• Hazzardis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s become like a hobby of mine to not pay for a single item every time I check out at Walmart or Kroger. Fuckers have their margins higher than ever and their starting pay is $12-14/hr. If they want to reduce theft then they can hire people to actually work some of the 20 empty check out lanes they have.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        That sounds absurd. There is easily 5000 regular shoppers in a grocery store. Plus people buying there irregularly. They would need to reliably identify every single one of them, with face recognition only having 80-90% accuracy. and If we talk 5$ missacounted per shoppinge once a week that is 4 years of shopping.

        The amount of data needed to be stored and analysed for that is insane.

        And then we are not even at the point, where they can prove theft on every single instance, because they need to prove that the system did not malfunction, or a simple user error occured.

        I call bullshit on that.

      • Fish [Indiana]@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Are you being sarcastic? There is 1 person manning 10 checkouts and cameras that aren’t monitored. As someone who worked in the Front End of a grocery store for many years, I can tell you that they don’t have the resources to keep track of 99% of theft.

        • dodgy_bagel@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Walmart has AI keeping track of theft at self checkout. They don’t use that as a basis for in-person stops, but they still record it.

          And they have a small team of plainclothes people looking at camerad and sometimes straight up following people around the store.

          Speaking of cameras, in addition to regular cameras, in the big metro areas there are around twenty 360 degree cameras that can see across the entire store at any time, even when playing back a recording. If you have line of sight, it sees you.

          • Fish [Indiana]@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            I am mostly just familiar with Kroger’s LP, but in my experience their loss prevention is pretty ineffective. They have a lot of cameras installed, but they aren’t being constantly monitored. There are actually only a handful of loss prevention personnel, and they spend the majority of their time walking around in stores. They will occasionally catch someone trying to steal a whole cart of groceries or a kid stealing a pair of earbuds. The majority of theft is actually either at self-checkouts or people walking out the doors with pockets full of merchandise. There are also people who regularly get caught stealing, and loss prevention will always keep an eye out for those people.

            I didn’t work in loss prevention, but I would occasionally have to review security footage in the security office. The cameras, even in the newer stores, were pretty low resolution and had a lot of blind spots. They are put there as a deterrent more than anything else.

            I assume Walmart probably has better loss prevention than Kroger, so you could be correct. Though, I doubt all Walmart stores have AI SCO tracking or 360-degree-recording cameras.

            • dodgy_bagel@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              1 year ago

              My experience is as a manager in three different high-loss stores in a metropolitan area. I assure you, the cameras are very good.

              Now, when you’re zooming across an entire store the image does “bounce” up and down a bit, but it’s still good quality.

              With the AI, I think it’s still in development. Again, it isn’t used as a primary means of apprehension, but it’s definitely a tool in the arsenal.

          • limelight79@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I was at a Meijers a few weeks ago (midwestern chain kind of like Wal-Mart but nicer) and the self-scanner started flashing for the clerk when we finished. When the clerk came over, it played a video of me scanning one of the items, and the clerk could see if I had tried to slip something in the bag without scanning it. It was interesting to see.

            It may have triggered because we’d bought alcohol, which had to be paid for separately in a special part of the store, and that was still in the cart. But I don’t know for certain what triggered it, and, if he knew, he didn’t say so.

      • Hazzardis@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m so far below $1k that it isn’t a worry, it’s only small dollar items. That and they aren’t catching me every time, even with all the cameras. Even if they did know every single time I “missed” an item at self check out, I’d be surprised if I’d taken more than $100 of food by now. That and they’d have a hard time proving it was intentional every time and not a simple mistake.

        • Therevev@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I was never trained to run their register, so mistakes are bound to happened.

        • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          This is a really bad idea. There are better ways to stick it to Walmart without stealing and I assure you it doesn’t look heroic. You’re just stealing.

    • Trolled@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      guys look at me! I am very smart because I steal from walmart to rebel against the evil capitalist overlords! time to get validation for my actions from reddit!