Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech::When Walmart’s anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.
All the retail shops that were built 20+ years ago have a ton of un-peopled check-out stands. My local grocery store. My bank branches. The hardware store.
Companies have reduced their staffing to two or three checkers and a self-checkout line.
We’re doing the work for them. They’re hoarding the profits. It’s a mess.
My local BofA branch has twelve or thirteen checker stations and I’ve never seen more than two people at the counter. I don’t know when the branch was built, but it was clearly at a time when the semblance of customer service existed. Now, long lines and poor service are normalized and the idea that you’d shop around for a better experience is non-existent.
Abolish the minimum wage laws.
Computers are cheaper than employees, so this is where we have come.
They were never intended to have 100% of the teller/check stands open.
It’s for surge and holidays, if you go in on Black Friday or other super busy times, you’ll see a vast majority opened.
It also makes counting easier, if 1 person uses a drawer and it’s off, it’s easier to hold a person accountable, rather than if 5 people used it
As someone who used to have to fix tills, this is both true and not right.
Yes most larger retailers have more tills then they plan on having open outside of say Xmas, and also to allow for some to be down and not effect over all sales. But also no (started years ago) that you will see even on the most busy days of the year most of the lanes open.
I would say about 10 years ago with express and self checkout the big retailers gave up on hiring enough people to use all the forward tills and I think moved to the idea that people will wait on those busy days. I watched stores be built with less and less lane capacity and have less and less dedicated cashiers. Like a lot of companies retail giants see payroll a tempting place to make cuts on and after covid they have learned (hopefully incorrectly) that people will put up with a lot more BS then was expected years ago.
target reversible retina scanners
I’m cool with checking myself out I actually prefer to but the anti theft nonsense is to much. Nearly everyone triggers it and last time I had to wait an extra five minutes for an employee to clear it and then they had to count 20+ small items all because I waved my arms over the machine fixing the cuff of my shirt… I don’t blame the employees that’s their job
It’s not “anti-theft”.
It’s just dumb **** criminals who can’t handle being herded and being RIGHTLY LABLED as useless C***S
Until you get caught in a similar predicament without having stolen anything. Then you’ll waste 10 minutes being humiliated by having your entire cart rechecked, all the while catching looks from everyone else checking out. Then you will be frustrated and might say something about it. But yes, they are all dumb criminals. You’ll be the only innocent one who was ever humiliated in this way…
Grow up
Hey remember when they gave you free bags, bagged it for you, and rang you up? That was kinda nice. Now the price is three times as high and all that service stuff is gone. The day before Thanksgiving is going to be hell this year at my supermarket
Those free plastic bags deteriorate into toxic materials that are presently all over the inside of your body. You had to wait in a slow line for people to bag the wrong things together and sometimes scan the same thing twice. Now I have my own canvas bags that last forever, I never scan my things twice, and my shit is bagged with the right things together based on where they go in my home.
The irony is that the plastic bags became the norm over the paper bags because they were thought to be more environmentally friendly, over the infinitely recyclable paper that literally grows on trees.
I remember when plastic bags became a thing. We were encouraged to use a plastic bag to save a tree.
The manufacture of plastic bags produces much less carbon emissions than paper bags. Consider the costs of logging, transportation of wood, the manufacture process which uses a ton of water, the transportation of paper which is heavier than plastic which means higher fuel costs, etc. And also consider that most trees we cut down from paper come directly from farms which often require irrigation or items like fertilizer (which have carbon costs). Although not every tree farm uses that, some are more “natural growth”
Plastic bags tend to be more durable and re-usable than paper bags. Unfortunately most people don’t re-use either.
Of course, the main issue is the fact that they take hundreds of years to decompose and end up everywhere. Also, plastics come directly from petrochemicals which are a finite resource. There are ways to create plastic from renewable oils, although that raises the carbon emissions significantly.
I think this is an excellent example to give people to illustrate that a lot of times, the choices we make as a society about simple things can be counter-intuitive. Often times, we’re making decisions about what bad thing we want less. Do we want plastic building up in landfills and oceans, or do we want the global temperature to stop rising?
