Many thieves are cowards, too. They steal less when they think people are watching. Their risk analysis is based on if people are there, if cameras are there, if they think people really watch thieves on camera, and if the store prosecutes thieves. Every box you tick can reduce theft. I think Target was in the lead on that stuff.
Re scales. The scale detects a weight difference between items. If the items are similar weight, the scale or cashier will ignore it. The scales also had a high, false alarm rate that often caused cashiers to ignore them. The thieves also use scanning methods that cause higher, false alarms to encourage that. None of that works with human cashiers and a bascart exchange.
Re registers needed. You would think. The company was top-down, micro-managed, low staff, and blame the worker. The supervisor had to open registers in time, maybe watch self-checkout while the attendant does price checks, and often work a register themselves for most of the shift. Good service was impossible in those conditions.
Instead of having cashiers, the executives decided an AI that thought for us would fix the problem. Of course, we had no cashiers to open registers. They marked us as failures on that, too.
Later, they had us force more people to use self-checkout, closed more registers to facilitate that process, and installed more self checkouts. I’ve been gone a few years. It seems the customers have grudgingly accepted the status quo because both major companies, the cheapest with most products, were intentionally making checkout terrible. Oligopolies in action…
Re scales. The scale detects a weight difference between items. If the items are similar weight, the scale or cashier will ignore it. The scales also had a high, false alarm rate that often caused cashiers to ignore them. The thieves also use scanning methods that cause higher, false alarms to encourage that. None of that works with human cashiers and a bascart exchange.
Re registers needed. You would think. The company was top-down, micro-managed, low staff, and blame the worker. The supervisor had to open registers in time, maybe watch self-checkout while the attendant does price checks, and often work a register themselves for most of the shift. Good service was impossible in those conditions.
Instead of having cashiers, the executives decided an AI that thought for us would fix the problem. Of course, we had no cashiers to open registers. They marked us as failures on that, too.
Later, they had us force more people to use self-checkout, closed more registers to facilitate that process, and installed more self checkouts. I’ve been gone a few years. It seems the customers have grudgingly accepted the status quo because both major companies, the cheapest with most products, were intentionally making checkout terrible. Oligopolies in action…