i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are not faster than a cashier.
I’m faster than the line of people buying ice and lotto tickets and cigarettes and paying with a check.
No, it’s way more relaxed and honestly I don’t wanna speak to someone after a whole day of yapping at the office. I just wanna pack the groceries into my bag in peace
Yes, but the cashier has a line of people waiting, and the self checkouts don’t.
So I get a massive head start, and I still finish first.
There would not be a line at the cashier if there were more of them. There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out. The self checkout created the problem.
This might perhaps be true in the land of XXL everything, but in the space it takes to have 3 cashiers you can easily install 2 rows of 4 self checkout machines, and in Europe space tends to be more scarce.
They are a massive space saver, and when that’s the space you have, 8 self-checkouts and a cashier have more throughput than 4 cashiers (which don’t even tend to be staffed all at once).
Not true, there are less because it costs money to pay for more cashiers
There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out.
Let’s not pretend they open all the checkouts and it’s space keeping them limited.
obviously my self checkout experience is faster, or i would go to a cashier. we’ve been over this.
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
A bunch of smaller places around me just totally shut down the self checkout. It’s actually incredibly frustrating because there will be a line and I could just do it myself and be done. But no, everyone has to wait for a single cashier now because people were stealing. Just make up your mind. Get rid of it entirely or use it.
Why would they pay more cashiers if you shop there anyway?
Dear Walmart, You owe me 4 weeks Vacation pay, and my annual raise. And where is my staff discount???
Sincerely, Customer
You are responsible for applying the staff discount directly
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
4011 is the new 411.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
This is indeed 4011
Self-checkout or not, minimum wage is not even remotely enough to expect cashiers to be anti-theft enforcement.
Doesn’t stop some people from trying to. Lady at Smiths insisted on seeing my receipt after telling her twice that yes I was sure I correctly scanned all of the 6 items in my cart, thank you.
Agreed, there is always at least one worker at these places who has a strange sense of misplaced loyalty.
I don’t know what “Smiths” is, but unless it’s a club like Costco that can impose it as a condition of membership, they have no right to demand your receipt or stop you from leaving.
If they stop you anyway, they had damn well better have probable cause (and no, refusing to show a receipt doesn’t create it by itself) because otherwise that’s a false arrest.
One of ours does this. I object, so I just breeze past the security guard without listening or making eye contact.
Just a standard regional grocery chain. They dont have memberships but im not gonna make a scene over $40 worth of groceries i knew I had scanned properly so I just let her realize her mistake and decided not to shop there anymore.
Just saying that the lack of pay doesn’t stop people from appointing themselves as volunteer loss prevention.
You don’t make a scene, you ignore them and walk past them and through the door. You don’t have to prove you own the things you bought. Pretend you don’t speak English or just are confused and keep moving.
I will say though I’d probably show them the receipt instead of call the cops, but that says more about what I think the cops might do than anything else.
Pretend you don’t speak English or just are confused and keep moving
I just either ignore them entirely or say “no, thank you”, declining it as the request it actually is rather than the demand they try to imply it to be.
Its sort of funny, if they catch someone shoplifting its the same thing. They will request they come back to a room and wait for the police but they can’t force them physically.
But how many of them were actually bananas?
I’m gonna be so real, I prefer self-checkout whenever possible. The “employee discount” is just an occasional bonus
I don’t.
Every single thing involves me getting the attention of the 1 guy who is responsible for minding like 10 of them.
- item won’t scan …
- you have alcohol
- you have a thing with a discount sticker on it
- item has 2 upcs on it for some reason and the first one scans and is like twice the cost of the thing
- I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
I have seen only one implementation of this that I like so far, in Decathlon. You dump your shopping basket in the machine’s basket, you don’t even have to know what is in there and the machine automatically picks everything up by their nfc tags. It has never failed for me and you don’t need to search for any tags or barcodes. You pay, you can pick up all yours stuff and dump it in your bag and you are ready to go.
The polar opposite experience is the one you describe and for those shops I avoid the machines if I can.
My experience is from Norwegian shops, so it might differ from the standards in elsewhere.
- item won’t scan: very rarely an issue. We can put in the bar code numbers manually if needed.
- you have alcohol: a nearby staff will take a quick glimpse at me and will approve the age from their unit. Only people close to the age limit will have to wait for the staff.
- discount stickers in shops here have the updated price on a barcode on that sticker.
- I don’t understand the “2 upcs”-issue.
