The study was led by Adrian Beck, an emeritus professor of criminology, who has spent more than 25 years researching losses in the retail industry. In 2016, criminologists at the University of Leicester published a paper that reported on the impact of recent developments in mobile-scanning technology. But many perpetrators know exactly what they’re doing. (A figure from the same report suggested that the total cost of items stolen through self-checkout machines in 2017 came in at more than £3bn, up from £1.6bn in 2014, though the numbers are speculative.) Some steal by accident, the study found, perhaps on account of a scanning error – honest mistakes. In a recent study a team at Voucher Codes Pro, a sales coupon website, quizzed 2,532 shoppers about their supermarket habits and found that close to a quarter had committed theft at a self-checkout machine at least once. There were savings to be made.īut any financial gains now appear to be marginal, at least in part due to unforeseen spikes in self-scanning theft. The more self-checkout machines a supermarket had, the fewer cashiers it required. And though the machines were outwardly advertised as being strictly beneficial for the customer, they offered retailers perks, too, notably the freedom to slash labour costs. “Many marvelled,” the Los Angeles Times reported.) When they reached stores, the machines offered customers unexpected levels of autonomy, and the opportunity to avoid long queues at traditional checkout tills. (To hammer home the point, he had an 11-year-old provide a demonstration. The till’s inventor, David R Humble, had introduced the technology at an LA trade convention, describing it at the time as “a revolutionary product” that “will sweep all of retail”. When they turned up last decade, self-checkout machines were supposed to represent a new dawn in minimum-fuss shopping, though they’d been around since 1984. “It’s about being crafty, sneaky – and outwitting them.” Sometimes he fills the bagging area “so there’s no room left for more shopping and I’m forced to put items on the floor,” which circumvents the “unexpected item” message we all dread. “Now I’m a saint, although sometimes I’ll take a five-pence bag if I’ve already paid and realise I need extra.” In a WhatsApp message, one friend confessed to regularly placing a single banana on the scales while nabbing an entire bunch, though that wasn’t all. “But a checkout lady once caught me with mangoes, very embarrassing, and I didn’t do it much after that.” He ended the message with an Emoji of a face beneath a halo. “A couple of times I tried exotic fruits as potatoes,” a friend wrote in a text one morning. And more than a few said they bagged items that failed to scan, half-shifting the blame on to a faulty machine. Another regularly declares chocolate croissants as bread rolls. “Must have forgotten to swipe it through,” she said. Several of mine confessed to pilfering something from a self-checkout machine at some point, though nearly all of those added a caveat: only small stuff. Everyone’s at itįor an idea of how close to home the issue really is, try mentioning it to your friends, like I did. Some scams have names – “the banana trick” (steaks as potatoes), “the switcheroo” (cheap barcodes for pricey ones), “sweethearting” (when a checkout supervisor only pretends to scan an object before handing it to a loved one, gratis) – though there are so many techniques not all of them do. The barcodes of pricey objects – wine, beer, spirits, cosmetics – are deliberately obscured by stickers removed from significantly cheaper on-sale items. Expensive grapes are scanned as inexpensive carrots. Need proof? Look online, perhaps at a Reddit thread, and you’ll find anecdotes of petty self-checkout theft delivered with something like a stick-it-to-the-man pride. ![]() Though, to be honest, on another day I might have swayed the other way.
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