Hire more humans. Problem solved.
Not quite simple, human are expensive and finicky.
And employees in any retail establishment are prone to shoplifting, so adding more might not help.
Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
False positives may cost more than the items being protected in diverse costs.
It seems that the self service kiosk just stops functioning if it thinks something is wrong. I'm not sure how many high intensity "you're stealing!" confrontations really occur.
It should really allow you to continue scanning but prevent you from paying until the associate confirms that you're not stealing. That's 90% of the issue with the weight sensors -- the sensor stops me from moving forward with other purchases because it's making me wait for someone to check my stuff. But if they left the notification on while I continued to scan that would eliminate my issues with it entirely. Then they wouldn't need to rely on flaky AI.
The other issue I have is that the barcode scanners are not activated until the weight sensor settles out, which can take several seconds up to a minute, so it's way slower than going to a checker. If the weight sensor didn't gate barcode scanner activation I would have a much better experience.
All they really need to do is verify the weight of the total transaction and have the associate check on any discrepancies. And they can probably use a very noisy weight signal with a low-pass filter. They don't need to blow a ton of money on an AI solution that is about the same level of inconvenient.
If I had 10 or 20 million dollars I'd build a better self-checkout.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#33I'm suprised they even bother to try and stop it. My grandfather works at WalMart, and said that they're told to not try and stop shoplifting because they don't want customers to be afraid to shop there.
Some around here hassle people for their receipts near the exit. It was already my least-favorite place to shop for a ton of reasons, so that was enough to stop me ever going. It's one thing at Costco where I agreed to it and they're very fast and nice. I'm not standing in line to get permission to leave friggin' Wal-Mart (yes I know you can just ignore them but they sometimes try to stop you and make a big deal of it and that's just not a situation I want in my day)
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#34I'm suprised they even bother to try and stop it. My grandfather works at WalMart, and said that they're told to not try and stop shoplifting because they don't want customers to be afraid to shop there.
Meanwhile my suburban Walmart has airport-level security theater: substantial bag checks on exit and one way doors to enter the shopping area.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#35Is it just me or do the "Concerned Home Office Associates" not sound like they actually work at Walmart? I talk to the workers at my local Walmart and they don't refer to themselves as "associates", or care enough about a minimum wage job to contact media over anti-shoplifting AI failing.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#36I'm suprised they even bother to try and stop it. My grandfather works at WalMart, and said that they're told to not try and stop shoplifting because they don't want customers to be afraid to shop there.
Some around here hassle people for their receipts near the exit. It was already my least-favorite place to shop for a ton of reasons, so that was enough to stop me ever going. It's one thing at Costco where I agreed to it and they're very fast and nice. I'm not standing in line to get permission to leave friggin' Wal-Mart (yes I know you can just ignore them but they sometimes try to stop you and make a big deal of i…
Also Best Buy, which is particularly annoying as they watch you check out at the register five or ten feet from their post, then "randomly" (almost always) demand the receipt.
Who are you checking, the cashier or the buyer? My guess is a deterrent for some kind of collusion.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#37This is a very hard problem and thinking a product could do this without extremely high error rates is naive. Any implementation should use this as a supplement only, not replacement for humans. For example a human watching 10 checkouts and quickly manually reviewing scenes flagged as suspicious. Any implementation should also account for the fact that loss will still occur and account for that in the RoI. The fact t…
Preventing scanning one item and placing two on the bag? It's an easy problem. Just have scanned items be placed on a scale. People will be bagging stuff to take home, so just have bags placed on a scale and observe the weight increase as items are placed in the bag.
You probably know the weight of one jug of milk, but even if you don't, it's easy to "learn" the weights of new SKUs statistically.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#38There is a lot of information in the article but little to draw a conclusion from. They bring up examples where the AI failed, but that alone does not indicate it doesn't work. An AI that fails to recognize some thefts but does recognize others can still be considered to work as long as enough thefts are caught. Imperfect, but given the low cost of a failure relative to not using an AI, imperfection seems quite toler…
It is a bit strange how the in-house and other competitor is also mentioned, Walmart are big on data warehousing and management, in a lot of cases they are pushing innovation and r&d, in some cases for decades. This article needs to show a more detailed analysis of when it does actually work, a fraud KPI ?, or something else besides some anonymous complaints. You can trick any system, but that's not telling on it's o…
Walmart pushing innovation? Citation needed.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a bit strange how the in-house and other competitor is also mentioned, Walmart are big on data warehousing and management, in a lot of cases they are pushing innovation and r&d, in some cases for decades. This article needs to show a more detailed analysis of when it does actually work, a fraud KPI ?, or something else besides some anonymous complaints. You can trick any system, but that's not telling on it's o…
Walmart pushing innovation? Citation needed.
Their new kiosks are so infernally slow that I like to imagine they're electron apps running on a raspberry pi, which would make them the very peak of innovation.
Re: Walmart employees are out to show its anti-shoplifting AI doesn’t work
#40Is it just me or do the "Concerned Home Office Associates" not sound like they actually work at Walmart? I talk to the workers at my local Walmart and they don't refer to themselves as "associates", or care enough about a minimum wage job to contact media over anti-shoplifting AI failing.
I bet they do. "Home Office Associate" means office worker or manager. A programmer falls under this. It isn't a minimum wage "store associate". Of course they won't refer to themselves as store associate when casually chatting to a shopper.