Anytime corpos blame theft there’s always another reason. I wonder what the real reason they’re doing this is; are the automated checkout companies increasing prices or perhaps they’re charging a percentage of the items that go through their machines?
It’s never theft, just like a failing economy isn’t on the millennials, and you can’t personally save the environment through recycling and using less gas in your car. The real problems are only covered up by blaming individuals, specifically it ends up being something like “our stores are costing because of downtown theft” then you find out it’s because downtown stores are doing half the business as before the pandemic and it was never theft.
>are the automated checkout companies increasing prices
How would this work? The items have price tags on shelves. You can't arbitrarily jack up prices without attracting consumer outrage and/or regulatory scrutiny.
>perhaps they’re charging a percentage of the items that go through their machines
That wouldn't affect the raw sales data, which is how "shrink" is determined (ie. goods you've bought - goods you've sold)
>It’s never theft
What makes you so sure of this? Theft is a real phenomenon, so it's at least somewhat plausible that it's affecting stuff. You'd have to have pretty good exculpatory evidence to assert it's "never theft".
>specifically it ends up being something like “our stores are costing because of downtown theft” then you find out it’s because downtown stores are doing half the business as before the pandemic and it was never theft.
For the first point, I usually assume the checkouts are run by third party vendors and charge a fee for the automated systems. I was saying that perhaps those third parties have started to raise prices for the operation of the checkout machines because it’s harder to find cheap labor, so now that corpos have gone all in on automated jobs they’re in a hard place. Maybe not, but I wasn’t saying the checked out item prices were being changed, that’d be stupid.
Your own source admits it's real, albeit limited to certain cities
"But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic."
That's hardly enough to support the claim it's "never shoplifting".
The CNBC investigation this story was based on uses official crime statistics. Seems reasonable, until you realize that if officials aren't responding to crime reports (eg. lenient DAs), stores might not bother reporting, which makes it seem like crime is going down when it really isn't. You can see this in the nytimes article, which has both reported crime data as well as retailers' inventory ("shrink") data. The latter is obviously less susceptible to this effect, and we see that even though the reported crime rates were down 14% (45.1 -> 38.6), shrink was only down 3% (1.62 -> 1.57).
The two above combined makes the exculpatory evidence for "it's never theft" to be pretty weak.
So theft is up in NYC and no other major cities, that’s considered an outlier in that case. Everywhere else, theft is down and not an issue.
Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.
> So theft is up in NYC and no other major cities, that’s considered an outlier in that case. Everywhere else, theft is down and not an issue.
That's extrapolating too much from what the article actually claims. It only says that shoplifting incidents "in major cities" (whatever that means) as a whole has gone down. That's not the same as "So theft is up in NYC and no other major cities". Moreover, the claim you made isn't that thefts are down on average across the country, it's that "It’s never theft". Even if it's just new york, that invalidates your "It’s never theft" claim. Murder rates are down across the country as well, but that doesn't mean you can claim it's "never murder".
>Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.
>Get real comrade.
1. Is "maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime" really that hard to believe? The National Crime Victimization Survey puts the reporting rate for property crimes to be 26%. Once you stack non-response to the actual survey on top, you'd be a fool to take any self-reported crime statistics at face value.
2. True, shrink could be caused by other factors, btu is there any reason to believe that "lost or destroyed inventory" would have gone up? I find it baffling that you dismiss the idea of retailers not reporting thefts, but are seemingly convinced of the idea that retailer reported shrink is caused by other factors without providing any justification, "comrade".
> Literally everyone (except apparently you) is stealing from these retailers
I guess that's why I can't have nice things. What really bothers me is people who scam insurance and then boast to me about it as if I'm gonna tap them on the back for "sticking it to the man" when they're stealing money away from me by causing my insurance primes to increase but are too stupid to realize it.
While I don't support that, that argument only works if your insurance is truly a nonprofit. If profit is involved, they can increase your primes even without people stealing simply for the sake of profit.
