Breaking news! Customers finally realised the long-promised gains of automation /s Is anyone surprised though? You get less and less of service (having to fish shit out of massive pallets, self-weighting produce, fighting with the retarded auto-checkout) just to pay more and more. Great deal! Yes, you pay more (or the same for less - it is riddiculous how much cheap filler is now in every single thing that can be cut with it)

I find the cardboard boxes that are massively larger than required for the contents to be very annoying, like I've been bait-and-switched.

If the rate of theft is so high, I wonder if switching from barcodes to the more expensive RFID tags would actually end up saving them money.

In Australia the high value cuts of meat recently started to have RFID tags embedded in the packaging, so the checkout scanners do have RFID readers in them already. So maybe people have been putting sausage barcodes on the beef fillet.

A major supermarket chain in my area is in the process of phasing out their self-checkout lanes.

A family member is friends with many of the staff at their store. The inside word, not promoted publicly, is "shrinkage".

They are losing enough that the cost of remodeling out the self-checkout lanes, and the cost of additional staff, is still seen as a net savings.

For my part, I'm glad for the change. Their staff are competent and helpful, and it's a union shop: Wages at least for long-term employees seem to be living wages, people actually get vacations, etc.

They still employ young adults, providing initial jobs and e.g. jobs for people in the local community college.

And staff, while hardly idle, have enough time and the freedom to e.g. provide enough boxes for my friend's recent move. (Already collected in a shopping cart as they had worked, so it really didn't cost them much if any productivity to do so.)

The major supermarket in my area did this several years ago. One of the reasons they cited was speed. Customers were slow going through self-checkout lines and there were so many of them that at busy hours they had trouble getting people out quickly. Speed noticeably improved when they went back to people.

"Shrinkage" is the industry standard term for inventory loss.

May I ask what chain?

I keep my presence at least somewhat vague and anonymous. Major metropolitan area chain. Big, but not "regional" or national -- although now owned by one or another of the nationals; it's changed hands a few times in the last some years.

The tech didn't make us dishonest. It only made it easier.

Honestly if I'm going to risk going to prison/getting prosecuted it's going to be for much more than claiming a $5 lemon wasn't organic and switching the barcode over ...