The AI gets to accuse you based on a bad guess, while you have to file paperwork and surrender more personal data to prove you didn’t steal a pack of vitamins. »Innocent until proven guilty« is now a premium feature.
Innocent until proven guilty was always the highest tier wealthy only premium. Everyone else is expected to plea bargain down to a crime they didn’t commit.
if you’re a billionaire you can be proven guilty and still be considered innocent
Innocent even proven guilty
That isn’t kafkaesque, that’s just authoritarian.
This will ultimately be the death of retail stores.
Half the reason anyone wants to go to a store in 2026 is to have a good time shopping in person. If going to the store leads to any chance of a shitty experience? Fuck it dude, I’ll just order online like everyone else I suppose.
I guess the stock boys and cashiers could just be like the olden groceries, where you bring your list and they fill it? Or, I guess more layoffs?
Walmart already does this with pick up orders I see as many Walmart employees with carts running around as I do regular customers.
Self Checkouts are not even self checkout anymore. You go up and scan your stuff then 2 times out of 3 someone has to come over and approve that you scanned everything. At that point just open the normal lanes back up
I literally stopped shopping at Kroger over this. If you’re gonna accuse me of stealing every third item I scan because I use a reusable shopping bag instead of the single-use plastic ones, you aren’t getting my business.
I think the only one more over it than me was the poor associate who had to keep signing in to watch videos of me scanning stuff.
Sorry Mr Ed, won’t happen again sir. Please do not Gatling Gun me.
It’s so annoying. I’ll scan something big and the computer is OUT LOUD saying at me “BAG YOUR ITEM” like NO! I DONT WANT TO!
The grocery store nearest my house (QFC, a slightly nicer Kroger-owned regional chain) has tiny trays for the bagging area. Anything more bulky than a gallon of milk and a bag of apples turns into a weird game of Jenga.
opening more lanes very obviously makes things better for customers but that’s not even remotely the goal. self-checkout lets them slash their labor costs and give out more executive bonuses by just paying one employee to manage the entire self-checkout section. they wouldn’t get to keep that money if they opened up more lanes and paid an employee per lane. so now every store has 20 lanes with at most three lanes open, and only if it’s really slammed.
The world would be dramatically better if about 10,000 specific people died
It’s so weird how little it takes to ruin a society
More will replace those fucks. The system is flawed.
It would be a lot easier to address those flaws in their absence.
What is wild about all this is looking back to the old social contract and how it basically made this
fobittedforbidden.The best example is the movie minority report in which the had a fool proof way to 100% of the time predict the future.
I won’t spoil the movie, but the whole premise was that even if there was one instance of it making a mistake, and a innocent person was put on ice by mistake, then the whole thing had to be shut down.
And in today’s reality: all of big tech’s new tools make mistakes constantly, sometimes more than getting things right, and it’s still full steam ahead on the rollout.
MFW dystopia movies were too optimistic
I mean, even in that one case, it was accurate, just not in the way they thought.
fobitted
I’m sure this is a typo of some kind, but I can’t for the life of me work out what it was.“Predicted”? “Foretold”? I’m sure I’m being dense and just missing something obvious, but I’d love to hear what.
Can we actually see the reports? Not saying it can’t happen but using AI in articles creates lots of views. Is “Home Bargin” the only store doing this? Is it only in the UK? This is really poor reporting here.
Anecdotally my wife keeps getting flagged by Walmart and they have to come watch her bag at the self checkout every time she uses one. So far no where else, just there. She uses them many other places, so she’s not acting suspicious or using it wrong.
When they walk up she should ask them to go ahead and start scanning and bagging her groceries
They actually did the first few times. Which is funny to me because my wife is very much a control freak. She did not think it was funny, though.
Walmart has extremely good facial recognition software, which I assume now has been taken over by AI.
I also get my reusable bags checked at Walmart (I rarely shop there anymore),they will even make me take out all the empty ones in my larger bag to prove I’m not stealing. I figured it was strore policy.
I do know retail theft has skyrocketed the last 5 or so years. I have read stores getting rid of self checkouts because of this.
I do know retail theft has skyrocketed the last 5 or so years.
Nobody should give any fucks whatsoever as long as it continues to be dwarfed by wage theft.
Also, there is zero fucking reason to let Walmart check your receipt or your bags. With a warehouse club like Costco it’s written into the membership agreement, but a normal store has no authority to hold you, especially without probable cause. Exercise your goddamn rights, people!
You have no 4th amendment rights against a private party. Depending on your state, the store can detain you until police arrive if they suspect you of shoplifting.
The key phrase there is “if they suspect you of shoplifting” which means they need to have actual fucking evidence and merely refusing their rent-a-gestapo bullshit doesn’t cut it.
Otherwise, they’re the ones committing the crime of false imprisonment.
I do know retail theft has skyrocketed the last 5 or so years.
Yeah the stores did that.