Of course, these aren’t the only two options and it’s not a 1 to 1 linear relationship. But it’s an interesting example.
Paper is not infinitely recyclable.
Wow…
My body is fine but thank you for your “sincere” concern.
I went on the fast lines, maybe you need help with this. The trick is to look for lines that are shorter not longer. Easy mistake to make.
I never had an issue with the cashier making a mistake and I have never been so freaken insane that I need to have the items in my bag in the reverse order of removal. Maybe they made so many mistakes scanning you because they were distracted by your fugly bag and advice on what order to put things in. You don’t want to waste a single half second of your life putting groceries away. That could add up over an entire lifetime to a whole minute or so!
Like a lot of the crap in your body that is hurting you its not obvious until you get a health issue or cancer later and then noticeable statistically not individually EG you look at two populations and one had more folks with a much higher incidence of cancer or auto immune diseases or what have you. The fact that its not obvious doesn’t make it any less real. Those free bags were closer to free cigarettes.
I used to manage cashiers and handled 10 of thousands of transactions and observed more. Like any human beings they do occasionally make mistakes. If you haven’t noticed anyone EVER making a mistake ringing you up it means you don’t pay attention.
I don’t tell cashiers how they should bag things because that’s obnoxious but I do know that I do a better job of not putting fresh things with meat or things that are liable to be squished with canned food or all the non-food items together.
If you avoid 4 minutes waiting once per week and 2 minutes putting away things over your life you will save over 300 hours. You aren’t liable to be awake for much more than 100 hours a week so that is like 3 weeks of your life.
We are just lying now I see.
Could you just not follow the math. Do you not believe I was an illustrious supervisor of cashiers, or do you just not believe microplastics are bad for you?
I agree with the top level comment but this one reeks of toxicity, so unnecessary
Switching from single use plastic to multi-use plastic has greatly increased carbon emissions of production. You also have to reuse the new plastic bags over 100 times for them to break even, emissions wise. (https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-cotton-bags/)
I agree with you that canvas bags are better overall, but IMO we should move back to paper. It’s WAY easier to reuse paper products, gardeners love the paper bags, and they break down quickly even if they are littered somewhere. There are some tradeoffs, such as transportation costs being higher because they are thicker than single use bags, but if you compare paper to multi-use bags, it’s a fairly moot point.
Also, I’d still rather someone bag my shit for me. I’ve had so many things broken or otherwise damaged by the cashier haphazardly tossing my stuff into the cart just so I can walk 5 foot and take 10 minutes to pack my own stuff. Personal preference, but it should be given as an option imo.
I don’t understand. You’ve had cashiers break your shit, and therefore you prefer they do the bagging?
Bring your own bags => cashiers toss stuff into cart and break things, because you have to bag your own stuff.
Cashiers bag stuff => less things break, because stuff is bagged then put in the cart.
Here, everything goes out on a belt where you have to bag it yourself. The cashier never touches your cart or items apart from scanning them.
Costco recently came to my country and it feels so incredibly weird to wait for someone to first unpack your stuff and for someone else to scan it, and then someone else packs it again.
I am not sure how to put it, but I almost feel humiliating in a way.
It’s also pretty common in grocery stores to walk around with a handheld scanner which you dock when done so you can pay. The great thing about this is that you bag your stuff while shopping and when you pay, it’s already bagged.
What country is this if you don’t mind me asking. If uncomfortable with answering , no pronlem. Also, they have hand scanners for everyone?
Yes, anyone that is a (free) store Member can use the scanners.
Note that not every store has those, only bigger grocery stores do.
Yeah. Piling stuff on another belt so we can bag it ourselves is the norm here as well. I find it fascinating that I will simply pile everything into a haphazard pile on my side of the cashier, but when the cashier scans it, he/she usually piles it up into a very nice and tidy organized group.
I see, that explains the confusion.
Costco recently came to my country and it feels so incredibly weird to wait for someone to first unpack your stuff and for someone else to scan it, and then someone else packs it again.
