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Did you pay the sticker price or the intended price?

Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.

Calling card doesn’t actually mean anything without enforcement. My city police didn’t have time to investigate when someone kicked in my back door and fled once the alarm sounded. I really doubt they give a crap about looking me up and coming to cite me for misdemeanor charges.

Anything that risks an employee might confront you in the store is a greater risk IMO. And, usually they light on the register is green (or a similar indicator) so they do know right then if you don’t pay.

> So scan everything, then put it in the cart and walk off without putting in the credit card.

I actually saw someone do this a couple weeks ago.

> why didn't you stop him after the first theft? Why did you keep letting him steal?

Enforcement goes to the police. Stores can't apprehend thieves. There is a lot of training for store employees to not try to engage the thieves because some can behave erratically and dangerously when they feel like they're caught.

You can tell someone they need to stop and pay for merchandise, but if they choose to keep walking there's nothing the store staff can do but document and report it.

The reason stores wait until it reaches felony level to report it is because police are too busy to try to pursue every small case that happens everywhere. There are fewer crimes that rise to the level of a felony, so they have to focus their efforts on the smaller number of more serious crimes instead of taking every report FIFO style

IKEA did this to me two years ago. Flagged me as not having paid the right amount. Turns out that they sell fake plants as one cost and the pot you put them in as another; even if they're put together.

It was a difference of like $5 at most on a $400 bill. I suppose 1.25% is enough to pay someone in another country to monitor everything.

> Not just that, getting unpaid labor.

That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.

I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?

They are automating quite a lot, since the wait times are much much lower. I choose the self-checkout counters >95% of the time.

I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.

Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.

I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.

Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.

Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.

Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.

Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.

And where do you account for the absolutely countable number of lost jobs in this equation?

With about a month of practice you could learn to pick 95% of residential locks.

So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s

Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.

Living in low trust societies sucks.

I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.

Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.

I don't understand why we'd defend a megacorporation. Both the corporation and the shoplifter can be wrong.

The delusional thing is they think the cost is distributed to the owners.

They just cut worker hours and raise prices. The owners don't see a difference.

The richest person they're hurting is the store manager earning $200k missing some of their bonus.

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Don't tell me, you think the store actually expects to sell all that milk before it goes bad?

I know people who have during a period of their life needed to steal food to eat.

These are not the people bragging about scamming the self checkouts.

As a former cashier it kills me to scan one at a time, the self checkouts all have painfully long mandatory wait times between scans. Most of my time is just spent holding back my muscle memory, or getting yelled at for trying to scan at a normal cashier scanning pace.

Depends on the neighborhood

My local Target had also done this most of the past year but re-opened them recently, thankfully.

That's really surprising. In my experience its so much faster than traditional cashier.

Interesting, I rarely go to Walmart if I can avoid it, but I've noticed the stores here seem to only have a couple staffed checkouts left. There's 14+ isles of self checkouts.

In the fraud/theft detection I had some experience with, everyone learns right away that mistakes happen all the time. Singular incidents are basically not worth investigating unless something about them is highly unusual, like an unusually large dollar amount or aligning with a scam that has become popular.

When I watched movies and TV shows I had this idea that thieves were all clever people who built smart systems to evade detection and steal right out from under big corporations. Some of those people might be out there operating undetected, but the average thief who gets caught is someone trying to abuse something as much as they can until they get caught. Some of them are so brazen (like the scan everything as bananas post above) that they must believe that nobody will ever check and if they do get caught nothing bad will happen.

The staff who watch these things have a good sense of what dollar thresholds the customer must cross before getting law enforcement involved.

I've had awkward interactions with the Walmart system. It's clearly using a neural net, and a good one at that. It's only ever flagged me when I did something odd (like put something bagged and paid for in my cart, then take it out, then put it back again). I dress/groom like a thief, so the conversations with the staff are always annoying.

Honestly, I trust these systems more than humans to do the same work. While we're all talking anecdotes, this one time at Walmart (how all good stories start) many years ago I was in the music section and these two in-store security guys approached me, saying they had told me to never come back in the store, etc., making a big scene. I so rarely go to Walmart and found the situation kind of humorous and wanted to see where it would go (knowing I had not done anything wrong now or in the past). They had seen me on video evidently and thought I was somebody else - serial shoplifter or public urinator or who knows what. Anyway, I tell them I've never been told to leave prior to this visit, didn't know what they were talking about. They were adamant that I was in the wrong, asked me to come back to the office while they looked into things. I was like, "sure!", more entertained than upset. So there I am sitting in the office while some guy combs through video footage. A guy of authority comes in, tired demeanor, asks these guys - well, did you match his ID? "No", says he. Checks ID, realizes I'm not their guy. Many stressful apologies on their behalf. But that's humans for you.

