Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech
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.
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.
Ever since the pandemic, curbside pickup has been the norm at our house for groceries.
We use Kroger, not Walmart, but I had a recent experience relevant to share.
I was out running an errand and my spouse asked me to go grab a couple items from Kroger since it was nearby.
I hadn’t been inside the store in like a year, so I was surprised to see gates at the door that opened and closed upon approach and walking away.
Also, while shopping, at some point suddenly the wheels on the cart locked up, causing me to bang the ever loving shit out of my shins on the cart frame. That’s when I got to learn about the new “anti-theft” wheel lock tech being used on all carts now.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to flip the goddamn cart over and kick the absolute shit out of it… but I knew that wouldn’t help.
…But if I read a story about someone going and drilling holes in every single one of those cart wheels, or setting fire to them all, or breaking the gates, I would laugh.
I imagine as soon as someone gets something worse than bruised shins and brings a lawsuit against these stupid companies, we will see these stupid things go away… but until then, I’m not fucking stepping foot inside any store that has that bullshit.
Some loss is the expected result of replacing workers with customers. Even cashiers who are paid and trained to check out customers have a failure rate of about 1%. Walmart treating their customers like criminals for things that routinely happen to even their own trained and incentived employees is ridiculous.
I'd get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone's time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it's not about preventing theft. It's about proving a point: that corporations control you.
Maybe they should keep some non-self check registers open then. I was a grocery store cashier in high school and college and I got $20/hour for doing it (adjusted for inflation). Right now if I see a store only has self-check open I will walk out, what I want to do is start tracking my time then mailing in a 1099 and an invoice for my time.
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.
It's gone further here.. we have shops with scanners so you scan the goods as you go around.. in theory speeding up checkout but..
- 25% of the time you end up selected for 'random check' so an employee has to come and rescan everything anyway
- If there are any 'restricted' items a like painkillers, a different employee has to come over and allow them.
Given the chronic understaffing meaning you're basically in a queue for attention, it frequently takes longer to get through the 'rapid' checkouts than it would if I simply queued up and got someone else to do it. But as far as the supermarket thinks they're winning as they pay fewer people.
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.
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.
One time I went to wal-mart and at self-checkout there was a security guy (with a bulletproof vest...) with the employee. I don't know if he was there to look intimidating to potential thieves or to protect the employee from violent customers, but I did not like the feeling of him watching me scanning my items. Am I a customer or a potential profit-loss theft for wal-mart? I fucking hate that company...
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
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.
If we shop at chain grocery stores we're self-checking (and destroying local businesses). If we buy from Amazon we're supporting billionaires and destroying local businesses. If we shop at mom&pop stores we're paying too much for less in an age of inflation. Good luck getting everything you need from side-of-the-road vegetable stands (who skirt tax and have no liability). We can't win.
Fucking Kroger's (grocery store in the US) self checkouts yell at you if you have more than like 6 to 8 items, so you have to wave down an employee to continue scanning.
Then it complains for more than 15 and you have to wait for the employee again.
What's the point? How often do people go to a grocery store to get less than 15 things? It's just frustrating.
When their AI is well trained on social behaviours, they'll start sending Minority reports
Ohh man i fucking hate self checkouts with a passion the soulless passive agress voice. The voice annoynecemnts to scan rewards card to take groceries to take recipt the 3 different "would u like to dobate to x" that constantly swap wheres the yes and no button is. Then sometimes it just fucking freezes and cos the bloody product isnt heavy enough to detect and it wont give me the ability to scan something till the other thing has been put down. I have no multiply button so if im buying 30 of something then i have to get a godamn employee to go into the employee section and hit the multiply button or my inabiloty to remove something once scanned. It all pisses me ofd so much. I do however have to say aldi has figured it out and i hope they dont go down the route of everyone else.
It almost pisses me off as much as ordering food via a qrcode and then being asked for a fucking tip. Im in australia we dont tip cos we have a fucking decebt minimum wage. But why does the fucking robot need a tip it disnt have exemplary service its a fucking machine.
I don't understand people that get upset and hostile at employees in these situations. When I go through self checkout I go in with expectations already set that it's very likely that at some point during the checkout process the machine is going to trigger an alarm and an employee will need to come over and override the alarm. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does my first reaction isn't to get all pissy and throw things at the cashier.
If you have no patience for this sort of thing, then go through the regular checkout. See if it takes longer going that route.
In Sweden we usually have a self-checkout alternative where you acquire a wireless scanner when walking in, scanning when picking from shelves and put it directly in shopping bags.
At checkout, you just pay and walk out. There is random controls, where an employee will check like 5 randomly chosen things from the bags. This is seldom though, like once every three/four months or something.
Makes for very quick checkout.
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
LET ME AT LEAST MUTE IT
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Retailers broadly are facing increasing theft and have responded by locking up merchandise, warning investors of major losses, and implementing new technology to help combat the issue.
In 2019, Walmart introduced computer-vision technology at its registers to reduce inventory shrink, a term retailers use to describe merchandise losses from theft, fraud, error, and other causes.
Employees overseeing the self-checkout stations can monitor the registers from mobile phones and, in the case of issues, pause the machines to prevent customers from checking out.
The employee, who has worked at Walmart locations for over two years, said the self-checkout technology caught many customers off guard — particularly when they saw that the registers flagged them and then played back a video on the machine's screen showing them scanning items.
"It was personally uncomfortable for me to notice somebody purposefully not scanning an item," said Dominick Haar, 20, a recent newly former Walmart employee who worked self-checkout in a store in Southern Illinois.
"I think it created a lot more stress for the employees, not to mention customers that just want one-on-one personal conversation when they go to the store," Leroy told Insider, referring to the self-checkout machines.
The original article contains 923 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
I don't blame them
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.
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Walmart and their customers deserve each other.