I’m in the states, but I still kind of feel weird having them do this. That said, they’re much faster at it than me and lines are always huge, so they probably prefer it this way.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. In the olden times, a bagger (or the cashier) nicely packed the stuff into bags making sure not to break shit. All the stores around me now just yeet shit back into the cart after scanning it with no regard to what it lands on or if it breaks.
And cats! Cats love paper bags!
And cats! Cats love paper bags!
Multi use plastic bags are a moronic half measure agreed. What some places are doing is using paper for disposable bags and selling actually long term re-usable bags for a little more like a 2-5 bucks a bag mostly.
Yeah the idea that people buying a dozen polyester bags made of substantially more plastic that still gets thrown away by people on average is not great. Our fast scramble approach to solving issues is often awful like that though. Look at the waste that the turn from plastic straws caused all because of a school report about turtles.
Don’t get me started on fucking paper straws…
They even used to bring your groceries out to your car, put them in your trunk, and return the cart for you.
If you are going to go on the day before, I’d recommend doing your shopping at 5:00am and be done by 06:00 am. That’s when the day shift comes in. I wouldn’t bring a cartful of groceries to the check stands before that time though, nite crew will be stressing out.
Notes and thanks
I can’t remember the last time I let someone ring me up at Walmart. Self checkout was always faster because most of the attended registers were closed. Most of my adult life I’ve bagged myself and idk if I’d want to go back tbh. The tech is annoying to deal with though
Trust me it was nice. Value adds keep going down and prices keep going up. Keep hearing how everyone is unemployed and how CEO pay keeps rising. Biggest shareholder of Walmart has a mega yacht, maybe could have spent some of that money hiring people at the register.
Whatever, enshitification continues. Now if you excuse me I want to watch a fifteen second yt vid and will have to watch a 30 second ad first from some alt-right “news” service that hates trans people.
Ahh yes the value of getting something for free for almost 2 decades goes down the moment they actually want people to watch the ads or ask people to pay.
I can’t even count the number of Epoch Times ads I have gotten telling me how the media invented trans people. I keep blocking them but they keep coming back. Do you support that ad as well? How about the Prague-U ones where a woman explains how the Southern Strategy is a myth? This morning I got one about the Turtle Twins, the author explained how slavery wasn’t really all that bad.
I bought jelly and the age restriction went off. The clerk came and I had my ID out to check. We both had a laugh
I’d never think to harass the poor employee who has nothing to do with the store managenent’s decisions…
However, when I’m pissed or tired I’ll sometimes be rough or sloppy with the machine, and I get pissed if they have too few manned checkouts for how crowded a store is. Banging items against the scanner glass, tap selections on the touch screen forcefully with my ring etc.
To keep the self-checkout machines company, I’ll act like a machine too. If I unsuccessfully attempt to scan something, after 5 tries I “timeout” and move onto the next item.
I give 60 seconds for someone to come fix the self checkout when it fucks up. If no one is available, I’m taking my shit and leaving. I tried to pay, fuck you I don’t have time for this.
Sureee you will.
No, you’ll stand there and look around annoyed like everyone else, all yourre saying is youre gonna be a dick to whoever has the misfortune of helping you.
I’ve done it several times lol
One time I’ve gotten a “hey you can’t do that” but in my area the guards aren’t allowed to stop you. Which imo is a dumb rule but it allows me to do this.
It’s unethical and I personally wouldn’t do that…
…but in your situation practically speaking, if no one’s going to come and fix the machine in that amount of time, then who would be there to stop you just walking out with your goods?
I tried to pay, fuck you I don’t have time for this.
Lol, uh huh. Whatever you gotta tell yourself to justify stealing that bag of doritos, dude.
Grocery stores raise their prices, cut staffing, and shift more labor to their customers so they don’t have to pay for it. Refusing to do that labor, especially when it’s made unnecessarily difficult, is based.
Sucks to suck. Fix your machines.
I’m not gonna cry for a corporation that doesn’t give a fuck if you eat or not. Why are you?
