They’ve been experimenting with self-checkouts for decades. When I was a kid, I remember being in a store with my grandma, waiting in line to pay, and an employee kept trying to entice those in the line to come over and try the self-checkouts.
She asked my grandma a few times before my grandma, a proud union supporter, snapped “I want a person to ring me up. I’m trying to save your JOB, young lady!”
And the young woman stopped asking my grandma.
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
trying to save you are job
I’m a grammar proponent as well, but I’m not seeing the benefit of your comment. Do you think autocorrect errors are fun for anyone?
I’m a grammar opponent as well
Zero training and zero pay. Hmm I wonder if anything could possibly go wrong…
You could pay yourself with free groceries. Or at least leave yourself a tip.
And for some reason they were expected to tip the machine.
Would you like to round up for charity?
Yeah, “scanning errors”, like when it’s charging me full price instead of the discount that it was supposed to be on, which would not be as obvious if a cashier scanned it?
For an almost expired product none the less
I still don’t get why you wouldn’t get a discount for checking yourself out. No wonder all those high-falutin’ CEO’s think consumers are a bunch of dumb schmucks. The real heroes are the clerks who “miss” scanning something from time to time.
I get a five finger discount now and then. Small things usually. I will NOT pay the bag fee if I self checkout, you took away a job for a computer, you can absolutely eat the 25-50 cents worth of bags.
Same reason they don’t pay you for using an atm instead of an expensive teller at an expensive branch
It’s easier To add a fee To a new service even if it’s to save them money, Than it is to start charging for an existing service that used to be central to their business
I am not paid, i dont do the work.
Also, if the cashier makes a mistake, it is their peoblem. If you make it, they call you thief. Fuck them, i aint no cashier.
As an introverted person, I use self-checkout wherever I can. The less I have to talk to random people, the happier I am :)
I’m also strongly for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines, like it happened with washing machines. Let them do that work, and let people enjoy the creative ones.
Hey, it’s not my fault that a pack of T-bone steaks weighs the same as a pack of hot-dog wieners.
In the local shop they often catch you for not scanning the paper bag.
But if you scan tomatoes as peppers or vice versa nobody bats an eye.
I love self check out, it’s great when you’re only getting a few items. When I shop for more than that there’s the handheld scanners, which are also great
Watch out guys they might cut your shifts if this keeps up.
Totally Company’s fault. 😂
I get that we hate corporations. But since when is reconsidering something complaining? Presumably if they reconsider there might be more paid cashiers, good right?
It’s not shoplifting, its an employee discount.
The industry term for that is “shrinkage”.
I was shopping in the pool!
I thought that was used in the porn industry.
That’s “fluffing”.
I thought that was when you stuffed your mouth full of marshmallows and then give head
That’s a fluffernutter.
That sounds dangerous.
Two choking hazards at the same time
It’s my compensation for doing their work for them.
It is 1866. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 1940. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 2026. You get the picture.1920s - Corporation Genius idea: “self service groceries” - put the product out so people have to fetch the items themselves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
2000s - Corporate Genius idea: “self service checkout” - People scan their own products that they went and got from the shelves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
Solution? Tax the employees more to pay for police to protect our record profits!
“Record profits” in nominal currency will be made year after year. Profit margins (on supermarkets in my country) remains low, and is lower than it was 10 years ago.
EDIT: if you don’t believe me, ask for evidence instead of just downvoting because you don’t like facts. Lemmy has a narrative about grocery profits that (at least in my country) is not supported by evidence.
I recognize the impact inflation has on the term, but it varies from store to store and country to country whether it outpaces inflation. Walmart, which this meme is about and a load bearing parasite on the US, maintains growth slightly above inflation. This doesn’t indemnify everyone, or really anyone in particular. It’s pointing out that money is going somewhere in this current era of force-fed infinite growth, but seemingly not to the people who need it most.
