Canada

How much is the loss really, in the grand scheme of things? Article says 23% of losses are self-checkout and theft, but what's the percentage of losses overall?

Because I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of people scan their items correctly. My local stores don't even bother enabling the scale on those machines.

IMO it's got to still end up cheaper than switching back to rows of cashiers, and self checkout is so much nicer and faster. I check my groceries out in less than a minute usually.

Or, if it's such a big problem, maybe they can license the tech Amazon uses for their physical stores. Literally grab what you want from the shelves and walk out and it knows what you took and bills you.

Am I the only one that hands my stuff to the staff member standing there and asks them for help? I really don't mind saying I don't understand how those things work, as I truly don't care enough to pay even the slightest bit of attention to them.... If there's a staff member just standing there watching, why can't they help me as a customer?

I'm always polite about it, except that one time at Dollarama where there was 4 people standing there acting like I was being rude for asking them to ring me thru a till rather than use a self checkout. That time, I just put my stuff down and walked out. If they don't want to help me, I'm not giving them my money.

What I do is deliberately go to a cashier, even if the line is extremely long, and I see more and more people doing the same. This forces more lines to open. One time they asked if I could use the self-checkout to speed up the process. I replied that if the items were cheaper at the self-checkout, sure, otherwise I'd stay in line.

I don't use self-checkouts in retail stores, and I hate that some stores, like Shoppers, will try so hard to direct me to one when I'm in the queue for the cashier. I have put down merch and walked out of stores over this stance, and I no longer visit some stores (like Shoppers).

I'm not entirely against automated purchase systems. A completely touchless system would get a pass from me. I am against retailers forcing their customers to manually scan and check-out their products though, all while treating them as untrustworthy by dictating where they can place their scanned merch, weighing the merch as it's scanned, and checking the receipts after doing so.

Obviously, none of this addresses the question of whether fully-automated retail spaces are actually good for the working class as a whole.