61–70 of 102 posts
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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.
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Early self-check kiosks did this very poorly. It was super frustrating as a customer to be constantly asked to "please place the item in the bagging area", even when I already had, not to mention the hassle it caused when buying something you don't want to bag. Eventually I'm assuming they gave up on that and turned it off.
Checkouts in the UK still do this. They just seem to have gotten better at it, so I rarely have problems anymore. Possibly they loosened the tolerances.
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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.
Change of ownership happens at the point of sale. Toss them a cheery "no, thanks," and walk on by. They have no authority to detain you. Same with Fry's. Not the same with Costco; there, you're subject to the membership agreements.
self check out systems are great and the concerns of the workers should be heard but it comes down to not having all the numbers. what is the positive to false positive rate? projects can have metrics that those in the field are not privy too and it could down to they are preventing a sufficient dollar amount to not consider the false positives are an issue. Again, what are the percentages?
Right. It takes a lot of theft to pay for a whole extra human standing there. Even a minimum wage.
People take fruit and vegetables, and put the money in the box--or if the farmer is tech-savvy enough, through their phones. And even if a few people don't pay, they still get more money from their inventory than shipping it to a wholesaler or a grocery store. (As far as I know, direct to a local gourmet restaurant pays best.)
For an extra employee on the duty roster, you're probably paying minimum $7 per hour, every hour that store is open to the public--probably 16 hours a day, every day, for a big box. That's $41k per year, plus the per-employee costs for 2 or 3 people, which are probably another $60k, unless you're an employer that doesn't offer benefits (i.e. Wal-Mart).
The employee would likely have to stop $200/day of petty theft. That doesn't seem impossible, but the problem is that if you pay your employee minimum wage, they don't actually care that people are stealing from their employer, because they have no actual incentive to do anything beyond what is the bare minimum requirement to avoid getting fired, which may be just catching one shoplifter per day.
And then, after all, if one caught every shoplifter, every day, people would stop trying, and one might miss quota on later days. The person whose job depends on shoplifters has a perverse incentive to encourage shoplifting, just as cobra-catchers have an incentive to breed and release snakes.
So the problem is more that it's too expensive to hire someone at a rate high enough to make them care about doing their job well, instead of just keeping it indefinitely while gaming the right metrics.
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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.
Is this not standard everywhere self checkouts are used? All of the ones I've ever seen used scales and enforced the weight matching the scanned item. Of course, there are still possible cheats: not putting the item in the bagging area, for example, or telling the kiosk you are buying carrots and then weighing something more expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Early self-check kiosks did this very poorly. It was super frustrating as a customer to be constantly asked to "please place the item in the bagging area", even when I already had, not to mention the hassle it caused when buying something you don't want to bag. Eventually I'm assuming they gave up on that and turned it off.
It seems to be still on based on the fact that every self checkout has a scale and Walmart does have bag item prompts until you bag it. It isn't as annoying though. My guess is that they have more tolerance for items not of the exact weight and/or more accurate scales.
There 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…
My local walmart now has cameras getting your face at self checkout. I cover it with a bag before using checkout
If it bothers you so much, why not just use the regular checkout? Or just shop somewhere else? Do you cover their security cameras all around the store with bags or just the self-checkout one? This seems a really odd place to draw the line on surveillance.
What’s the beef with my choice?
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If it bothers you so much, why not just use the regular checkout? Or just shop somewhere else? Do you cover their security cameras all around the store with bags or just the self-checkout one? This seems a really odd place to draw the line on surveillance.
Only one clerk per store typically. 10+ self checkout lanes. What’s the beef with my choice?
It just seems odd that they've captured your face walking in and all over the store with their other cameras, but then you choose to cover the camera at the checkout. Why? What do you hope to gain/prevent by doing that? Why are you risking getting in trouble?
Why is that one camera where you draw the line?
This 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.