To phrase my comment another way, the wealth gap is widening and businesses will do anything but address it, instead complaining about their own impropriety as if it were your fault.
This meme is about self service checkouts which are ubiquitous in my country.
Walmart had an operating profit margin of 4.2% in their last statement, and a net profit margin of 3%.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for widening wealth inequality, profit margins under 5% are not where you’ll find it. Check the facts instead of going on pure vibes - company accounts are public and subject to audit (on pain of huge punishments if wrong - they got Al Capone on tax fraud remember)
Walmart’s gross profit rate was 24.1% of net sales in fiscal 2025, and operating income was $29.348 billion, or 4.4% of net sales.
So for every $100 Walmart keeps $4.40 after paying everything including corporate staff but before taxes.
For Walmart, the “3%” is basically net profit margin for fiscal 2025, Walmart reported $680.985 billion in total revenue and $19.436 billion in net income attributable to Walmart, which is about 2.85%.
3% sounds like nothing but 19.5 billion in profit definitely is but nothing.
Wording it like this is a struggling company is a really…special way to go about this.
I’m getting my numbers from here: https://stock.walmart.com/financial-information/income-statement I believe the difference in figures is between US and Worldwide, and aren’t different enough to affect the conclusion.
I’m not “wording it like” Walmart is struggling; I’m saying that Walmart (and the grocery sector in general) works on razor-thin margins, and trying to ignore that fact by talking about “record profits” is misleading and either stupid or dishonest. I’d encourage you to re-read my comment and try to decide which words made you interpret it that way - I think you’ll find that they aren’t there, that I was just reporting facts in neutral language, and you’ve made that interpretation because I’m going against the narrative.
What a low profit margin means is that if an average shopper buying a $100 basket of goods decides to swipe a $2 chocolate bar, their profits are nearly halved. Problems that seem small have large effects to a company operating like this.
The narrative Lemmy commenters tend to believe is that the cost of groceries went up in the 2020s due to corporate greed and lay the blame for their current struggles at the foot of retailers like Walmart. The actual facts don’t bear that out. They then mock complaints about theft from shops attributed to self-service checkouts as price-gouging fat cats whining that their cost-saving measure isn’t saving them costs, ignoring that, with profit margins relatively steady/down since before the pandemic, those cost savings are being passed on to them, the consumer.
Are the companies in your country currently complaining about theft in massive PR campaigns? Because Walmart is.
And Walmart’s outpaced inflation. Not all of our companies have, but some certainly. Your argument is like asserting that a car couldn’t have run out of gas because it has 90 km/l.
And of course I’m going to blame a company that underpays and abuses its employees as severely as Walmart, while siphoning half of its personnel budget from local taxes.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
https://wallstreetnumbers.com/stocks/wmt/operating-expenses
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/revenue
Not in a massive PR campaign, but yes they are complaining publicly. Retail theft has gone up significantly, with 360k offences in the last year before the pandemic, having fallen for a couple of years from a peak of about 380k, and the most recent year stands at 530k offences.
And by all means, criticise Walmart for their abuses of staff and exploitative practices. But their profit levels are just not part of it. If Walmart were nationalised and stopped making profit and stopped paying its execs as much your $100 grocery bill would still be over $95. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
I can tell you that Dillons (subdivision of Kroger) is on genuinely razor thin margins, and they at least pay half way decent for the area im in
Then it sounds like I wasn’t referring to Dillons. Do they even have self checkout?
Yes, most have two separate checkouts on both sides. And also this weird self checkout/belt lane thing. Was just trying to add to the conversation, geez.
I didn’t mean any offense, but I exclusively found dillons in low population cities, which made me question whether they’d have any need for a self checkout.
Even the little corner shop in my town of a couple thousand people has one now. There’s no way that a second full checkout would fit in the space, nor is hiring another staff member to work it likely to be realistic, so it’s a straight upgrade in capacity
Gotta be careful giving dissenting opinions in the black and white world of the internet.
