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Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

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Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#221

Post by MisterTea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #214
MisterTea wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, Yup. I was in a local super market and saw Tomahawk steaks priced at $4-6 each. It had to be a mistake but I figured I would give it shot and see if they noticed. Cashier looked at the price, did a confused double take and immediately called over the manager. Turns out the decimal point was off by one so my $4.50 tomahawk w…

Did you pay the sticker price or the intended price? Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.

Intended price. Costly but it was too late as I already had steak on my mind.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#222

Post by kennywinker »

yreg wrote: post #197
lamasery wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain to me which part they are automating. A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries. I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does. Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit…

The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters. So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to d…

They understaffed, and it sucked. Now you do all the work and are apparently happy about it. Go figure.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#223

Post by kennywinker »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #127
FatherOfCurses wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad the store owners introduced a way to give customers more control over how merchandise exits their store.

At my grocery store, they are using image recognition for self checkout. Bananas show up as bananas automatically, and if you select otherwise, I imagine it flags the item or purchaser. Shouldn't be long before the store figures out who is regularly overriding the image recognition for the purposes of theft. Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for…

Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.

Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#224

Post by WarmWash »

jrm4 wrote: post #168
WarmWash wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "too bad" is most people lacking the understanding that you don't steal from a store, you steal from honest shoppers who keep the store open for you to steal from. Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.

And where do you account for the absolutely countable number of lost jobs in this equation?

None of the other automating technologies like this in the past ended up causing job loss. We used to employ hundreds of people 24/7 to connect phone calls...

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#225

Post by kccqzy »

nozzlegear wrote: post #129
neuralkoi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I went to Walmart, and at the self-checkout the system quirked out and an attendant came by. She reviewed some sort of draconian overhead cam video of me trying to locate a tag out for a product to scan. Gave me "guilty until proven" innocent vibes. Are these systems actually effective?

The self checkout at my preferred grocery store (Hy-vee, an upper midwest chain) has started using these overhead cameras to confirm that you're purchasing everything you ostensibly have in your cart. Except it always flags us for the Starbucks drinks we're carrying (Hy-vees usually have a mini Starbucks shop inside them). More annoying though is that it flags us for the 5 gallon water jug refills that we manually pu…

I don’t use self checkout systems that have weighing scales that require items to be moved from the cart to the bagging area. I either avoid self checkout at these stores or stop going to such stores altogether. I shop at my neighborhood Whole Foods and Home Depot; the self checkout systems don’t have this requirement.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#226

Post by aksss »

acidtechno303 wrote: post #201
Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if you don't steal anything but the system is messed up. I had a case where I bought multiple things at a big hardware store, self checkout of course, and on my ticket was something I didn't notice. Because I bought a lot I didn't notice until a month later when I looked at the ticket and returned something else. Should I tell them or not, will I be some kind of weird situation? I hate self checkout. At my g…

I've had awkward interactions with the Walmart system. It's clearly using a neural net, and a good one at that. It's only ever flagged me when I did something odd (like put something bagged and paid for in my cart, then take it out, then put it back again). I dress/groom like a thief, so the conversations with the staff are always annoying.

"Clothes make the man", as the idiom says. Clothes don't impugn your character, but they define you in the eyes of others.

Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#227

Post by Denatonium »

runjake wrote: post #204
acidtechno303 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had awkward interactions with the Walmart system. It's clearly using a neural net, and a good one at that. It's only ever flagged me when I did something odd (like put something bagged and paid for in my cart, then take it out, then put it back again). I dress/groom like a thief, so the conversations with the staff are always annoying.

If you dress like your HN username indicates, then yeah, you're probably noticed by humans before you get into the store. Ironically, some of the store security look exactly like you. They come in all shapes, sizes, grooming standards, styles, and tattoo levels. I've seen some in full-on Juggalo outfits and neck/face tattoos.

One of the AP (asset protection) guys at my local store always wore an eyepatch and a t-shirt reading "A bullet a day keeps the terrorists away". He did NOT look like a typical grocery store employee, and I'm sure that was intentional.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#228

Post by lazide »

MisterTea wrote: post #221
TeMPOraL wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you pay the sticker price or the intended price? Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.

Intended price. Costly but it was too late as I already had steak on my mind.

In most US states, you have the same rules.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#229

Post by Telaneo »

kennywinker wrote: post #222
yreg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters. So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to d…

They understaffed, and it sucked. Now you do all the work and are apparently happy about it. Go figure.

Given that every store (and damn near every establishment for that matter) has been understaffed for the past 20-ish years, can you blame them?

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#230

Post by Denatonium »

Aboutplants wrote: post #29

I 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

Systems like Everseen make that approach significantly riskier than it used to be. A live video of you checking out is run through image classification software, so if you scan a steak as 4011, it'll pause the checkout flow and call the SCO (self-checkout) attendant to watch the video of you scanning the item. They then have to approve the scan, at best leaving you publicly humiliated.
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