Monday, March 11, 2024

Self-Checkout

For the first time in a while, I went to Walmart over the weekend.  And I was surprised to find all the self-checkouts closed.  I had heard that this was a thing happening at some of the bigger retailers, but this was the first time encountering it.  Shoplifting must be a real problem if they're having to do this and sacrificing the enormous savings in labor cost from self-checkouts.  Do that many people really "accidentally" not scan all their items?  I confess to having "accidentally" scanned something for less than it was actually worth.  But that is just a very small drop in a very big ocean.  Surely in this day and age we have the technology to eliminate shoplifting.  I've never been to an Amazon Go store, but in those you don't have to check out at all.  If the big retailers can't or don't want to incorporate these kind of technologies, then perhaps they deserve to be the victims of shoplifting.  But then we all suffer when they use this as an excuse to drive up prices.  And apparently shoplifting is an endemic nowadays, because the cost of grocery shopping is outrageous.           

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