Yep, same thing with Walmart. I don't know about Target's systems, but wouldn't be surprised they're on par. Walmart is one of the biggest leaders in loss prevention and customer surveillance.

The explicit agreement also says that you'll return your shopping cart to the coral, and see how well that works.

That's basically Costco, the price they pay is what you pay, the system paired down to bare necessities, and it is incredibly popular.

I have always liked the idea of a company that sits between me and all the other services I engage. Like I am a client of ZipZorp and they negotiate on my behalf rentals, travel, providers, utilities et al. ZipZorp provides value to me by using their size to negotiate better rates, conditions, offer legal protection and as you put it remain hyperinformed in a way that I cannot. I would pay for a service like that.

That's pretty much what a food co-op is supposed to be.

I think with this openness the problem is there’s so many fluctuations and estimates that average consumer would think you’re being dishonest even if you weren’t. They’d see that you acquired an item for $20 and could never quite understand why they have to pay you $50. They’d see the plethora of line item costs as nickel and diming even if many are absolute hard costs. They’d see the estimated numbers as inflated.

There are coop grocery stores where members get to see the financials at a high level and make price changes that make the market sustainable. This is usually some form of shared ownership but I think this is a better way to achieve similar goals.

Yeah Target is notorious for its surveillance technology.

Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-inv...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...

they have the best marketed loss prevention: by getting nerds to talk about, people are like, ooo i shouldn't shoplift at target

of course, without any real data, how would anyone know?

Same experience here. The one "monitor" employee is busy nearly full time helping out with some issue some customer is having, such that they simply can't be monitoring that everyone's items are ringing up as the actual item instead of "bananas".

But every terminal also has a spycam hanging above it to either "give the appearance" of a big-brother overlord watching to encourage honesty, or is recording everything so that someone can review footage later if some issue is discovered.

There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.

The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart.

The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.

Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.

Grocery is a big industry. What's shadowy about it?

Why deal with problem systems when we can punish someone we caught?

That is your thought process?

Shadowy? Kroger's and Albertsons weren't allowed to merge due to anticompetitive practices, price hikes, etc. This was only a couple years ago & is out in the open. You can point all your fingers and toes at the boards of these companies if you need to.

All grocery stores are introducing self-checkout as a way to reduce staffing. It's not a shadowy conspiracy, it's a legitimate fact. Many customers would much rather check out with a person.

There is, as you suspect, a carveout:

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Cha...

(i) ...if there is a discrepancy between the advertised price, the sticker price, the scanner price or the display price and the checkout price on any grocery item, a food store or a food department shall charge a consumer the lowest price. If the checkout price or scanner price is not the lowest price or does not reflect any qualifying discount, the seller: (i) shall not charge the consumer for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is $10 or less; (ii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price less $10 for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is more than $10; and (iii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price for any additional units of the grocery item. For the purposes of this subsection and unless the deputy director determines otherwise, individual items that differ only by color, flavor or scent shall be counted as the same item if they are identical in all other aspects, including price, brand, and may only vary in random weight. This subsection shall not apply if: (1) there is evidence of willful tampering; or (2) the discrepancy is a gross error, in that the lowest price is less than half of the checkout price and the seller, in the previous 30 days, did not intend to sell the grocery item at the lowest price.

I dunno, having worked in retail I think it is just not that hard to steal in general (I wasn’t going to get killed over some bananas). Most people are honest most of the time.

The law probably doesn’t apply to fraud, but then the cashier only notices the really obvious cases.

But in the moment how do you know it's fraud and not an employee mistake? Especially if the price is not egregiously low.

They are talking about the price on the shelf vs the price at the register. The price tag on the shelf has information identifying the product. The price at the register is obviously associated to the bar code on the product. So there's no way for a consumer to swap price tags from one product to another.

Source - worked at a grocery store in Massachusetts as a teen

The thing I was responding to was about pricing policy in general, but I would assume so

Sorry about not being explicit. I meant how it changes anything security-wise.

With the same vulnerable protocol the RF system is as easy to attack with bigger consequences then it seems....

Amusingly enough the extra steps likely make it worse once caught as it shows intent to defraud and planning.

In some places walking out with a MacBook Neo is a misdemeanor-but putting a barcode for bananas on it and checking out would be one or two felonies.

Hardly matters when one may print their own barcode on labels and cover the frangible one.

I sure wish I was wealthy and had a fistful of RSUs. You wanna send me some? I make 5% over my area's 80% median income and I can't even get housing because I "make too much money" despite being $3000 too rich.

I'm pretty tired of being the network guy in the field playing remote hands having to be on the front lines of all of this bullshit having to explain to decision makers that a bunch of shitty kids are running around and there's no real solution that we can just "fix" this with.

I'm tired. If they're not deauthing our networks they're breaking into rooms with the goddamn card copying and fuzzing functionality and stealing shit.