> That analysis showed that self-checkout led to a shrink rate more than 16 times higher than traditional cashier lines. Nearly 7% of self-checkout transactions had at least some amount of partial shrink, compared to 0.32% with cashiers. The analysis also suggested a shrink rate of 3.5% for self-checkout machines, while conventional cashiers only saw a 0.21% shrink rate.
> For its study, the company used computer vision to analyze nearly 5,000 retail transactions, comparing items the shoppers picked up during their shopping trip with transaction data to see what was actually purchased
Then
> According to Grabango, checkout-free technology powered by computer vision can help eliminate self-checkout shrink by tracking what shoppers pick up and charging them exactly what they owe. The company also stressed that average supermarkets could increase bottom-line profits by more than 50% per year by eliminating partial shrink from self-checkout alone.
First, I don’t trust a company selling something to say they did a study, literally using that product, and the result of the study was to sell you something new. Not only that, but everyone knows computer vision isn’t always perfect, it’s similar to LLM AI in that when it works it’s amazing but it’s hard to get working. For this study it seems like they trusted their CV product to be perfect and compared it to the human scanned item list and assumed that was inaccurate.
This article is literally just an ad, not a reliable source!
What’s the evidence other than from corpo press releases? They haven’t shown numbers or evidence that’s the real reason, and you can’t trust a corpo to tell the whole truth.
I just noticed today my local Walmart super center has signs limiting self-checkout to 15 items. They're not enforcing it -- I had that many yogurts, plus a dozen other things. But maybe, like when they eliminated providing any grocery bags at all in Washington, they'll give it a little time to sink in.
I think this is a positive step. Most of the time when online discussion about self-checkout theft would come up, there would be an uncomfortably larg number of people justifying their theft as "payment for doing a cashier's job". Basically "if you don't want me to steal, then hire someone to watch me".
Also it was inconvenient when I had about 30 items and a kid in the cart to do self-checkout.
>there would be an uncomfortably larg number of people justifying their theft as "payment for doing a cashier's job".
I realize you probably don't hold this position, but legality aside, that argument falls flat on its face when you consider the value of your time vs the value of items you're stealing. Self-checking out groceries takes maybe 3 minutes for a full cart? Suppose the store would have otherwise needed to hire a cashier earning $20/hr. Let's double that to account for other expenses like payroll taxes and insurance. $40/hr for 3 minutes works out to $2. That entitles you to a free candy bar, not ringing up a pack of steaks as bananas.
>Basically "if you don't want me to steal, then hire someone to watch me".
At the risk of being called a "corpo bootlicker" or whatever, this is basically along the same lines as "if you don't want me to grope you, don't dress provocatively".
Most I've been to in the past few years staff so sparsely that they have one maybe two staffed checkouts, even at peak "grab stuff on the way home from work" times. So your choice is to wait in that line for the single checkout, or the self checkout line for the 6-10 self checkout stations.
>Also unacceptable is requiring customers to do the job of an employee.
That's entirely subjective though. Around a century ago, Piggly Wiggly introduced the supermarket shopping experience as we know it today (ie. the shopper was responsible for picking items off the shelves, rather than having a clerk do it). I'm sure back then you could make the same argument that "unacceptable is requiring customers to do the job of an employee".
> Also unacceptable is requiring customers to do the job of an employee.
A grocery store is a store that takes money in exchange for groceries, not a store that takes money in exchange for poking buttons nor a store that takes money in exchange for putting things into bags. There's nothing inherently "job of an employee" about any button poking or bagging peripheral to trading payment for goods.
It's incorrect to assume that a customer should be happy being compensated for minutes at the same hourly wage the store would have paid a dedicated cashier over the course of a whole day. Rather for on-demand piecemeal work done by a more skilled generalist, a much higher rate is appropriate. In addition to a minimum call out time, of course.
Personally I just avoid self checkout unless I only have one or two items and the lines are bad. But even then it's not often worth getting annoyed by the sluggish hyperprescriptive workflows.
Self checkout isn't that quicker and is often slower than a regular manned checkout given a few obvious conditions. It's not really the speed that self checkout solves.
It may feel quicker to the consumer, speed is probably more predictable and it could increase throughput and efficiently use space. Most benefits are for the shop.
