Comment by manarth
1 day ago
Most self-checkouts I've come across have weight validation – "Unexpected item in the bagging area".
Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.
You can build a socioeconomic graph of the country by how anal the unexpected item in the bagging area sensors are.
Some places will detect a fly farting on the damn scale, others can take three or four kids climbing on it before it complains.
The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart.
The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
The only time I had Walmart bitch at me was when it thought I hadn't scanned an item - it was all camera and not weight.
And yes, the grocery ones all seem to be tuned really high.
There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.
This is a more expensive form of shoplifting though, idk why even bother with the banana thing, as hilarious as it is.
Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.
Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.