How would this work? The items have price tags on shelves. You can't arbitrarily jack up prices without attracting consumer outrage and/or regulatory scrutiny.

>perhaps they’re charging a percentage of the items that go through their machines

That wouldn't affect the raw sales data, which is how "shrink" is determined (ie. goods you've bought - goods you've sold)

>It’s never theft

What makes you so sure of this? Theft is a real phenomenon, so it's at least somewhat plausible that it's affecting stuff. You'd have to have pretty good exculpatory evidence to assert it's "never theft".

>specifically it ends up being something like “our stores are costing because of downtown theft” then you find out it’s because downtown stores are doing half the business as before the pandemic and it was never theft.

Source?

Edit: this one from further down the thread too: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data...

For the first point, I usually assume the checkouts are run by third party vendors and charge a fee for the automated systems. I was saying that perhaps those third parties have started to raise prices for the operation of the checkout machines because it’s harder to find cheap labor, so now that corpos have gone all in on automated jobs they’re in a hard place. Maybe not, but I wasn’t saying the checked out item prices were being changed, that’d be stupid.

Your own source admits it's real, albeit limited to certain cities

"But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic."

That's hardly enough to support the claim it's "never shoplifting".

>https://sfist.com/2023/12/22/sure-enough-shoplifting-was-not...

The CNBC investigation this story was based on uses official crime statistics. Seems reasonable, until you realize that if officials aren't responding to crime reports (eg. lenient DAs), stores might not bother reporting, which makes it seem like crime is going down when it really isn't. You can see this in the nytimes article, which has both reported crime data as well as retailers' inventory ("shrink") data. The latter is obviously less susceptible to this effect, and we see that even though the reported crime rates were down 14% (45.1 -> 38.6), shrink was only down 3% (1.62 -> 1.57).

The two above combined makes the exculpatory evidence for "it's never theft" to be pretty weak.

Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.

Get real comrade.

That's extrapolating too much from what the article actually claims. It only says that shoplifting incidents "in major cities" (whatever that means) as a whole has gone down. That's not the same as "So theft is up in NYC and no other major cities". Moreover, the claim you made isn't that thefts are down on average across the country, it's that "It’s never theft". Even if it's just new york, that invalidates your "It’s never theft" claim. Murder rates are down across the country as well, but that doesn't mean you can claim it's "never murder".

>Your argument against the second article was “maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime” lol. Shrink includes numbers for all lost or destroyed inventory not just theft, btw.

>Get real comrade.

1. Is "maybe those poor corpos just aren’t reporting crime" really that hard to believe? The National Crime Victimization Survey puts the reporting rate for property crimes to be 26%. Once you stack non-response to the actual survey on top, you'd be a fool to take any self-reported crime statistics at face value.

2. True, shrink could be caused by other factors, btu is there any reason to believe that "lost or destroyed inventory" would have gone up? I find it baffling that you dismiss the idea of retailers not reporting thefts, but are seemingly convinced of the idea that retailer reported shrink is caused by other factors without providing any justification, "comrade".

The shrink rate is an order of magnitude higher on self checkout compared to a cashier lane with a human.

I guess that's why I can't have nice things. What really bothers me is people who scam insurance and then boast to me about it as if I'm gonna tap them on the back for "sticking it to the man" when they're stealing money away from me by causing my insurance primes to increase but are too stupid to realize it.

> That analysis showed that self-checkout led to a shrink rate more than 16 times higher than traditional cashier lines. Nearly 7% of self-checkout transactions had at least some amount of partial shrink, compared to 0.32% with cashiers. The analysis also suggested a shrink rate of 3.5% for self-checkout machines, while conventional cashiers only saw a 0.21% shrink rate.

Then

> According to Grabango, checkout-free technology powered by computer vision can help eliminate self-checkout shrink by tracking what shoppers pick up and charging them exactly what they owe. The company also stressed that average supermarkets could increase bottom-line profits by more than 50% per year by eliminating partial shrink from self-checkout alone.

First, I don’t trust a company selling something to say they did a study, literally using that product, and the result of the study was to sell you something new. Not only that, but everyone knows computer vision isn’t always perfect, it’s similar to LLM AI in that when it works it’s amazing but it’s hard to get working. For this study it seems like they trusted their CV product to be perfect and compared it to the human scanned item list and assumed that was inaccurate.

This article is literally just an ad, not a reliable source!