Needless to say a shop is able to reduce the speed of regular checkout to black pattern people into using self checkout
The stores I visit usually have 10+ self checkouts. It swallows a lot more people so you don't have to queue like in a regular store. It also allows people with fewer items to bypass the people with a full shopping cart because there are 9 other checkouts.
You also save time by putting the scanned items directly into your bag instead of putting them on a band for the cashier to scan, before you can put them into your bag.
So my experience is that it's faster most of the time.
I'm quite often waiting in line for self checkout. In theory people with only a few items go through, in practice people will sometimes go crazy with it. And of course some customers can be quite slow or get hung up so it isn't really predictable.
Drives me nuts to wait to take care of myself. I think they should give you a scanner gun you walk around the store with, then I can just leave.
I don't use self checkout, because I prefer human interaction to menial labor, even if it costs more. The number of edge cases handled by 'skilled human is present' is staggering.
I perceive the checkout kiosks as "the fast lane". Which gets invalidated if people with a full cart block them. Plus, the probability of something going wrong and them needing assistance is about 25% per item, with many items it's a sure thing they will need assistance and block the queue for a long time.
Get back to me at spyrecovery36 at gm ail co m if you want to proceed so i can explain in full details, that is if you want me to hack remotely
and install bugs on your spouses Email, social account, phone and other means to get contact of someone without him/her knowing,
39 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.4 ms ] threadIt’s never theft, just like a failing economy isn’t on the millennials, and you can’t personally save the environment through recycling and using less gas in your car. The real problems are only covered up by blaming individuals, specifically it ends up being something like “our stores are costing because of downtown theft” then you find out it’s because downtown stores are doing half the business as before the pandemic and it was never theft.
Edit: this comment has some links showing I’m correct, theft is a scapegoat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39740436
How would this work? The items have price tags on shelves. You can't arbitrarily jack up prices without attracting consumer outrage and/or regulatory scrutiny.
>perhaps they’re charging a percentage of the items that go through their machines
That wouldn't affect the raw sales data, which is how "shrink" is determined (ie. goods you've bought - goods you've sold)
>It’s never theft
What makes you so sure of this? Theft is a real phenomenon, so it's at least somewhat plausible that it's affecting stuff. You'd have to have pretty good exculpatory evidence to assert it's "never theft".
>specifically it ends up being something like “our stores are costing because of downtown theft” then you find out it’s because downtown stores are doing half the business as before the pandemic and it was never theft.
Source?
Edit: this one from further down the thread too: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data...
For the first point, I usually assume the checkouts are run by third party vendors and charge a fee for the automated systems. I was saying that perhaps those third parties have started to raise prices for the operation of the checkout machines because it’s harder to find cheap labor, so now that corpos have gone all in on automated jobs they’re in a hard place. Maybe not, but I wasn’t saying the checked out item prices were being changed, that’d be stupid.
Your own source admits it's real, albeit limited to certain cities
"But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic."
That's hardly enough to support the claim it's "never shoplifting".
>https://sfist.com/2023/12/22/sure-enough-shoplifting-was-not...
The CNBC investigation this story was based on uses official crime statistics. Seems reasonable, until you realize that if officials aren't responding to crime reports (eg. lenient DAs), stores might not bother reporting, which makes it seem like crime is going down when it really isn't. You can see this in the nytimes article, which has both reported crime data as well as retailers' inventory ("shrink") data. The latter is obviously less susceptible to this effect, and we see that even though the reported crime rates were down 14% (45.1 -> 38.6), shrink was only down 3% (1.62 -> 1.57).
The two above combined makes the exculpatory evidence for "it's never theft" to be pretty weak.
Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.
Get real comrade.
That's extrapolating too much from what the article actually claims. It only says that shoplifting incidents "in major cities" (whatever that means) as a whole has gone down. That's not the same as "So theft is up in NYC and no other major cities". Moreover, the claim you made isn't that thefts are down on average across the country, it's that "It’s never theft". Even if it's just new york, that invalidates your "It’s never theft" claim. Murder rates are down across the country as well, but that doesn't mean you can claim it's "never murder".
>Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.
>Get real comrade.
1. Is "maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime" really that hard to believe? The National Crime Victimization Survey puts the reporting rate for property crimes to be 26%. Once you stack non-response to the actual survey on top, you'd be a fool to take any self-reported crime statistics at face value.
2. True, shrink could be caused by other factors, btu is there any reason to believe that "lost or destroyed inventory" would have gone up? I find it baffling that you dismiss the idea of retailers not reporting thefts, but are seemingly convinced of the idea that retailer reported shrink is caused by other factors without providing any justification, "comrade".
The shrink rate is an order of magnitude higher on self checkout compared to a cashier lane with a human.
I guess that's why I can't have nice things. What really bothers me is people who scam insurance and then boast to me about it as if I'm gonna tap them on the back for "sticking it to the man" when they're stealing money away from me by causing my insurance primes to increase but are too stupid to realize it.
> That analysis showed that self-checkout led to a shrink rate more than 16 times higher than traditional cashier lines. Nearly 7% of self-checkout transactions had at least some amount of partial shrink, compared to 0.32% with cashiers. The analysis also suggested a shrink rate of 3.5% for self-checkout machines, while conventional cashiers only saw a 0.21% shrink rate.
Then
> According to Grabango, checkout-free technology powered by computer vision can help eliminate self-checkout shrink by tracking what shoppers pick up and charging them exactly what they owe. The company also stressed that average supermarkets could increase bottom-line profits by more than 50% per year by eliminating partial shrink from self-checkout alone.
First, I don’t trust a company selling something to say they did a study, literally using that product, and the result of the study was to sell you something new. Not only that, but everyone knows computer vision isn’t always perfect, it’s similar to LLM AI in that when it works it’s amazing but it’s hard to get working. For this study it seems like they trusted their CV product to be perfect and compared it to the human scanned item list and assumed that was inaccurate.
This article is literally just an ad, not a reliable source!
Also it was inconvenient when I had about 30 items and a kid in the cart to do self-checkout.
I realize you probably don't hold this position, but legality aside, that argument falls flat on its face when you consider the value of your time vs the value of items you're stealing. Self-checking out groceries takes maybe 3 minutes for a full cart? Suppose the store would have otherwise needed to hire a cashier earning $20/hr. Let's double that to account for other expenses like payroll taxes and insurance. $40/hr for 3 minutes works out to $2. That entitles you to a free candy bar, not ringing up a pack of steaks as bananas.
>Basically "if you don't want me to steal, then hire someone to watch me".
At the risk of being called a "corpo bootlicker" or whatever, this is basically along the same lines as "if you don't want me to grope you, don't dress provocatively".
Also unacceptable is requiring customers to do the job of an employee.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
That's entirely subjective though. Around a century ago, Piggly Wiggly introduced the supermarket shopping experience as we know it today (ie. the shopper was responsible for picking items off the shelves, rather than having a clerk do it). I'm sure back then you could make the same argument that "unacceptable is requiring customers to do the job of an employee".
A grocery store is a store that takes money in exchange for groceries, not a store that takes money in exchange for poking buttons nor a store that takes money in exchange for putting things into bags. There's nothing inherently "job of an employee" about any button poking or bagging peripheral to trading payment for goods.
Personally I just avoid self checkout unless I only have one or two items and the lines are bad. But even then it's not often worth getting annoyed by the sluggish hyperprescriptive workflows.
It may feel quicker to the consumer, speed is probably more predictable and it could increase throughput and efficiently use space. Most benefits are for the shop.
Needless to say a shop is able to reduce the speed of regular checkout to black pattern people into using self checkout
You also save time by putting the scanned items directly into your bag instead of putting them on a band for the cashier to scan, before you can put them into your bag.
So my experience is that it's faster most of the time.
Drives me nuts to wait to take care of myself. I think they should give you a scanner gun you walk around the store with, then I can just leave.
I am usually done and out 10x quicker than waiting in line.
I’d rather spend my time interacting with my family and dog than random person at the counter.