Cameras watch you as you scan. Employees eyeball you as you bag your items. Receipt checkers demand to scrutinize your entire transaction.
As if self-checkout security features aren’t intrusive enough, one grocery chain has come up with a new way to thwart thieves and annoy honest shoppers. It’s installed giant scales in one of its stores, making self-checkout users pass a weigh-in before they’re allowed to leave.
The new system has been introduced in a Tesco grocery store in Northern England. And as with any new technology, if it takes off there, it may someday show up in a grocery store near you.
If you scan and bag your own items at the Gateshead Tesco, you now have to push your shopping cart onto one of the new scales. It calculates the weight of each item that was scanned, subtracts the weight of the cart, and if the result matches the combined weight of all your purchases, you’re free to go. If there’s a mismatch, well, hope you’re not in a hurry. The system will flag down an employee to manually rescan every item in your cart, one by one, to make sure nothing slipped past the self-scanner.
The photo above was posted in a Reddit thread, where Tesco shoppers weren’t too pleased with what they saw. “Orwellian capitalist technology,” one commenter wrote. “Come for the shopping, stay for the full body scan!” another added. A third commenter said shopping there would now feel “like the border of communist East Germany,” while another lamented that “more and more, the honest shopper is treated like a thief.”
The technology is “new,” in the sense that it’s the first that many local shoppers have seen of it. But in many ways, it’s also instantly, woefully outdated. Using scales to weigh your self-checkout purchases is very 1990’s – remember “unexpected item in the bagging area”? Other stores have since introduced much more high-tech methods of ensuring that shoppers are paying for everything they select. It was almost a decade ago when Amazon installed cameras all over its Amazon Go stores, to detect when an item was moved from a shelf into your shopping cart, and charge you accordingly. Amazon later shifted its focus to smart shopping carts that would do the same. Sam’s Club stores are using computer vision technology to instantly scan your cart, identify all the items inside and verify that you’ve paid for them all. And Tesco itself last year tested “scan-free technology” in one of its stores, where self-checkout cameras instantly recognize all of the items in your basket or cart and tally up your total without requiring you to scan everything one by one.
They’re all ways to combine the convenience that self-sufficient shoppers seek, with the security features that retailers require. The sweet spot is a system that can accomplish both, quickly and seamlessly, without being intrusive or cumbersome.
Judging by Redditors’ comments, though, it appears these self-checkout scales are far more intrusive and cumbersome than they are quick and seamless. And one retail analyst says they appear to be designed far more for Tesco’s benefit than for its customers.
“There is no way this is about making it quicker for the shopper,” retail consultant Ged Futter told the BBC. “This is supermarkets saying, ‘we know there are thefts so what we are going to do is treat every customer in exactly the same way to reduce theft’.” The risk, he said, is that honest shoppers may object to being treated like their more dishonest counterparts. “Trust is the most important thing for all of the retailers, and it works both ways,” he said. “If customers don’t feel trusted or think they’re being treated like thieves, they will go somewhere else.”
Tesco hasn’t said anything publicly about the new scale system, and whether it has any plans to introduce it to more stores. Redditors are skeptical the system will work. Will the scales be able to detect a lightweight item like a greeting card? Will you be flagged for a manual re-scan if you use heavyweight reusable grocery bags instead of the lightweight plastic bags the scales might expect? Will the system think you’re shoplifting a child if you have one riding in the cart’s front seat? “This seems like a good idea until you think about it for more than 5 seconds,” one commenter wrote. Another said it’s not a question of whether the system will work in theory, but whether it will continue to work, literally: “These things are going to be broken in a few hours of use, 100%.”
So in the final analysis, this may be a system that’s destined not to show up at a grocery store near you. Instead, stores might consider checkout systems where a human examines your purchases, rings them up for you and places them in shopping bags so you don’t have to. What an idea! Sounds convenient, helpful, and it would do a lot to minimize theft – no giant ominous-looking scales required.
Image source: Reddit/JackFarron
