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Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

nytimes.com

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Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#61

Post by notaustinpowers »

yieldcrv wrote: post #54
notaustinpowers wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, just have the homeless pay a $9.99 delivery fee, plus tip, plus an app service charge, plus inflated pricing in the app. Rather than just walking into the store and buying it themselves. So now that $0.99 packet of ramen now costs, at a minimum, $10.99.

yep, I was pretty clear about that being a tolerable outcome of being barred from grocery stores from prior behavior as long as there is that alternative as opposed to no alternative (and as long as the accusations was accurate)

Then you and I have different views on what's considered tolerable in the wealthiest nation in the history of the Earth. I have no sympathy towards multi-billion dollar companies crying and implementing these ethically dubious systems over a human being stealing food for survival.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#62

Post by Brian_K_White »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #18
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's gone berserk since the pandemic. CVS claims they have had a 300% increase. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2022/why-has-shopl... https://www.axios.com/2022/02/11/shoplifting-retail-crisis-o...

And other data points say the opposite: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-s... "In a major shift, Walgreens, which said it saw a spike in shrink during the pandemic and cited organized retail crime in its decision to close five San Francisco stores in 2021, is backtracking. “Maybe we cried too much last year” about shrink numbers, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe said on an earnings call e…

I also wonder if the stores reduced staffing.

All stores have had less staff ever since self checkout was invented, and seems to have gotten even worse lately.

Let's have a big store and no staff, treat the staff you do have like shit, and then complain about shoplifting.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#64

Post by qbasic_forever »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #62
qbasic_forever wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And other data points say the opposite: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-s... "In a major shift, Walgreens, which said it saw a spike in shrink during the pandemic and cited organized retail crime in its decision to close five San Francisco stores in 2021, is backtracking. “Maybe we cried too much last year” about shrink numbers, Walgreens finance chief James Kehoe said on an earnings call e…

I also wonder if the stores reduced staffing. All stores have had less staff ever since self checkout was invented, and seems to have gotten even worse lately. Let's have a big store and no staff, treat the staff you do have like shit, and then complain about shoplifting.

Exactly what I've seen too. It's wild seeing one employee trying to watch a dozen self checkout kiosks during an after work rush of grocery shopping.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#65

Post by NoRelToEmber »

brookst wrote: post #46
pessimizer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this application it feels like falling down an increasingly slippery slope. The slippery slope could go farther than a ban from the premise for retail theft. People are being barred from banking in England based on political speech. Don't grocery stores have the right to choose who they do business with? What if they don't want transphobes, Brexiteers, or people of Russian descent shopping there?

The US had the concept of protected classes. As a business, I can refuse to serve fans of the wrong sports team or anyone wearing a blue shirt. I cannot refuse to serve people based on membership in a protected class (race, sexual orientation, etc). I think that works ok. There is a strong profit motive to serve as many people as possible, and there are consequences for getting reputation as “who knows if they’ll ser…

> I believe the market would sort that out.

"The market" will consolidate grocery stores until only 3-4 nationwide chains remain, whose policies and prices will be suspiciously similar. Almost every market is moving in that direction, and some have already arrived.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#66

Post by gumby »

Simulacra wrote: post #53
gumby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can easily see a system like this ending up like credit rating bureaus with a few large companies aggregating data into a score which stores can use to deny entry. I'm sure the big three credit bureaux are developing precisely this product. The stores need not even ban you: they could adjust their prices on a per customer basis to cover their expected risk. Come to think of it, the insurance companies could get i…

You might be interested in a book from long ago called No Place to Hide by O'Harrow. In 2004 he discussed Target, Home Depot, and shopping malls using mobile phone identification to collect and classify customers. This is just the next logical step. I would be very surprised if major retailers are not already using facial recognition software.

> I would be very surprised if major retailers are not already using facial recognition software.

Big retail chains are already doing this.

I believe I read on HN a few years ago that Facebook had a product for retail shops that did this. Couldn't find anything on the web though.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#67

Post by eesmith »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27
fuzzy2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, let's put even more people in prison. Prisons that are already filled to the brim. I'm sure that's going to help.