- accidental scans can be corrected by the user without staff involvement.
Having lived in both the US and Denmark, I’d say the listed problems are much more prevalent in the US. The ID check being a pain, the double bar code, discounts not being applied.
It’s just a better experience here than the US lol I’m guessing it’s similar in Norway
Not to mention it takes twice as long because you’re unloading an entire trolley onto a space that holds maybe 4 items, you’re scanning, and you’re bagging. There’s no area to actually work and put all your shit, this doesn’t even include the 4-12 times you need the person to come fix the broken machine, but that 1 person is busy fixing 4 other people’s broken machines.
Something that would take you and a professional working together 5 minutes ends up taking 10+ minutes
Wait, you guys have to unload everything at the register and scan it there?! No wonder you hate that shit. In Sweden we have a portable scanner that we bring with us through the store, and you can remove stuff yourself. Removes most of the hassle. There might still be items that need checking or an ID check, but the former usually doesn’t take long, and the latter they can do remotely if you look way above the required age. Saves a shit ton of time, since there’s very often a queue at the regular registers.
I have absolutely never had that experience, it’s always the opposite. I’m in, I’m out. The good thing is, if you don’t like self-check you can go through the clerk line and vice versa.
There is a severe lack of space if you’re getting a lot of items and no good way to remove full bags without the thing yelling at you.
I used to scan and bag groceries in high school and the scanners on the self checkout slow me down significantly as well. Constantly flagging items as not bagged if I scan the next item too fast (even when bagged) or for not scanning items if I dare have something in my right hand while bagging with my left.
And yeah, I’ll avoid the one line with a human where they’re 4 deep with 50 items each wanting to pay with checks still.
Stores vary. In mine there’s ample bagging space and the self-check limit is 15 items anyway.
Years ago they used to do that here. If they did that now though, with only one register with a person, you’d easily be waiting 20 - 30 minutes to check out.
If you have more than like three things get the hell out of the self-checkout lane. I’m so sick of being behind a person getting fifteen different kinds of produce that all need to be entered manually while I wait with my single gallon of milk.
Supermarkets in my area have had separate basket and trolley self-checkout areas for a good while. Basket ones are what you describe, trolley ones have enough space for a trolley on one side and about three or four times as much packing area on the other
I accidently pick the wrong tomato type and to fix it I need to get someone’s a attention
You can avoid this by just ringing up all produce as bananas.
So, ten dollars?
What is the cheapest tomato? That’s the tomato you ring up. Oops, silly old me, making a mistake anyone could make.
Loose romas
I actually would like to do that but I live in Canada and in February there cheapest tomato choosing is hard.
Red tomato might be a green house tomato and cost more than you might think.
This combined with the shit interface that truncates the names and is slow as hell makes it annoying.
In my experience (L.A.) the tomatoes each have stickers on them, with either a scan code or a number code. But you’re right the whole thing is a PITA
Carrots are cheaper.
If you can find them sold by weight. Most stores in my area sell them in big, pre-weighed bags.
Self check-outs at a fast food place (or boba tea etc.) are great because you can ensure that everything is correct and to your liking before making payment.
But they’re absolutely atrocious for any transaction where you’ve already picked out a half-dozen items or more.
Advantage: when somebody is taking so long it seems like they’re figuring out their taxes, you’re not stuck behind them because the one line goes to multiple stations. At least where I shop.
Wild guess, you’re American? Because every story I hear about self checkouts in the US is this. Meanwhile in actual first world countries where they are modern systems you very rarely have any of these issues. Even my experiences in Croatia and Spain from 20 years ago had solved most of this (and please, I’m not dissing them. I’m a Swede and my experience is just that Scandinavia is on the forefront of stuff like this.) I haven’t had to grab the attention of a worker for so many years, and from what I see with other shoppers it’s the same for them. The workers seem bored if anything because they so rarely have to help someone even with one person minding twenty of them at the larger stores.
I prefer self checkout since they have to hire at least 2 person that I have scanned everything instead of 1 person to do the scanning.
Or I get something for free.
Wow yeah I bought a six pack of Coke or something and the scanner picked up the UPC on the cardboard carrier AND one bottle, like fuck off you’re charging me an extra bottle! Took a while for the attendant to stroll over and lackadaisically fix it at his leisure.
