled about 50% of my bag and the system unlocked so I could finish paying and go.
It seems to work fine. More shops are beginning to adopt this system.
There needs to be punishments for false accusations, unfortunately the best I could do was waste a little bit of the stores time.
I’ve been using this system frequently for years and had to go through this check exactly once.
Yes, thats the accusation.
It was unbiased and heartless so you couldn't play it cool and fool it.
Sure, there was like a 3/4 chance (or something) you'd get through with your weed, but it wasn't worth the risk and penalty.
And the line was processed really quickly.
I think I just really like the convenience of someone else ringing all of that up and putting it into the bags, etc.
Edit: perhaps the future is to charge customers more who want full service. You can either check out and bag your own, or for some price more you get full service where someone else does it.
So I look at the lines, the amounts in carts in the lines, who is in the lines, and make my guess which is faster.
I usually self checkout but I have an issue at least 70% of the time
Unfortunately, like every software made since 2010, its gimped so that it doesn't scare people, so its too slow. I used a scanner at home to scan my books (they are just usb keyboards, so surprisingly easy to integrate in e.g a spreadsheet), and the scan was so quick. I could go through all my grocecies in basically no time if all I had to was scan them.
So I always pick the cashier, and then start reading on my phone while standing in line. This essentially reduces the wasted time close to zero, even if it does not reduce the wall time to zero.
She became flustered when she saw everything was correct, then began rapidly and somewhat forcefully checking the rest of my items through. Was it that she didn’t trust me? Was I doing something that looked suspicious?
Maybe there’s a lot of shop lifting and their job security is at risk when it occurs on their shifts. In any case it made me regret choosing self checkout – I’ll definitely think twice in the future.
Ironically my wife steals things in self checkout constantly and I never have (nor would I), but somehow I’m the one who gets picked out for a thorough check.
I feel for that employee, anyways. I was a little frustrated and bothered by it at first, especially when she began checking my items through for me. Then I realized she must deal with people being pretty awful and lying to her all the time – I wouldn’t last a day.
Not to pass judgment on your wife or anything like that, but I’m very curious: Has this changed the way you feel about your wife or her judgment?
I was just thinking to myself that if my wife said that she stole things constantly through self check out, I would advise her that it would be wise to stop. To me it’s reckless, you may never get caught, but you might get caught, and who knows what incident that might create.
I can scan things faster than the register can take it. It gives me a beep, I move on. Then I see the register is missing items, and getting out of sync with the scale function. Most things I buy are light-weight, so the computer decides to just fudge it and move on. (And if you notice after the fact that you've moved it onto the belt, you can't take it back, the system will hang and block you from going on until you put it back).
I'm not trying to steal, just their hardware can't keep up, and I'm not going to slow down to watch to make sure every beep corresponds to a successful item rung up.
What would you say of the case where you do all your grocery shopping and they close the full service checkouts right as you wrap up and force self checkout? You’ve agreed to shop with the intention of having a cashier and they unilaterally change the terms after you’ve invested your time… I’d say unilaterally changing goods received is just as much theft as unilaterally changing payment.
(Which will usually actually cost them more than just stealing some small item which doesn’t justify either.)
I’m not concerned about her getting caught (I think that would be a good thing), I’m more so concerned that the activity contributes to rising prices, it’s a detriment to the commons in a sense, it should have a real impact on her conscience, and it’s laughably unnecessary. We earn so much more than the median income for our over priced region; we could pay double for everything and barely feel it.
And you can reasonably guess that the "incident" it will create will be proportionate to the value of the thing being stolen. If you cause a scene over someone else not paying for a $2 candy bar, you're the asshole.
I wonder if she was trained to do that so that you'd think she just came to help.
I think they'll pretty much only work out in places that have such strict laws and culture around theft that people don't even attempt it.
This is a smartphone app system that they briefly rolled out and have now paused/abandoned. It did not require going through a line at all, which presumably made it much easier to ‘accidentally’ not scan an item here or there.
New York (CNN Business)In 2019, Wegmans, the cult-favorite northeastern grocery chain, rolled out a new mobile app that allowed customers to scan, bag and pay for groceries while they shopped and then skip the checkout line altogether.
Not surprised it failed
The larger one a bit further away let's you do all of that except that there's still a checkout for paying at and they do a re-check of a few items every so often.
It was truely great, it put so much trust in you. Self-checkout stations don't let you remove items, but this app let you edit the cart as you liked. Scanned something twice, not a problem. Put something back? just remove it.
Checking out was a 30second task, and it did feel a little weird. I had a whole cart full of stuff, scanned my phone, paid, and left. I put a lot of care into making sure everything was there and accurate, but I can see how easy it was to abuse. Easily could have not scanned half the things in there.
An interesting thing was that it didn't actually save much, if any, time. Maybe even took sightly longer overall. Scanning with the phone every time you added something means pausing in the store to do it, switching between scan mode and shopping mode wasn't seamless for me. Putting something back after you scanned meant fiddling with your phone for a little bit. Maybe if I was able to do it more then once it would have become significantly faster.
And even if not that particular case, it's just ok to do that? Yeah, why do we have prices on those things anyway.
Ok, "socialismisok"...
I can't bring myself to think that the other outcome (Kroger saves $3, child good hungry) is the just outcome.
Should we have great social safety systems that prevent anyone from going hungry? Yes. Do we? No.
So in the absence of support and safety nets, I'm just not going to fault anyone who is dealing with the stress of "my child is starving but I can't afford food" and decides to pocket a couple containers of mashed carrots and peas.
You know what though? Whoever stole that shit was in more desperate situation than I'm in. Insurance covered it, I moved on. Hardest part was the emotional burden of having someone in your stuff.
Now, Kroger? Kroger doesn't have feelings. They won't care because they can't care. They write off the loss, same as if an employee broke a bunch of jars or as if they couldn't sell the product before it expired.
Again, I'm not saying all theft is good. I'm saying some theft might not be inexcusable.
A couple blatant alcohol grab and runs by homeless alcoholics, a couple small luxury items like a nicer cut of meat that someone didn't want to pay for, small items like candies or toys, and a couple necessities or staples like loaves of bread (and I do feel bad for anyone stealing cheap bread).
That's about 10%, or about 30,000,000 people.
If we had social safety net programs that solved food insecurity, I'd think different. But when one in every ten people can't get enough food? I'd say we don't really have safety nets or of we do they have huge holes in them.
Or are you here telling me Robin Hood was the villain?
I guess I disagree. I don't see him as the villain.
Also, runaway slaves in antebellum south were considered property, and people helping them escape were sometimes tried (and hanged) as thieves.
And you must absolutely hate going through artist alleys at conventions, as IP theft is everywhere!
And if you had a baby that you cannot feed, apply for WIC or whatever. Don't steal.
It's not a failure to need help.
On a side rant, is anyone else bothered as much as I am at how self-checkouts force this tediously slow pacing for doing each step. You can't just scan-scan-scan-pay. Instead its scan...."place item in bag"...pause... now you can scan the next item. Do it too quickly and it freezes up. The regular checkouts don't have this issue. Drives me absolutely crazy.
I'm curious if the shop-lifting challenge is similar in Norway. I would expect not, since it is a very trusting society, but I have never seen any real numbers on this topic.