I use to think you were highly educated and understood business. Thinking it’s only a few dollars of shrink, I was wrong about you.
I worked in loss prevention long ago and was a manager. As dumb as I am, I understood Big Corporate does nothing unless Big Money is involved. Where I live some of the stores complain about $100,000 a month in shrink. That shrink is not bad bananas, spilled milk or broken eggs. 90% theft. They pull self check-out and put it in once a year to test human nature. The crew was pulling it out in Oct again..
Quick and easy?!!! Are you nuts? Unless you have 1 or 2 items at a place like HD, those things suck. There is no way on god's green earth I'd use one for a cart full of groceries. If I'm paying the same price, I'm getting my stuff scanned and bagged while I sit there, twiddle my thumbs, and watch. But I think unloading a cart item by item onto the standard conveyor belt type check-out sucks too. Way too many redundancies involved from the store shelf to the kitchen cabinet. You have to take the item off the shelf, place in cart, remove from cart, place on conveyor, have someone scan each item one by one, place in bags, pick up bags and put back in cart, remove bags from cart to put in car, remove from car to carry in house, unload items one by one into pantry. Giant waste of time. I know Whole Foods has experimented with cashier-less stores... but for the life of me, I can't figure out why the major grocery chains haven't implemented a system where one can just throw a giant box(es) -- or bags---- in a cart when they walk in the store and aside from anything that needs weighed, push the cart thru a scanner and have a total in one second flat. RFID chips are cheap (and they would become 1000X cheaper). They would be placed in some inaccessible place by the manufacturer during packaging to prevent low-lifes from removing. Walk in WMT.... throw everything in a box.... run through the scanner... pay and walk out. Easy peasy. You could even make the "boxes" foldable plastic bins for flat storage, and have consumers use them over and over again. No waste, no plastic bags choking whales 100 years from now.
%% Local WMT still uses them. Poor crooks perhaps in character for some . WMT has cameras, even if you or any accidently dont scan something= it beeps security. New Mexico cheats maybe upgrade a high priced apple?? But any could get caught doing that Still makes sense, one person can watch about 7self scan cash registers. I have had that auto checker cheat me out of a penny once, too busy to fool with that; but then it shorted me a $00.25 once LOL I got that female to give it to me. Dawn I once told that WMT observer ''I think that machine shorted me $1.00, not sure , it rejected a dollar with a corner folded?? They have it on camera, the machine was right LOL Not related to the Mr Murray in article most likely.
Never really gave a shit about what you think of me but for the record, I meant a few dollars on shrink on each item. And this just confirmed what I was trying to say: People are either way poorer than we think or they've just got incredible morales today. "They only steal from the big retailers and not the mom and pop stores". What do they think they are? Robin Hood?? Stealing from the rich to give to the poor?? LOL Or they think they are Ocean 11? That they got away with scamming the big bad retailers? LOL No they are low-life losers who stole to satisfy their insatiable and uncontrollable needs for material crap. Unless they are really financially strained, there is no excuse for their behaviour. And as for those who think it's harmless to steal from big retailers, well they need to realize that those big retailers were mom and pop stores once and all started from there and honestly they make less margin than mom and pop stores.
%% Sounds like he was fishing for an emotional reaction LOL, we used to do that all the time with mom. NOt saying he is a kid LOL Amen on swat teams @ checkout. Our local WMT also has ''Reserved place for police partners'' [paraphrase /park sign] Our local police dept has one of those ''Blessing Boxes with free food'' placed on edge of police property . Mostly free[private sector] canned goods, no excuse @ all to steal..................................
IMO its a part of automation. They will have 'employed humans' there again while they trouble shoot the process. 'Customer humans' will get back into the habit of placing items on the conveyor but the items will be scanned through a 'tunnel',rather than an employee scanning and sliding. Its 2023,so barcodes will need to match bulk,weight,description etc.or an alarm will go off like the 'price check' we all remember. I prefer it,but the ramifications for employment are obvious.
For me it is, absolutely enjoyed self-checkout. It's super quick, no line-up or at least line-up is much shorter, lot less need to wait on others. And it's super easy, just need to put the barcode at the scanner and for multiple of the same item, you just type in the quantity and everything is scanned all at once! No need to wait for the cashiers to ask for the payment method and type in the total amount, it automatically shows up on the screen for you to pay. And like I said before, you have more control over the process as well. No more scrambling to find this wooden block to place it in between the other person's stuff and yours on a fast-moving conveyor belt and then have everything all falling on the belt when the belt is abruptly stopped by the aloof cashier. No need to constantly watch the cashier to make sure he/she's punched in the correct item and the correct price, no need to watch the bagging staff and having to re-adjust yourself when they've put the fragile eggs or this glass bottle of juice at the very bottom (risking them breaking into pieces when they fall through those environmentally-friendly plastic bags or when you bump the bag into something hard by accident) below this huge carton of milk crushing everything. No now you are able to monitor the price at the pace you want and bagging each item exactly how you want them placed, total control over the whole entire process and you have the whole cash register all to yourself. Can't think of any reason why people wouldn't love this process. Exactly what I was thinking when you were talking about the redundancy of still having to load and unload everything and scan them to check them out one by one to pay. I absolutely agree with you why can't they just account for everything that you picked up from the store when you've picked them up from the shelves, calculate the total (after weighing the produce and the fruit individually) and then make you pay and that's it. And then anything that you haven't paid and tried to sneak out will trigger the security alarm when you are exiting the store. RFID is extremely fragile and be easily destroyed by just smashing or bending them so they could get seriously damaged during transportation or wrapping them in tin foil or other materials that prevent them from being scanned. I can totally envision those punks lining the entire bag or box with tin foils and then place all the items in there and then go to check out to get a $0 for total and walk out with all the merchandise. Instead of using RFID, what they can do is give each person who enters the store a shopping bag/basket/box with a store barcode and then upon checkout, the shopping/bag/basket/box will be automatically closed before scanning and then whatever items with the same store barcode that they put in that shopping bag/basket/box will be scanned to produce a total for them to pay. Once they've paid, they will be issued a receipt that they will have to hold onto. The shopping bag/basket/box will be automatically transported outside of the store to a designated pickup place. The shopper will have to walk through a security check. Whatever items are found on his/her/its body that belong to the store identified by the same store barcode will need to be paid for. After they passed the security check, they can claim their paid-for items from the designated holding place with the receipt.