If I was running such a store, I wouldn't want to spend the money on those cameras. But alas, the money is well spent in stopping thieves.
I was talking to one of the staff in a grocery store a while ago. He said the corporate auditors came in one day and decided to review the security cams. The result was half the staff was fired for theft.
It's just too bad that we live in a low trust society.
The face one is to show you that you're on camera, the other one is to detect the fruad. THe cameras in the ceiling aren't high enough resolution to work out if your doing a switcheroo or not.
Basically its a full service package. with the three cameras, it makes it very hard to argue that it wasn't you who did it, that the swap of barcode was a simple error, and that it was just a mistake.
Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.
I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.
A likely excuse!!
I did not say "all" machines. If I had meant "all" I would have written "all". That's what the word "all" is for.
Consider: "people like ice cream" Riposte: "not everybody likes ice cream"
I see this kind of response over and over here. It's cliched and irrelevant.
In any case, since it bothers you so, you explained the situation yourself: "The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier."
It's an error to equate "cheaper" to "increase in standard of living" because the people benefiting from the reduction in cost are usually not the entirety of the community, and it's unfortunate that someone of your caliber accepts such lazy thinking.
Over the last twenty years, automation has increased but the standard of living has gotten worse.
Compared to a generation ago, we can stuff more crap in our pockets and wardrobes, but housing is precarious and public institutions are weaker. Good luck supporting a family on a bottom-quartile wage.
GDP, measures of inflation: Goodhart's law.
BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.
The whole thing feels like post hoc justification for bad design (or bad understanding of the usage).
I've also had it flag when it thinks there is more stuff in my cart when going to pay. This happened to me when I had an umbrella in my cart. The attendant had to come over and clear it. When I worked at a grocery store 20+ years ago, checking that there was nothing on the bottom of the cart was a big thing for cashiers; the cameras seem to automate this check at self-checkout.
I've also had if false flag when I pass my hand over in a way that looks questionable, where the attendant has to come review the video and clear it.
All this stuff happens in real-time during the checkout process.
For people who want to steal, they seem to find ways around it. I was at the store a couple months ago (the same one that has all the tech mentioned above) and the beep next to me sounded ever so slightly off. I looked over, the guy was on the payment screen, which I'm assuming disables a lot of the camera checks, and was passing all his items over the scanner and making the beep noise with his mouth. The tone wasn't perfect, but it was really close.
> I don’t see what the cameras add.
Again, stores would not spend money on self-checkouts and cameras if they didn't pay off.
In the Seattle area, the cities are trying to stop grocery stores from shutting down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shopli...
They just dirty the airwaves with whatever lies they want to justify spying. Drag them to court where they have to be honest and well, their BS is revealed.
The low trust side is entirely on the rich owners class side of the divide.
Academics and credentialed class take some blame here too; of course no one is going to be capable of a task or job without their coursework. Nevermind expertise in $thing been around since before their class
Capitalism has turned everyone into a fucking Udemy sales pitch.
Only 30% of people have seen a mental health professional since 2020. Everyone else does what we used to do; rather than pay a modern day preacher for faith healing[1] we have friends.
[1] lots of people truly need intervention but America uses therapy to cope with basic shit https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
at the start of the year, I personally saw 4 shop liftings happen. I know the staff well, they told me after one of the events that at the present rate they are loosing something like £1500 a week.
They now have a security guard, which has lowered the problem, but not stopped it.
Not unheard of to get crackheads trying to sell you stolen supermarket meat out of a bag if you hang around in some of the less salubrious pubs
The classic combo is Afghan buj + crack but synthetic opioids are starting to make an appearance now the CIA isn’t producing heroin anymore.
It’s nowhere near as bad as the west coast of the US obviously, that’s a whole other level.
I would normally use a different word than crackhead but I thought I’d use the internationally recognised term
there was a bit of a kerfuffle where a dataset that literally only contained the start, end and time, and some deanonymized data of NYC taxi rides was successfully deanonymized and used to track celebrities. Most people have fairly sparse, unique travel patterns, and so armed with only a few known paparazzi photos you could accurately derive their whole travel history. https://www.fastcompany.com/3036573/nyc-taxi-data-blunder-re...
There was a similar data trawl when Boris bikes were introduced, and some of the information gleaned from that was quite hilarious but I can't find a link because it was from the old world and now lost in enshitted search.
As an aside, the artist John Baldessari made an installation in the Tate Modern where you were filmed walking into a room and the image was projected on the wall, but with about a 10 second delay, so that the feedback loop between seeing yourself 'on screen' and being able to influence it was completely broken. It was quite interesting to experience.
Here's a good reference point: if you have one hard drive per camera, and record at 1Mbps, you can store 5 years of footage.
Stores have loss 'prevention' (more like tracking) software which the security team can use. They are able to attach images of people stealing, but its hard to identify a person from a camera 15ft away when they are bent over a shelf; so they attach images of them stealing and of them passing through choke points - e.g. checkouts and entrances.
Tying them together is laborious, and is currently in its own little model rush - it's a technique called re-identification.
However, the next question is why doesn't it happen in practice? Well the stores have found police to be uniquely annoying on that they won't arrest and the state won't prosecute despite clear evidence.