Other than an employee or two standing by, it seems to be riding on customer trust. Wouldn’t a company want to only have cashier lanes, so they can ensure that all products taken from a store are bought fairly?
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Honestly, the money saved by having to hire less people to manage check-out lines ends up making up for the occasional item that doesn’t get scanned. The majority of people aren’t thieves, and will be honest when scanning their groceries. These stores see how much money they made before and after self-check out, and have found that they are saving money by having them, even factoring in inventory checks to see how much is getting stolen or lost.
The kiosk and tell when you’ve put an unknown object in the bagging area and people are less likely to try and overtly steal things when they are in a rather open and public area. If you’re going to steal something, you’re not doing it at a check out lane, you’re doing it in the aisles where you can be hidden from view. After that, it doesn’t matter whether you go to a lane with a cashier or not.
The common answer is that the costs saved on a cashier, make up for the cost of stolen goods.
The reality is that cashiers dont prevent shoplifting anyway.
A shoplifter who’s willing to risk cheating at the self-checkout is also willing to stuf some items down their parts before walking past a cashier.
A few things to discourage theft, such as employees watching customers, cameras at each checkout monitoring the customer, scales to detect that an item was scanned and placed in the bagging area, etc. Stores also account for any theft by raising prices, so the customers who are paying for their items are making up for those who aren’t.
They don’t. They budget shoplifting. They do this anyway, even with manual checkouts. But savings from automatic checkouts more than compensate any potential increase of shoplifting.
They have several systems they can use.
The oldest is the scales. It knows how much stuff weighs, and weighs the bagging area. So say you slip an extra can of soup into your bag without scanning it, it sees the extra weight and says unknown item in the bagging area. If you scan the soup, pull it out and try to sneak something you havent scanned that costs more in… it knows when the weight drops. Some weigh where you set down the small shoping cart. Some just weight the bags. Ever have the machine seemingly randomly say it is going to get someone to come help you? Often it is something like this where a weight was off, or something changed that wasn’t supposed to.
Many also have cameras watching you.
Some have cameras that watch carts and esp. the bottom of carts to make sure the stuff down low doesn’t get forgotten.
I’ve been to one place that is RFID (pretty cool). Basically you put everything in a big bin, its scans the RFIDs and rings you out without you having to scan.
Another is software and QC checker based. You scan, get ready to pay and a worker comes by and a few things can happen. One is their handheld scanner Tells them to look for or scan a specific item. It may also ask them to scan a few random items. It may go on to ask them (or ask them to ask you) more questions “how many cans of soup are there”. If the answer doesn’t match what was scanned, they know you were cheating. If the random scan pulls up something that you didn’t scan in, they know you were cheating. If they scan your steaks and it rings up as apples, they know you cheated.
They know there is theft. They try to minimize it, but it’s part of the risk/reward of self checkout. Rewards can be cost savings, faster lines, and in some cases customers really prefer it. Drawbacks include theft, and loss that may not be intentional but a consequence of having a random untrained person trying to figure out how to key in the right orange, or not scanning something correctly.
Oh, one more thing- they also make a big deal about prosecuting people who steal. There have been news stories recently where they are arresting folks, suing folks, and otherwise going after them. In many cases they are also going back to prior checkouts someone made to look for theft on the video, and adding that to the charge. Trying to make an example out of them to deter others.
Look around next time you are near a self checkout lane. The number of cameras looking at that section is positively Orwellian.
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I hate these things and don’t use them. Just pay a person to run a till and stop automating people out of work for a couple extra bucks
Another thing that has happened to me at big box stores is randomly getting your receipt checked by the greeter/entrance person. Like maybe 1 in 20, but others see it so it’s a deterrent.
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