this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
78 points (95.3% liked)

Canada

7311 readers
495 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories

πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales

πŸ—£οΈ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
78
Self-checkout theft causing problems for retailers β€” and shoppers who despise receipt checks (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
131 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I started using grocery self-checkouts during COVID, but I've kept using them because there's rarely a line (and I'm a misanthrope). I'd probably go back to using regular human checkouts if I had to dig through all my crap to prove what I bought.

Having said that, I've noticed myself making mistakes. I've accidentally failed to scan an item, and I've accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I've probably missed a few.

I guess the easiest answer is for grocery chains to reinvest some of those windfall profits and hire more cashiers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I have a friend who works at a shoppers, and she was saying even at it's height, theft is like .001% of daily sales. You'd have to steal a bunch of electronics to even make a dent.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

There's a bunch of lemmings thinking "challenge accepted".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This isn't true for everything across the board however, and the number of .001% is a bit of hyperbole. The driving force behind theft is multifaceted but the biggest ones are probably a mix of resell value, time to flip, and ease of access. Most items not from grocery stores are fenced through oh say Offer Up.

I worked for a major retailer as a mix of boots on the ground and investigative loss prevention and I will say theft is far more common than people give it credit and that mostly stems from how damn easy it is. Pre-Covid theft only loss were probably about .8-1.5% depending on the location and during/after was around 2-4% these numbers are for my state only though.

Now of course this is still a drop in bucket and corporation are still horribly, horrifically greedy which is why I had to get out and now get to relax working from home. I just wanted to frame the numbers a little better since I had to live and breathe this shit for years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Even this corporate shill website lists 'high' amounts of theft with "According to some industry data" as "an average-sized food retail store in Canada can have between $2,000 and $5,000 worth of groceries stolen per week"

So not only are those inflated numbers, that's still a tiny number. There are about 15,000-16,000 grocery stores in Canada. Even if every single one of those lost 5000 per week, that's 3,900,000,000 per year. They make over 9,000,000,000 per month - or 108,000,000,000 per year.

Even at their highest possible (and likely lying) numbers, that's 0.0361111111111111 % lost to theft.

Sure, some hyberbole, but barely. (And I worked at Costco and saw their theft numbers, and even they have laughably low ones.)