Old tricks at the self-checkout machine — like trying to pass off a bottle of vintage Bordeaux as a banana— are becoming harder to get away with.
ver since retailers hit on the idea that they could make customers, not employees, scan and bag their own products, and installed rows of monstrous self-checkout machines at the front of their stores, shoppers have tested the limits of what they could get away with stealing.
Self-checkout machines have become a common sight at stores, with a record 200,000 machines shipped worldwide last year, up from 80,000 in 2019, according to consulting firm RBR. Some retailers, including Walmart, Kroger and Dollar General, are experimenting with self-checkout-only stores. Retailers that have stuck with traditional cashiers, like clothing and home improvement stores, are starting to install the machines.
“Normal shoppers can become very emboldened by the cloak of excuse-making that surrounds self-checkout,” said Adrian Beck, a criminology professor at the University of Leicester. “Normal shoppers can become very emboldened by the cloak of excuse-making that surrounds self-checkout.”Retailers like Kroger have also been testing artificial intelligence technology that can identify when an item has been placed in the bagging area without being properly scanned — with an accuracy rate that results in 80% fewer customer alerts than the antediluvian-era scale that’s widely used on many self-checkout machines.
“Making sure you don’t alienate that customer is really important. Because they might have just made a mistake. What we don’t want to do is treat them like a thief and ultimately give them a bad experience so that they don’t come back to that store,” said Matt Redwood, director of advanced self-service solutions at Diebold Nixdorf, whose self-checkout machines are used by retailers like Ikea and Lidl.
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