Technology

One time I went to wal-mart and at self-checkout there was a security guy (with a bulletproof vest...) with the employee. I don't know if he was there to look intimidating to potential thieves or to protect the employee from violent customers, but I did not like the feeling of him watching me scanning my items. Am I a customer or a potential profit-loss theft for wal-mart? I fucking hate that company...

When their AI is well trained on social behaviours, they'll start sending Minority reports

This post has reminded me that I should go steal from Walmart soon.

It's not the system that bugs me. It's the amount of time it takes for the employees to actually come and get the shit going smoothly again. Even when it's pretty dead in the store, it can take an extraordinary long time before one of the employees watching the area actually comes over when the light is flashing red and I'm trying to get their attention.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Retailers broadly are facing increasing theft and have responded by locking up merchandise, warning investors of major losses, and implementing new technology to help combat the issue.

In 2019, Walmart introduced computer-vision technology at its registers to reduce inventory shrink, a term retailers use to describe merchandise losses from theft, fraud, error, and other causes.

Employees overseeing the self-checkout stations can monitor the registers from mobile phones and, in the case of issues, pause the machines to prevent customers from checking out.

The employee, who has worked at Walmart locations for over two years, said the self-checkout technology caught many customers off guard — particularly when they saw that the registers flagged them and then played back a video on the machine's screen showing them scanning items.

"It was personally uncomfortable for me to notice somebody purposefully not scanning an item," said Dominick Haar, 20, a recent newly former Walmart employee who worked self-checkout in a store in Southern Illinois.

"I think it created a lot more stress for the employees, not to mention customers that just want one-on-one personal conversation when they go to the store," Leroy told Insider, referring to the self-checkout machines.

The original article contains 923 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Seems like i have a complete different experience of self checkout here in Germany. But why? Are our devices newer?