Yeah, so I hit the grocery store two or three. Times during the week, usually getting stuff for dinner that night, fresh veggies, meat, that sorta thing. It makes sense with how my mornings lay out, and I prefer small trips. I’m at a point where I have this shit down by rote. Yes, there’s some hiccups, like watermelon needing an employee because people use watermelon to steal apparently, but I kind of program in to the whole operation.
Larger orders, I’ll hit an employee so I can bag while they scan.
At the end of the day, it’s always about efficiency, and so it’s generally best for me to self checkout.
I prefer it if I have like 8 items or less.
Anything more and I cant be bothered. Especially if it’s groceries and there are codes to enter instead of barcodes to scan and weights to take.
How do you expect me to tell the difference between organic lionsmane mushroom and a banana?
It is 1866. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 1940. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 2026. You get the picture.“Record profits” in nominal currency will be made year after year. Profit margins (on supermarkets in my country) remains low, and is lower than it was 10 years ago.
EDIT: if you don’t believe me, ask for evidence instead of just downvoting because you don’t like facts. Lemmy has a narrative about grocery profits that (at least in my country) is not supported by evidence.
I recognize the impact inflation has on the term, but it varies from store to store and country to country whether it outpaces inflation. Walmart, which this meme is about and a load bearing parasite on the US, maintains growth slightly above inflation. This doesn’t indemnify everyone, or really anyone in particular. It’s pointing out that money is going somewhere in this current era of force-fed infinite growth, but seemingly not to the people who need it most.
To phrase my comment another way, the wealth gap is widening and businesses will do anything but address it, instead complaining about their own impropriety as if it were your fault.
This meme is about self service checkouts which are ubiquitous in my country.
Walmart had an operating profit margin of 4.2% in their last statement, and a net profit margin of 3%.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for widening wealth inequality, profit margins under 5% are not where you’ll find it. Check the facts instead of going on pure vibes - company accounts are public and subject to audit (on pain of huge punishments if wrong - they got Al Capone on tax fraud remember)
I can tell you that Dillons (subdivision of Kroger) is on genuinely razor thin margins, and they at least pay half way decent for the area im in
Then it sounds like I wasn’t referring to Dillons. Do they even have self checkout?
Yes, most have two separate checkouts on both sides. And also this weird self checkout/belt lane thing. Was just trying to add to the conversation, geez.
Gotta be careful giving dissenting opinions in the black and white world of the internet.
I have no idea what the belt lane thing is and I’m interested. My self checkouts are just the scanner thing, and then you put the items on the scale. The inclusion of a belt is intriguing.
I didn’t mean any offense, but I exclusively found dillons in low population cities, which made me question whether they’d have any need for a self checkout.
Even the little corner shop in my town of a couple thousand people has one now. There’s no way that a second full checkout would fit in the space, nor is hiring another staff member to work it likely to be realistic, so it’s a straight upgrade in capacity
I fucking hate that belt fed one! They put it in my go to store shortly before I moved close to an aldi and how exactly is it supposed to be helpful? You scan, and it belts it all into a pile at the other end that you then have to walk over and organize. At least the lazy Susan designed ones can let you organise it all into the bags.
Also, I don’t know how their “unexpected item in the bagging area” sensor works but I literally set them off by getting within 10 inches of the bags. When I worked at one years back we literally measured the distance. No contact, no previous errors, tested on two different machines, apparently I produce an aura that makes Dillons bags gain mass.
And according to Hollywood accounting not a single movie has ever made a profit…
I would be surprised if supermarket’s profit margins are actually as low as they all claim.
Not true, Hollywood can shift profits from one film to another, but not hide them in such a way that no-one of them break even. You could have checked what the major studios are making (it was about $6bn net in 2025).
This is what audits are for, and in any functioning country (indeed even a half-functioning one like the US) the internal revenue department makes it very difficult to hide profits at a large scale. There’s an easy way to sniff check this claim: if it were possible to hide profits so thoroughly, why does any company at all pay any corporation tax at all?
What Hollywood does is shuffle its real costs around so that films which would have to pay the largest royalties appear to make no money. They can also shuffle some things around so that subsidiaries operating in high tax countries appear to make a loss. Supermarkets selling physical goods in physical shops can’t do this.
There’s also no reason to think that companies have got better at hiding profits over the last few years, even if you think their profits are wrong.
It’s not shoplifting, its an employee discount.
The industry term for that is “shrinkage”.
I was shopping in the pool!
I thought that was used in the porn industry.
That’s “fluffing”.
I thought that was when you stuffed your mouth full of marshmallows and then give head
That sounds dangerous.