I’m not “crying” for any corporations. I’m laughing at that jackass for their asinine rationalization for shoplifting. If you don’t understand the difference, I don’t know what to tell you.
You’re not crying for them, you’re licking their boots
You’re free to do so, of course, and we’re free to laugh at your dumb ass paying full price for $20 steaks that were only half as much three years ago.
Lemmy sure attracts some fucking characters. The guy simply pointed out that stealing isn’t justified by a 60-second wait. And you are jumping in here ranting about the price of steak for some reason. You’re not Robin Hood. You’re just a dumbass with a keyboard.
Tell us you’re not listening without telling us you’re not listening
This dumbass with a keyboard knows their worth and knows it is rarely if ever worth it to pay full price for stuff. Especially expensive necessities, for example meat, for which the prices skyrocketed thanks to the lockdowns and aren’t going back down because of the horrifyingly astounding greed of big corps like Walmart who largely control the market.
Hence, stealing stuff like that from Walmart is justified.
Hell, it’s justified simply because it is Walmart, but that is the more detailed justification.
It doesn’t matter either way, though, because people are going to keep doing it regardless of what you think.
So carry on, dumbass keyboard warrior. The only one you’re hurting is you. 😎
Remember everyone. If you see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no you didn’t.
I wouldn’t say anything. Not because I care about “muh poor people” but because I actively mind my own business. I would behave the same way if I saw someone steal from a small business as well.
Unless they’re stealing guns or ammo.
You know what, I’ll make that exception.
As long as it’s just “shoplifting”. Where I’m at, people will come in on a bike with a trash bag, load it up, roll out, and go to the next town over and sell the stuff on the street in the ghetto.
Since you kids are so sheltered you don’t believe anything like this happens, here it is on video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f8JLIWxxya4
Tell your moms I said hi, suburb kids
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Cool story bro.
Let me guess, you live in a safe, lily-white suburb😂
Poverty breeds crime, but not all crime is of desperation.
We call them “Entrepreneurs” lol
What would even be wrong with someone doing that? 🤔
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makes the shopping experience shittier for the rest of us (locked merchandise)
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the syndicates fencing these goods use the money to support actual harmful crimes
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the people doing the thieving often get violent themselves
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raises prices and causes store closures
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people don’t want to work in shitty stores, so the workers they have do the bare minimum (again, worse shopping experience for the rest of us)
The bazaars where people sell the stolen goods also cause lots of problems.
NGL I genuinely prefer the bazaars and street markets over the big box stores.
I take your point with the thieves getting violent. The others, ehh. The big box stores really ought not to be there in the first place and be replaced with little specialized mom and pop joints owned by locals the way life used to be.
Okay so then we have mom and pops, who can’t absorb the loss, getting their shit stolen. Don’t see how that helps.
Then we could have this talk. Then we could debate the morality of it.
Until that time, stealing from Walmart will always be the ethical thing to do.
Oh for the love of
I’ve been taking to a literal child.
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That’s quite a story.
It’s pretty common here. A lot of stores have been hiring private security, but if the security intervenes then the thief can sue them.
I used to be in security. I couldn’t imagine getting paid a little over minimum wage and giving a shit about theft. The only ones that would were people who took it too goddamn seriously and we called them “tac heads” because they purchased all this tactical gear like the maglights like a fucking billy club and were looking for an excuse to throw down.
Matter of fact that describes some cops too. Damn is there a serious problem with how we staff enforcement jobs.
Just curious, do you get anything if you tell on them?
Tell what? All of it’s happening out in the open, the cops just refuse to do anything about it. It’s not like if you tell a cop they’ll be like “oh shit I had no idea, let me go run over there and do my job for once, thank you citizen!”
To be fair to cops, they’re understaffed and they don’t want to do their jobs for fear of activists suing them. But all of those suits are paid for with tax dollars, so idk why they care, just do your job and if they sue you, they sue you.
I think it boils down to laziness but with the excuse of being sued.
Tell what?
