You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.

  • rumba
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    2 hours ago

    “If you go into a shop and you pick up a few groceries, usually you would pick any of the cashiers that is around and you go scan your goods,” he said. “When someone is planning a sweethearting theft, they will always go to the same cashier, which is most of the time a relative of theirs, and this is an anomaly in the behavior compared to the other customers. Our system is able to identify this anomaly and alert on that.”

    I usually go to one of two cashiers because they are faster and actually know what they are doing. I will always return to them simply to save time.

    The system sounds costly. It’s merely another version of the “inventory robots” that never gained traction. They’ll end up spending six figures per store on hardware that constantly triggers false alerts until they eventually shut it down. Weren’t groceries supposed to be fully NFC by now, allowing you to scan everything at once on your way to the door?

    The managers know who’s gonna steal. They see them sweet-talking and complaining about fixed income.

  • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    Well, the bad news is that some tech firm wants to convert the relationship you’ve built with your favorite cashiers into something inherently suspicious. And it wants to do this because retailers are claiming people engaged in theft generally head towards employees willing to help them engage in theft

    Yo I didn’t know I could just get help with my theft, wtf? Groceries could have been so much cheaper this whole time!

    What stupid logic.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      What stupid logic.

      Always. The shit excuse I got as for why we don’t donate food to a homeless shelter at some restaurant I used to work at was because we’d be incentivized to cook more by the end of the shift. Fucking what? You’re already making us weight that shit before towing it out, you can literally see the numbers increase if that’s the case and call people out. Fucking unregulated capitalism bullshit.