THe one of the face is to ID you, and the one in the barcode area is to work out if you've slapped a sticker for 1kg potatoes on a packet of 1kg of meat.

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.

> But the cameras on the UK self-checkouts only point at your face

Only the one that's shown on the screen. There are other cameras, including ones in the ceiling that look at the entire machine.

The cameras here are in the ceiling, and they watch to see if you are scanning the merchandise before putting it in the bag. I presume they are AI-trained to catch this.

I know this because I was idly thinking about something else and put an item in my bag without scanning it.

There are almost certainly more cameras to catch the stealing on tape too. But when the camera or even a person sees you swipe something, they are gonna want to have a pic of your face to be able to know who you are, especially so they can recognize repeat offenders. Next time you show up, they might be looking for their most notorious thieves so they can call police, point to you and hand them a video of the last time you stole.

The self-checkout is there because it is cheaper than a cashier.

I wouldn't be surprised at half. If a worker sees others at the store stealing without consequence, they may be tempted to steal as well.

BTW, the cash register was invented because of rampant theft by the cashiers.

I think the idea is that you'll go to the check out with several items and only present some of them and then skip the one that is expensive. If you just walk out of the store several times with items you haven't paid for, they might catch and ban you immediately.

They can catch legitimate mistakes. I had this happen about a week ago. I scanned something, thought I heard the beep, then put it in the bag. It stopped me and replayed the video. I looked at the item list and sure enough, it didn't scan. It was an honest mistake, and the camera caught it. I rescanned it after the attendant cleared the error.

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.

Primarily used to catch and ban from the shop heavy repeat offenders, some people shop lift on order and resell items versus use them for them selves, or have addiction problems with alcoholism etc.

There's usually one person in charge of an array of self-checkouts, and the self-checkouts flag suspicious activity.

> 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.

My local coop (I will not share the articles, because doxing) caught someone trying to smuggle >£300 of stuff out of the store. its a tiny store, maybe medium cornershop sized.

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.

Maybe not organised like the mafia but you 100% get crackheads shoplifting in an organised fashion to get money for drugs in London, and self checkouts obviously make this easier.

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