Tell on people who are shoplifting.
All of it’s happening out in the open
Then what did you mean by:
As long as it’s just “shoplifting”
To me, it seems like you were saying that if you saw people “on a bike with a trash bag, load it up, roll out” then you would snitch, since this comment chain is about not telling on people who are stealing from corporations.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
There’s no one to snitch to. The cops are already well aware.
You’re getting ripped off even with a stolen Walmart bike.
I work at a shop and people call us snobs because we won’t work on those deathtraps
The employees can potentially get fired.
I feel like it depends. Stealing is morally wrong no matter what. But I’d probably act as if I saw nothing if someone just stole a sandwich or similar. I’m not sure I’ll act the same if I see a teenage girl of a family that is obviously very well off steal things like makeup (that one literally bragged about it in front of her parents during a dinner where I was invited).
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Stealing is morally wrong no matter what.
🤡
I don’t know that stealing is morally wrong no matter what. My rabbi taught that if a man steals to survive, the crime is not his, but of his community because they did not save him from poverty. That teaching really stuck with me. Yes, stealing indicates something is seriously wrong in the world, but there’s a big difference in where the evil lies— is it in the thief, or in the society?
In our society people are acknowledged as human beings through consumption, and that need is hammered onto our heads by ads and beauty norms everywhere.
Belonging is a human need. Sometimes some cheap makeup is all it takes.
But also, the rich people are stealing from us in so much worse ways. A rich teen stealing from a rich corporation is kind of karmaeic, and really, even if she was caught, nothing significant would happen, whilst a poor girl doing the same would suffer a lot more.
Ergo, if you see something, no you didn’t.
This guy gets it.
It’s not the system that bugs me. It’s the amount of time it takes for the employees to actually come and get the shit going smoothly again. Even when it’s pretty dead in the store, it can take an extraordinary long time before one of the employees watching the area actually comes over when the light is flashing red and I’m trying to get their attention.
Yeah in most places I’ve shopped they don’t even have staff covering the self checkouts so they obviously don’t care that much.
I ran 8 of the damn things a decade or so ago and I was damn fast. I feel really let down every time I check out with one both with how none of the problems have been resolved and also with how the operators seem to be sleeping with their eyes open.
Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice “pay by cash” without a “back” button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.
Dang, from one ‘local’ establishment to the next.
And I bet you’re paying more, too.
normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned
Lol, that meat had a serial number.
Meat heist is unironically a real thing
We hang cattle rustlers round here…
Yes, if I get if from the butcher inside the supermarket, it has a “local” EAN13 barcode that “costs” the total of all parts I got.
Sounds like a badly configured system IMO. It shouldn’t take things out of stock or prevent rescanning until the sale was actually made (the customer paid).
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The last few times I’ve walked into a Walmart, the place has been a disaster.
Shelves empty and in disarray, no evidence that they ever did carry the product I was after, the building in an increasing state of disrepair.
I’m done with this company.
The Walmart here is pretty good, but this is a small city/large town where most of the local businesses have gone, so we have to rely on the Walmart a lot of the time. They keep it clean and well-stocked. They even usually have a couple of checkout lanes open.
But Walmarts are generally awful from what I understand.
Yeah hopefully ours goes out of business soon.
Have they choked out all other options in the vicinity?
Not really; we’re pretty flush for retail.
I’ve had a problem at self check out recently when I was buying a birthday card. I scanned the card, and placed the card and envelope it comes with in the area where scanned items go.
The kiosk, correctly, thought I put an unscanned item in the area. It was just the envelope the card comes in, so no need to scan it. But an employee had to come over and verify themselves before I could continue.
I don’t see the anti theft measures as being an issue, you need to protect your merchandise from theft to run a successful business. But, it should be made a little smarter, to know that if you scan a card, there is very likely an envelope that comes with it.
Why do people get hostile when they are showed a video of themselves moving items to the bag without scanning the item? Why not just accept your fate at this point and pay or give the goods back?
