this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
491 points (87.1% liked)
Technology
58279 readers
4934 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sounds like low trust society issues to be honest. I only see those systems expanding in Switzerland, and they never use annoying scales or complain about unexpected items, because there aren't even any sensors for that.
Here in Finland handheld scanners have been getting added to more shops, you grab one, scan and bag as you go, and at the end you return the scanner and pay it all at once.
One of the regional grocery stores in my part of the US has these (if you have an account). Before I did online ordering with curbside pickup, this was how I shopped. I didn't understand why it wasn't more popular. It made checking out so quick. Every twenty or so trips I'd be randomly "audited," where some poor employee had to rifle through my bags to double check I wasn't stealing anything.
The chance to be randomly audited would put me off from ever using it again. Specially when you know that randomly = you look brown or immigrant most of times.
At Giant, I'm pretty sure it's decided by the system based on some algorithm, not the employee. The one time I was audited, we were in the store for a long time and had removed a few items from the cart after adding them.
The audit consisted of the employee scanning ten random items and confirming we had scanned them too.
When I was using food stamps/EBT, I was audited every time I used the hand scanner at Stop and Shop. Luckily, I don't have to use food stamps anymore.
Well that's some bull. The software knows what items are covered and which aren't, so that's just assuming folks needing help are thieves.
Yeah, luckily an Aldi opened down the street and I started shopping there. I don't need food stamps now but with the way prices are going...
Ah, yes, yes. We're not racist, it's the system! It's an algorithm! I never heard that one before. It's also a sustym that randomly checks you at the airport.
It all depends on how truly random the system is. Each checkout (or ticket, or whatever) assigned a random number between 1 and 20, with 20 meaning audit? That's non-discriminatory. But it's also not tuned for the purpose of finding shoplifters (etc).
When you start adding criteria, they are often at least correlated with discrimination. Food stamps were mentioned elsewhere. Flight history to/from a list of hostile countries for airports. The list goes on. Technically not based on things like race, but it's a paper-thin distinction in some cases.
How do you know there's not someone looking at se purity cameras triggering random audits?
Then that's not random by any definition of the word. It's targeted.
It's entirely possible, even likely, that management would keep claiming that it's random when it's not. But then we're not talking about any algorithms.
That's the point I'm making.
We have both happen, sometimes combined or scan with phone. I've seen some of the American systems, with sensors and weights and speakers (with some voice lines), those are creepy to me.
Can confirm. The only deterrent is the potential for an random bag check by an employee but that never happened to me in years of using self checkout. Some shops have a worker over watching a dozen of stations to help out or just identify suspicious behavior but it's very unintrusive.
I've been a checker and have monitored self-checkouts. We get no training or instructions to watch for suspicious behavior. It's not the job of a checker / cashier to confront people for suspicious behavior, we don't get paid enough to do so, or to even care.
So much chocolate weighed through the scales as "fresh veg potatoes"
Thanks for the clarification! My assumptions were wrong ^^ although I saw once a lady who tried to leave without paying, but the worker noticed and they spent a good 5 minutes convincing her to put in cash into the machine, which apparently she had but had to look for in her bag for a looong time.
Over here it's a mix, some chains use the scales + sensors, some use simple scan machines. I absolutely hate the scale + sensors, some of them are almost completely unusable and the attendants have to keep running around fixing errors or resetting the ones where people just give up mid-cart and go to a manned checkout.
For sure, I use self checkout at at least 5 different places in China and they all work fantastically, including a Walmart.
I avoid places where self checkout isn't available. And, it's not just me. I stopped counting how many time the cashier is jobless and the self checkout area is full.