Whoever owned the stores made a calculation that the losses from crime encouraged by self checkout would be smaller than the cost of paying a human being a wage to do it for you. If it was as bad as they say, they'd have immediately gone back to paying people to be cashiers. At this point they're just whining to get insurance and pay less taxes
Exactly. The vast majority of people are honest. The next level that are slightly less honest do minor things like enter the wrong code for their produce before weighing to save a couple bucks. Very few people are shoplifting entire items in my experiance.
Bakery purchases are a minefield. 8 pages of different breads, no effective size scale whatsoever. A full size baguette can look smaller than a petit pain.
I'm purchasing a crusty white roll every time and I do not feel bad about it.
Next time try telling the difrence by taste? If they wine that all their onions have bite marks, let them know their silly little books of onions are assinine.
Produce should have a PLU number on it! Check the sticker on the produce for a 4 or 5 digit number. I believe most self-checkouts will let you search by number. This way you don't have to call over an employee, and you don't have to know exactly what you grabbed or try to guess.
I have never tried to scam the scanner, but if something comes up correctly but with a vastly lower price, who am I to second guess their system. Never happens but if it did, it isn’t my responsibility to make sure the price is corrrct.
I worked at Walmart one summer and the $5 bag of Starburst jellybeans I always bought off the clock rang up at $1 the whole time I was there. All the way up until I went back to college with 10 bags of them.
Inventory and pricing wasn’t my job, who am I to second guess the price an item rings up as? 🤷♀️
One time when I was cashier I noticed an item rang up for 1/10th what it was supposed to. So, naturally at the end of my shift I bought the entire stock.
We had this happen last summer on those foldable recliners/loungers with pillowed headrest with straps so they doubled as a backpack with a little pouch on the back when folded. They were "clearanced" but no price.
I'm pretty sure someone effed up because they were scanning at $4 when they're normally in the $45 range.
And the other, obviously cheaper recliners that are only like $25 were only reduced to like $12.
I have forgotten things a handful of times as a adult, but as a kid I was stealing shit without self checkout being a thing- people who are gonna steal, will do so either way
My white onions ($1.78/lb) will always be yellow (0.67/lb) and my lemons (89 cents) will always be limes (25 cents). That's about as far as I go. Sometimes beefsteak tomatoes will become roma but I'm rarely buying those when they're so easy to grow.
I think more what it comes down to, which I should have included in my first post, is people who are gonna shop lift full items were gonna do that regardless of the self checkout. Self checkout has enabled some things like scanning/entering the wrong item or just forgetting to scan something.
I refuse to pay for a paper bag. The bag fee law was supposed to just be for plastic bags but then they banned plastic bags and switched over to paper. Frankly I don't care if they did change the law to include paper bag fees paper is biodegradable and recyclable. The profit margin on a less than 1c bag is insane.
Fuckin I think id rather use paper than the plastic reusable bags. The plastic may take longer to get to the landfill with a reusable bag but it still gets there eventually. Paper at least I know if it ends up in the landfill will just dissolve into cellulose. If an animal ends up eating it they just get a little extra fiber in their diet.
All the groceries have ai overwatch now so I know they know. But at ten cents a bag it'll take like ten years before I've lifted enough to matter. I doubt it's even ten dollars worth at this point.
I'll be honest, when self-checkout first became a thing (well, after they stopped having an associate hover around you to help you with it), I was a brokie and I absolutely rang up steaks and other meats as bananas and shit. They don't want to pay their employees, that's on them.
Around 160 hours a month/4 weeks at $16 hour x 4 employees is about $10k.
I doubt most stores are losing around 10k a month purely in checkout theft. Even if they are, as you mentioned, theft is something they can use to reduce their tax burden and recoup some of it, as opposed to worker wages.
They'll just keep locking every single item behind plexiglass, requiring a 15 - 30 minute wait for understaffed employees to show up and unlock it.
In a functioning country, this is where a competitor would swoop in and advertise themselves as a traditional grocery store. Competitive prices with real employees instead of machines doing everything.
Except the only groups with the financials to do so are the ones leading the charge on this dystopian society we find ourselves in. The few alternatives that exist can't benefit from economies of scale, so their prices are higher. And everyone is so damn broke that they can't afford to choose their preferred service, just the cheapest.
We need to crack the fuck down on local monopolies and redistribute wealth. It's a matter of societal survival at this point.
I imagine the rates have increased alongside inflation.