I have no idea what the belt lane thing is and I’m interested. My self checkouts are just the scanner thing, and then you put the items on the scale. The inclusion of a belt is intriguing.
So, its a self checkout screen, then you place your scanned items on a belt that carries it to a bagging area. I think the idea is for the self checkout attendant to then bag the items for you
I fucking hate that belt fed one! They put it in my go to store shortly before I moved close to an aldi and how exactly is it supposed to be helpful? You scan, and it belts it all into a pile at the other end that you then have to walk over and organize. At least the lazy Susan designed ones can let you organise it all into the bags.
Also, I don’t know how their “unexpected item in the bagging area” sensor works but I literally set them off by getting within 10 inches of the bags. When I worked at one years back we literally measured the distance. No contact, no previous errors, tested on two different machines, apparently I produce an aura that makes Dillons bags gain mass.
And according to Hollywood accounting not a single movie has ever made a profit…
I would be surprised if supermarket’s profit margins are actually as low as they all claim.
They are “low” but it’s on purpose. When you make 19.5 billion in profit that’s the number that needs to be spread around. 3% sounds like Walmart might go under with one bad move. 19.5 billion in profit after they paid taxes in 2025 is a powerful company with plenty of profit.
People don’t really understand how these companies profit from their scale. They expect the regular person to be empathetic over 3% profit while hiding 20 billion dollars year over year.
Not true, Hollywood can shift profits from one film to another, but not hide them in such a way that no-one of them break even. You could have checked what the major studios are making (it was about $6bn net in 2025).
This is what audits are for, and in any functioning country (indeed even a half-functioning one like the US) the internal revenue department makes it very difficult to hide profits at a large scale. There’s an easy way to sniff check this claim: if it were possible to hide profits so thoroughly, why does any company at all pay any corporation tax at all?
What Hollywood does is shuffle its real costs around so that films which would have to pay the largest royalties appear to make no money. They can also shuffle some things around so that subsidiaries operating in high tax countries appear to make a loss. Supermarkets selling physical goods in physical shops can’t do this.
There’s also no reason to think that companies have got better at hiding profits over the last few years, even if you think their profits are wrong.
i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
You are not faster than a cashier.
I’m faster than queuing for a cashier.
And if it’s one where you take the scanner round the shop with you, it’s certainly faster than unpacking it all and repacking it.
Yes, but the cashier has a line of people waiting, and the self checkouts don’t.
So I get a massive head start, and I still finish first.
There would not be a line at the cashier if there were more of them. There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out. The self checkout created the problem.
There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out.
Let’s not pretend they open all the checkouts and it’s space keeping them limited.
Not true, there are less because it costs money to pay for more cashiers
FYI, it takes around 6-9 months (depending on how much larger inventory shrinkage is on the self checkouts) for a self checkout to pay for itself and begin saving money. Not that I am advocating for that.
This might perhaps be true in the land of XXL everything, but in the space it takes to have 3 cashiers you can easily install 2 rows of 4 self checkout machines, and in Europe space tends to be more scarce.
They are a massive space saver, and when that’s the space you have, 8 self-checkouts and a cashier have more throughput than 4 cashiers (which don’t even tend to be staffed all at once).
At my local store they seem to comfortably replace 1 cashier with four quick self checkouts, and 3-4 with 2 rows of 6-8.
People dislike them, but it gets a little silly when they insist they have lower throughput too.
They need to hire the cashier I had once, she was scanning and shuttling the items down the ramp faster than I could bag them. Probably 3-4 times faster than bagging. They had ramp splitter so once you are piled up and paid, she flips to the other ramp and slams the next person through. I’d never seen speed like that. The second person was checked out and bagging theirs before I was done bagging my own.
It was like watching grocery skeeball
No, this is wrong in my experience. The store would only staff as many lanes as needed to keep the lines short enough that people wouldn’t complain. So, there was ALWAYS a line of at least three people. That was policy, not a limitation of the number of lanes.