This leads me to think about how Walmart’s focus on cheap low quality goods with stores placed in areas where finances are often tight has created this “I want it but can’t afford it” despair.
You walk into this soul-less, hyper efficient box store and it’s easy to notice they have a lot of stuff but not a lot of staff. And the staff are not exactly motivated to care about theft.
It’s not a long shot to start to think it would be easy to get away with grabbing something, because perhaps Walmart is an easy target. But the efficiency of the place is where that mistake falls short.
The truth is, there are very few businesses with as sophisticated an anti-theft system. Walmart is dealing with petty theft on a global scale and understands exactly how much it costs them, especially if they are perceived as an easy target.
Walmart has the technology to wait until the number of thefts from a single person exceeds the local felony levels and only then press charges. It’s a trap, and ripping off Walmart is a lot less profitable than it might seem.
The key is to be subtle about it, understand the local laws and keep the thefts under the felony limit.
I caught someone stealing a felony amount of alcohol by using their young children(<5) and they acted like I was the wrong one in the situation.
You got caught, accept the consequences of your actions. Nope, I am the bad guy because I recognozed someone who stole a felony amount of an unnecessary product the other week, watched them on the cameras, and called the police station next door to wait in the lot for them.
They also didn’t show in court and got a warrant for it.
I don’t understand that level of incredulous lack of accountability for your own actions.
I don’t shoplift because I’m fairly fortunate to be able to work a job that pays a living wage. Yet every single time I use a self-checkout (not just at Walmart), it flags an employee for something; maybe I left a prescription in the cart (you have to pay for those in the pharmacy). Maybe I’m shopping with my wife and her purse is in the cart. Once it thought I was stealing my own kid.
If you don’t trust me to do a thing, don’t let me do a thing. It feels like harassment.
Is this an American thing? We had these things in Europe for years, and I never heard of anyone having problems.
Older people still prefer regular checkout, scary computers and that sort of deal.
In my nearest supermarket (europe) it is a pain. You go through self checkout cause it should be faster, but it works like shit, and you have to wait a lot until someone comes to fix the problem. We are civilized, though, we don’t cause problems to the shopkeepers. Still a pain, though
Yes. The technology options for self checkout in the US are terrible, so the user experience is terrible. All the horror stories in this thread are true. The stores are terrified of theft but refuse to hire checkers. There’s also way too many grocery stores, so there’s little money to put into technology upgrades and appropriate levels of staffing. For example, I am less than 5 minutes drive from 9 grocery stores. Extend that to 10 minutes and I’ve got over 20. Silly.
That’s crazy. We have a designated checker for each self checkout.
We have about 1 employee per 12 self checkout stations.
Kinda what I meant, too.
In more modern places, they have little machines that they can solve any issue without having to stand up.
In older places, they have to walk around, and they are assigned to like 6-10 machines.
Kinda funny how much faster Europe has adopted retail tech lately. Last time I was there 7 years ago they were still mostly using cash for transactions, but now the cashiers get a little buttmad if I don’t tap my phone to the scanner immediately. I hardly see anyone using phone payments in the US and I don’t understand why it hasn’t caught on. At least not where I live. It’s about as fast and convenient as it gets.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m in a major city right now and kit everywhere in Europe is like this.
Pretty much in any major town in my tiny country, this is the case also.
I’m in europe and the issues I’ve had are getting an alert that an employee needs to come to check and sometimes that can take awhile.
One store also has a scanner so you self scan as you go BUT the paying part is at an actual employee instead of a machine. Every damn time they are alerted to randomly pick some items from your cart to check if any weren’t scanned. And every damn time they pick the items at the bottom of my basket and damage stuff because of it. Or sometimes there is no one at the checkout so i stand there with my basket/cart and scanner like an idiot for 3-5 minutes for an employee to show up. That might not seem like a long time but it sure feels like it…
Yep this is exactly why I refuse to do the scan as you go, it ends up seriously frustrating. Self scan at checkout is fine if you don’t have paracetamol or alcohol, otherwise you’re waiting ages for assistance.
It’s definitely an overall worse experience