They knew self-checkout would be shoplifter heaven but they calculated that they saved more by cutting jobs. Then they cry for insurance and government payouts by pretending there is an epidemic of crime.
And now they’re cutting back on the self-checkouts while not bothering to hire people back to work the registers lol. The lines are getting longer and longer.
I hope not here as self checkout was a massive improvement for being able to check out with a few items where I live. They also have people assigned and present at slef checkout and more staff roaming the store to answer questions and keep stuff organized compared to before self checkout was a thing. I get help finding things and out the door faster.
Sucks that they are doing a shitty implementation other placss.
they will even make me take out all the empty ones in my larger bag to prove I’m not stealing.
God, I would laugh so hard as I kept walking to my car.
This has happened to me at a few times a local grocery chain (it’s not wal-mart, but I don’t want to name it, as that would reveal my general location).
do you have instincts?
When I worked at Lowe’s they could tell the instant shoplifters pulled into the parking lot. They even had nicknames for the repeat offenders.
“Heads up, Dumb and Dumber just pulled in, no doubt headed for lumber.”
Only the dumb, obvious ones.
I assure you, I’ve shoplifted quite a bit from Lowes without ever drawing suspicion.
That you know of. Some places wait until you hit felony level totals, then inform the police.
I usually go for pretty small stuff. Statute of limitations will probably run out before I rack up enough to hit felony level.
“What are you in for?”
“Felony bubble gum theft…”Lol fair enough
“Bit off more than you could chew, eh? Still, I like your gumption. I could use a man of your talents… And perhaps you could use a bit of ‘job security’, once you’re out of here. ‘Who’s asking’? Well, son, you’re looking at the mastermind behind the Great Maple Syrup Heist. That’s right. It was almost perfect, but as you can see, things got sticky in the end. But this next job will be different. You got your start stealing candy from babies, just like everybody else, didn’t you? Well, imagine stealing the candy before the baby even got it! Uh huh. So… I may or may not have come into possession of reliable intel about the Easter Bunny’s secret stash… We’re talking enough chocolate here to make each of us billionaires, once it’s melted down, and minted into fresh, clean, completely untraceable chocolate coins. So, what do you say… are you in?”
deleted by creator
You might be surprised at what they know! Dumb and Dumber above have no idea they’re targeted. Small timers won’t catch any heat as training is to let it slide above all. We had tips on how to “confront” shoplifters without actually saying anything.
Well, I never got ‘confronted’ at least.
I’ve gotten so many loose bolts and washers just laying around on the floor in the small parts section. I almost want to tell them to pay me for cleaning up their trash. Can’t say I’ve ever made off with lumber though.
Same with the LEGO isle in Wal-Mart.
How does one shoplift lumber?
Casually
The nickname wasn’t because it rhymes. Because it doesn’t.
You write just one book about a labyrinthine bureacracy and people use your name to curse organisational dysfunction forever.
A situations like this makes me use a form of Malapropism one would expect of a Dickensian society to bring about almost Orwellian situation. Makes you wonder when someone will use Chekhov’s Gun before it all gets Bowdlerized. Alas this Machiavellian paragraph is reminiscent of a Lovecraftian creature.
But seriously, that paragraph above reads like the scene in Blackadder when they meet the writer of the Dictionary.
Poor Machiavelli too. Everyone goes on about how he faked his death and “dark triad” traits, and he was just some bloke taking the piss out of the government.
This is a great way for people to lesen how this technology can be used negatively. Get the backlash early before it has completely infected everything.
I worked at my local Goodwill (they’re split up by region). We kept a close eye on known shoplifters, but we couldn’t say anything and even my boss couldn’t say anything unless he literally saw them conceal the object then walk out of the store and never broke eye contact. They said the store could get sued if we stopped them and they had ditched the contraband in the moment we looked away.
I don’t see why the stores discussed here should be treated differently. Someone needs to sue these surveillance stores until they stop automating false accusations.
Kafkaesque nightmares
I gotta read something besides The Metamorphasis because all I associate with that phrase is physical body horror of becoming a bug. Somehow I don’t think that’s what they meant here.
Kafka was most famous for pointing out that our current society is built on bureaucracy unto death. For instance how he have to fill out insurance forms while dying of cancer.
Snitches get glitches.
https://www.londonsecuritycollege.co.uk/wrongly-accused-of-stealing/
Sounds like they have a case.
We should have learned from navigation systems that people rely too much on a computer without thinking for themselves.
Facial recognition and AI for behavior recognition are potentially good security tools. But only if a human controls the output. The US had people wrongfully imprisoned because some Flock camera made the wrong call. Cases in which a human would have noticed that the accused’s car has an entirely different color.
It’s a human problem that can’t get solved. Not with new protocols, not with new software ideas. I have seen people clicking on buttons without reading what is there, only to get rid of any obstacle fast enough.
The only solution is banning this technology. Alternatively, make all false positives not caught by a human as expensive as possible.