The self-checkout machines are always open, so if you go during any time except the busiest, there is no wait. Self-checkout, in my experience, has been faster, and it’s not an illusion. I shop in the early morning, and there is never a wait for a machine, I just walk right up and start scanning. Before self-checkout, even in the early morning, when they’d only have two lanes open, there was still a wait.
Self-checkout did NOT create the problem of waiting, store policy did.
The problem is the opposite. There are too many regular checkout lines and not enough self checkouts. Almost every grocery store I shop at has like 12 self checkouts (taking the place of 4 previously regular checkouts) and then like 10-15 regular checkouts, of which never more than 4 or 5 (sometimes less) have cashiers in them. How about turning 5 or more of those regular checkout lanes you never use into 20 more self checkouts?
How about hiring 5 or more additional cashiers to relieve congestion?
Sure, but I feel like only a smaller mom and pop type of establishment is going to forgo extra profits and provide more jobs for the people in their community in this way. There is no way a Kroger or Walmart is going to do that.
Why have jobs for jobs sake?
It’s not “for jobs sake.” It is to reduce congestion and wait times for people trying to check out. It’s got the added benefit of reducing shrink by having a trained and practiced professional doing the labor quicker and with greater ease and accuracy than the customers would do themselves.
Idk how it works in Burgerland, but where i come from most checkouts aren’t occupied. They’re usually on demand, and even then they rarely use all of them.
If you want to use the space argument 6 self checkouts take the space of 2 cashiers
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No, it’s way more relaxed and honestly I don’t wanna speak to someone after a whole day of yapping at the office. I just wanna pack the groceries into my bag in peace
I’m faster than the line of people buying ice and lotto tickets and cigarettes and paying with a check.
obviously my self checkout experience is faster, or i would go to a cashier. we’ve been over this.
Yes I am. Worked in retail for 8 years. They are slow because they are paid by the hour, not the transaction.
What a strange thing to say.
I use an app to scan items when I pick them up and immediately put them into my bag. The whole self-checkout process takes 10s to scan a QR code and pay. It is much more faster and pleasant.
Wait… I need time to know more about this magical process.
Here in Estonia, major stores (I think we have 5 chains) offer mobile apps that let you scan items. You pick something up, scan it, and put it in your bag. By the time you arrive at the self‑service checkout, everything is packed and you only have to pay, which takes mere seconds.
That’s amazing and I am so jealous of that!
Walmart and sheetz does this.
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
I would pay for a mistake, but I wouldn’t feel sorry. They want me to be perfect, but I’m just a customer, so no reason to feel bad if I type it on wrong.
Well, the main point is that for some demographics a situation like this is a simple mistake with no consequences while for others it’s a direct way to talk to the police.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for Criminal charges sticking. The Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
I don’t think I’m making that argument at all. I’m just relaying what I witnessed when I worked first hand in that industry ~26 years ago.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.
With a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.
often, yes
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
Hello from France. Our countries don’t admit to themselves how racist they still are and how much of a poison it is. I hope your friend is OK.
Yeah, he was born here, so it’s not something new to him.
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…The more likely scenario is that you just neglect to scan that case of beer, or those ribeye steaks.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The letter of the law is the letter of the law afaik
They even call the security and police. Yes, they call it thief.
Fair, you may be pulled to a court for no reason.
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
I completely refuse to use the self-checkout lanes. every mistake we make there helps correct the process that will eventually ensure that the people who need jobs in a grocery store no longer have a job.
Fuck training their robots for them.
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
That’s a staffing problem…if they paid another cashier they wouldn’t have as many thefts
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
I almost exclusively use self checkout because it is quicker, and I felt rushed exactly once because a line was forming. Funny thing is, because I felt rushed I literally forgot to pay and just walked out with a free load of groceries. I did come back the next day and told them, and asked to pay because I didn’t want to risk getting banned from that store, as it is the closest one to me. They said nobody ever comes back to do that lmao