Prison is never an ideal plan; it's the least-bad option. A. What are you going to do? Let them shoplift whenever they like? B. Assuming that's not an option, what's your second plan? Give them free counseling and rehabilitation at very high cost (a 30-day drug rehab costs $14,000 - $27,000; and what kind of rehab prevents shoplifting?), even though the recidivism rate for property crimes (like shoplifting) is 78.3%?…

Every year there's billions of dollars a year in wage theft. The economic cost of just minimum wage violations is about the same as the economic cost of shoplifting, and that's only one type of wage theft.

Surely as an advocate of strong law enforcement, you want wage theft to be criminalized (it's often a civil law, not criminal), with equally stiff penalties, yes? That would be kinda neat - your boss steals $50 of your pay and the police are right there to toss that thief in jail for a month. You boss wouldn't dare illegally split your tips with other staff then!

As an observation, stopping wage theft against people earning minimum wage might even mean they can afford to buy things instead of stealing them.

> A. What are you going to do? Let them shoplift whenever they like?

The world is not all-or-nothing.

For one, the store can hire its own guards instead of using a tax-subsidized police force.

For another, you know that stores plan for and can afford some shrinkage, right? Many stores added self-checkout and mobile checkout despite knowing that shoplifting rates for them are higher than having a cashier.

Should we follow your proposal and use more police to enforce protection against shoplifting, surely many store owners will gladly fire more cashiers.

> Stores also close when shoplifting gets too extreme

Which is rare. "Stores say shoplifting is a national crisis. The numbers don’t back it up" https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifti... which also points out that Walgreens backtracked on its claims that it closed five San Francisco stores in 2021 due to organized shoplifting.

It also gives some reasons for why a company might make false claims in the first place.

> with strong external community programs to help people avoid feeling the need to shoplift,

Which programs were you thinking of? If it involves significantly higher taxes on the wealth, including a global wealth tax, resulting in a livable social safety net, then that will likely help reduce shoplifting by a lot.

But some people regard that as too high of a cost.

I don't want to be at the point where we have to decide if Jean Valjean should deserve five years of prison for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#68

Post by AbrahamParangi »

fsckboy wrote: post #55
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #48

Something that I think many people really underestimate is how much crime is done by how few people. It’s incredibly concentrated. We may have this image of a normal person perhaps down on their luck and tempted by circumstances and while this is true of most criminals , it is not true of the perpetrators of most crimes . For example, according to this article in the NYT ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/…

> top 327 shoplifters in NYC last year were arrested more than 6000 times so, what they mean is (get it? "the mean is" :) 6000 / 327 = 18+ arrests each not arguing against the argument being made, but refocusing it with a "broken windows theory" style argument, if so much mayhem can be caused by such a small number of people, I think when the shoplifting problem is allowed to go unchecked, friends of the shoplifters…

Maybe, and I do think that society and culture are sort of inescapable potential confounders, but the concentrated character of antisociality is well documented in a number of places.

For instance here's a study from Swedish prisons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/. 75% of violent offenders are "one and done" but the remaining 25% are responsible for 63.2% of convictions.

If you do the math that means that 75% of violent offenders will never reoffend, and 25% will reoffend an average of 4 times. And that's an average. The top 10% reoffend an average of 10 or more times.

Re: Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition

#69

Post by aurizon »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #17
aurizon wrote: post #8

If a shop catches a thief with a box he took outside the store after they chase him down, they offer him a choice, we will either prosecute you and get you jailed/fined - or you can promise never to come here again and to be sure, we will take your photo and use our scanner to detect you, and will tell all the local shops as well. Offered that choice, few would take the police route - this may be their tenth arrest =…

No one is chasing shoplifters, at least in America. Store employees have been shot and killed attempting to reclaim stolen goods. Or even worse, employees have tackled and injured shoplifters who have then turned around and successfully sued the stores for huge personal injury claims. It is store policy everywhere that employees are not allowed to pursue suspected shoplifters and folks have been fired for doing exact…

far more chasing in the UK, far fewer guns
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