alt Hacker NewsI was in college when self checkout became a thing and it took us all of about 45 seconds to realize that you could just check everything out as bananas. Steak was weighed and priced at 4011 (banana code) as the stoned teenager cashier paid no attention. Everything on the receipt was literally Bananas
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Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!
I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout.
I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…
At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.
And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.
You know you can just walk out the door with the items without using the scanner at all right?
Couldn't you also not just check stuff in? These are all obvious drawbacks, it's not really a high-scrutiny environment.
People like you are why we are living in an increasingly lower trust society, with for example having items behind locked door in shops.
Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.
Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up.
On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.
That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items.
Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.