Two choking hazards at the same time
That’s a fluffernutter.
It’s my compensation for doing their work for them.
“rethinking” doesn’t mean what you think it does.
I love self-checkout. The line moves much faster. But it is important to learn which machines work well and which ones are most glitchy. Kind of like learning which lane has The World’s Slowest Checkout Clerk.
I hate the ones at Kroger. If you scan stuff too fast, it freaks out and calls the employee over.
Like, I’m talking about going slower than an actual cashier.
I tried scanning one of those digital coupon things they print on paper and the employee was called over three times in that one transaction.
And if you ring up alcohol you can’t ring up anything else until you get cleared. Other chains I’ve been to let you keep scanning and you get cleared when they have time.
Maybe I’m spoiled. The ones at both local Safeways here are great, except each store has one with a card slot that won’t detect sliding my Safeway card. But recently I learned holding the card over the product scanner works just fine!
If I only have a few things, its great, usually shorter line and scanning my own stuff isn’t a big deal.
When I have a cart full of stuff, I’d rather have the expert just churn through scanning all of that stuff. Especially if there’s someone packing it into a bag at the same time.
No criticism here, to each their own.
Then you choose that one.
No, when I see she’s working I definitely go to self-check.
I have an issue with telling fancy mushrooms from the cheap brown mushrooms that are coincidentally 1/5 of the price. Its a known problem and it should probably disqualify me from a job checking out produce. Oh well, I guess I’ll just do my best.
My grocery store definitely did this on purpose: They sell Broccoli (organic) and Broccoli crowns. The self checkout menu lists the former at the end of a page, without showing the latter until you hit Next page. Organic turns out to be 2.5x the price by pound of crowns.
If not banana, why banana priced?
Wait til you find out about the expensive apples!
All apples are the least expensive apples.
My man.
Hell yeah. Honeycrisp flavor at Gala price. How am I supposed to know what apples I got? I’m colorblind and they all look the same.
A cold honeycrisp on a hot day is one of the simple pleasures in life.
I couldn’t agree more.
One time, i scanned all of my items and had to wait for someone to check id because it included alcohol. After they unlocked the machine, I paid and left. Turned out that none of the scans registered after the first alcohol item, so i got a bunch of freebies. I’d normally give a shit, but this is how well they trained me and how well their system worked.
The process is perfectly designed to give you the results you got.
-Demming, or someone like himMany moons ago, I stopped by the art supply store with my stepmom to get some colored twine. We picked up 2 rolls, and were basically forced to do self checkout. I watched her scan each one, but only one actually registered. The price for a single roll was also more than double the cost if she had bought it on Amazon, so the total when checking out was within a reasonable ballpark. Once we got to the car, I pointed it out, and she apparently had no clue, but was annoyed enough not to go back and pay for the second.
So, um … just for curiosity’s sake, what store chain would that little glitch happen to occur in?
Because I, of course, want to be completely sure that I don’t make a similar error.
Safeway. No idea if that system still exist.
The complaining is an important part of the theatrics.
I used to work with a very wealthy man. He owned a very successful side business and had some very good customers. He would tell me about how he would exaggerate all of his complaints about how much money he’s going to lose when something or other happens. And I saw him do it to people at work. One of his major skills was playing the victim. I lost all hope of feeling bad for business owners once I realized that was a thing. Meanwhile, he has a huge house on the palisades outside of New York City and all his kids went to private schools from preschool to college.
When he left, he tried to give me his bill oRiley CD collection.
You can only complain about being stolen from if you didn’t make record profits.
Have you never met a MAGAt? They can (and WILL) complain about anything and everything, and completely shout down any evidence of their deceptiveness.
Not sure what that has to do with my comment though
Who’s running these companies? Who are those companies’ major shareholders?
Again, not really responsive to my comment.
Im pretty sure you were talking about them not having a legitimate cause for complaint, since they made record profits.
And then WhoIzDiz is saying they complain without a legitimate reason about lots of things.
Not really disagreeing with your point.
Unless you mean you disagree that most of the corporate grocery chins are run by Republicans.
I was sarcastically pointing out that having records profits doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to complain about theft.
Oh! I took it as a serious remark about whining about hungry people pilfering while engaging in wage theft, price gouging, and exploitation of food producers.
Apparently all that subtext isn’t obvious to everyone…
In my country, supermarkets typically make about 2-4% profit, and were marking 4-6% 10 years ago. So I guess they can complain…
Yup, those are the rules.