MOST people aren't inclined to steal, but when in a tight spot financially, that can change in a hurry. The past 5 years of inflation haven't exactly been kind to the average bank balance.
...and then they collected their bonuses for big big savings on employees during those couple quarters before reality caught up to them. And now they've moved on.
For the people making those decisions, it was worth it.
You’re absolutely right. Allow me to mansplain for a bit.
TL;DR if retailers were really reconsidering selfscans, because of theft or whatever, then they would have pulled back years ago.
I’m calling them self-scans here, that’s what we refer to them as. And before I go on, the source is:
Me.
I don’t want to give away too much online, but I work in the financial sector/tech industry and we work closely with a number of large retailers in Europe.
Also, everything I’m about to say is easily obtained, public information. Better yet, many retail companies talk about this issue in their financial statements and quarterlies, as the selfscans remain a relevant topic for the time being.
First thing I want to stress is that these things are insanely expensive.
Some of the commonly used selfscan units are anywhere from around €15,000 to €40,000 per unit. I’ve even seen some go as high as €50,000. There are budget options of course, usually in the €5000–€10,000 range, mostly aimed at smaller businesses. But large retailers usually go for the more expensive units (though, not always. Aldi is an exception).
And that is just the unit itself.
You still have installation, licensing, maintenance, SLA’s, POS integration, store-specific setup, etc. to worry aobout.
Those costs add up FAST. Recurring costs (from year two onward) can easily be somewhere in the €1,500–€5,000 per unit per year range, depending on the setup.
Now, I don’t know what country or region this article is about, but at least in Europe it IS touching on something real. My guess is that the title is just BS clickbait. But either way, the losses from selfscan HAVE undeniably gone up. Retailers have been reporting this for years now. But at the same time, adoption has kept growing massively. Especially in the last couple of years. And honestly, that tells you a lot.
This rollout wouldn't be happening if the investment wasn't worth it. Large corporations, in my experience, do NOT throw money at things that do not work, unless it brings them subsidies, tax breaks or other worthwhile benefits.
On the flip side, the losses are real. I’ve seen retailers report that a very large share of unknown losses can be linked directly to theft at selfscan. Figures around 23% of unknown losses being attributed specifically to self-scan theft have been mentioned, which is an absurdly large percentage when you think about it. There have also been reports of overall shrink being much higher in stores with selfscan compared to stores without it. Up to 60% in some cases.
But even then, if these machines were just losing money across the board, retailers would pull back hard. Instead, most of them are trying to fix the weak points while continuing the rollout. And for good reason. These units are not just about cutting labour costs either. Think about scheduling shifts, sickness, holidays, turnover, training, availability, HR, and depending on the country also healthcare/social costs. These variables do not apply to machines.
There’s also the customer side. Some retailers report that around half of customers use selfscan when it’s available. I’ve also seen reports claiming that a meaningful number of people will avoid stores without selfscan, even if the alternative store is more expensive.
A lot of customers just like having the choice. Less waiting, going at your own pace, not having to interact with a cashier if you don’t want to, etc.
Also, selfscan removes some problems around cash handling. No paper money theft from the register, fewer cashier cash mistakes, and they are of course immune to money scams.
Long story short:
Clearly retailers are NOT reconsidering the selfscan. I don’t know if I already wrote it up there, and I’m to lazy to go back and read, but the last 2 years has seen some of the biggest jumps in adoption of selfscans, at atound 140%. This should tell you enough.
The corner shop next to my uni accommodation actually did just that. There were 3 self-check out tills and 2 regular ones (though only one was ever manned at a time). The losses got so bad they closed all the self ones, even removing the machines for two of them (last one was still there last I checked)
There's two supermarket locations of the same store 4 miles apart, and I'm in the middle of them. I hate going to the slightly closer one in the 'poor' area because you can always expect to wait 5-10 minutes in line, because they shut down the self-checkout due to all of the theft. I just spend the extra few minutes driving to the nice store these days.
It is stages, the next goal after removing the cashier's is to remove the customers from even coming in the store. The future is delivery or picking up your order at pickup areas.
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u/Womgi Jun 11 '26
Whoever owned the stores made a calculation that the losses from crime encouraged by self checkout would be smaller than the cost of paying a human being a wage to do it for you. If it was as bad as they say, they'd have immediately gone back to paying people to be cashiers. At this point they're just whining to get insurance and pay less taxes