Latest news with #selfcheckout
Daily Mail
6 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Walmart forced to shut down self-checkout lanes for good
A Walmart in Missouri has seen a sharp drop in police calls and arrests after it made a bold move: ripping out every self-checkout machine. The Shrewsbury supercenter removed the kiosks last year after logging a staggering 509 police calls. Since then, the numbers have plunged — with only 183 calls so far this year and arrests cut nearly in half. 'That's a huge change. We really appreciate Walmart taking initiative and removing those self-checkers,' Shrewsbury police chief Lisa Vargas said on Tuesday. Walmart has been looking for other ways to crack down on shoplifting at self-checkouts such as using handheld scanners in select stores to verify a receipts authenticity. Bosses have also been locking up items that are frequently stolen behind plexiglass screens. Besides Shrewsbury, select Walmart stores in Ohio and New Mexico eliminated self-checkouts to lessen the chance of shoplifting. 'We believe the changes will improve the in-store shopping experience and give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service,' a Walmart spokesperson told CX Dive . Walmart is in the middle of a massive revamp at 650 stores this year. While they're working on store redesign, select locations are also rolling out adjustments to self-checkouts to stop crooks stealing customers' card details. Commonly seen is red tape covering part of the card reader prevent card skimmers from stealing financial information. Card skimming has become a frequent problem in Walmart stores nationwide, with one incident going unnoticed for 18 days . During those days, a card-skimming device disguised as a pin pad at one of the retailer's registers in Connecticut . The problem has escalated to a point where Washington state's legislature proposed a bill to regulate the use of self-checkouts . Besides registers, Walmart has begun testing other methods aiming to decrease its crime rate without diminishing its current progress. Some of these tools include opening locked display cases with phones and hidden barcodes in Great Value-branded products . Walmart is not the only retailer to continue axing self-checkout. Dollar General also performed a massive self-checkout removal in 12,000 stores , hoping for a decrease in shoplifters. The takeaway worked in Dollar General's favor, and the chain reported an 8 percent boost in income during its first quarter . Sam's Club, a division of Walmart, is removing all machines and rolling out AI -powered 'Scan & Go' technology to reduce checkout wait times.
Daily Mail
7 hours ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Walmart makes massive self-checkout U-turn: 'Huge change'
A Walmart in Missouri has seen a sharp drop in police calls and arrests after it made a bold move: ripping out every self-checkout machine. The Shrewsbury supercenter removed the kiosks last year after logging a staggering 509 police calls. Since then, the numbers have plunged — with only 183 calls so far this year and arrests cut nearly in half. 'That's a huge change. We really appreciate Walmart taking initiative and removing those self-checkers,' Shrewsbury police chief Lisa Vargas said on Tuesday. Walmart has been looking for other ways to crack down on shoplifting at self-checkouts such as using handheld scanners in select stores to verify a receipts authenticity. Bosses have also been locking up items that are frequently stolen behind plexiglass screens. Besides Shrewsbury, select Walmart stores in Ohio and New Mexico eliminated self-checkouts to lessen the chance of shoplifting. 'We believe the changes will improve the in-store shopping experience and give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service,' a Walmart spokesperson told CX Dive. Walmart is in the middle of a massive revamp at 650 stores this year. While they're working on store redesign, select locations are also rolling out adjustments to self-checkouts to stop crooks stealing customers' card details. Commonly seen is red tape covering part of the card reader prevent card skimmers from stealing financial information. Card skimming has become a frequent problem in Walmart stores nationwide, with one incident going unnoticed for 18 days. During those days, a card-skimming device disguised as a pin pad at one of the retailer's registers in Connecticut. The problem has escalated to a point where Washington state's legislature proposed a bill to regulate the use of self-checkouts. Besides registers, Walmart has begun testing other methods aiming to decrease its crime rate without diminishing its current progress. Some of these tools include opening locked display cases with phones and hidden barcodes in Great Value-branded products. Select Walmart stores have been adding gadgets to self-checkout scanners to decrease the chance of card skimming Walmart is not the only retailer to continue axing self-checkout. Dollar General also performed a massive self-checkout removal in 12,000 stores, hoping for a decrease in shoplifters. The takeaway worked in Dollar General's favor, and the chain reported an 8 percent boost in income during its first quarter. Sam's Club, a division of Walmart, is removing all machines and rolling out AI -powered 'Scan & Go' technology to reduce checkout wait times. Costco, one of Sam's Club's biggest rivals, began rolling out the same technology but is not planning on axing self-checkout from all locations.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Walmart Makes Sudden Self-Checkout Decision After Alarming Police Data
Walmart is pulling back on one of its biggest retail experiments after eye-opening data from police revealed just how costly self-checkout can be. At a Supercenter in Shrewsbury, Missouri, Walmart abruptly removed all self-checkout machines—permanently. The decision came after years of frequent police calls tied to theft at the store, which local law enforcement says dropped dramatically after the kiosks were removed. According to the Webster-Kirkwood Times, the Shrewsbury Police Department responded to 509 calls from the Walmart location between January and May of last year. During the same period this year, after the self-checkouts were removed, those calls dropped to just 183. Arrests fell by more than half, from 108 to just 49. "That's a huge change," said Police Chief Lisa Vargas. "We really appreciate Walmart taking initiative and removing those self-checkers." While many major retailers once hailed self-checkout as the future of shopping, the reality has proven far more complicated. Customers frequently struggle with the machines, and some simply skip the scanning process altogether. The Mirror reported that Christopher Andrews, author of The Overworked Consumer, explained that stores initially viewed the technology as a labor-saving breakthrough, but it backfired. "They ended up realizing that they're not saving money, they're losing money," Andrews said. The move in Missouri isn't isolated. Walmart has also removed self-checkouts from a location in Cleveland, Ohio, and is reportedly reconsidering its broader among customers over slow, glitchy machines has compounded the issue. And with theft rising across many retailers, automated checkout lanes have become a high-risk gamble. Still, Walmart isn't giving up on innovation altogether. The company is testing Scan & Go technology at select Sam's Club locations. That model uses a mobile app to tally purchases in real-time, combining QR codes and AI to reduce shrink while offering speed and convenience to that system proves more efficient—or more secure—remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is clear: at least one Walmart is thriving without self-checkout. And police say the data speaks for Makes Sudden Self-Checkout Decision After Alarming Police Data first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 20, 2025
Daily Mail
11-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco
The other day I noticed a mildly alarming development at our local Tesco. What had hitherto been a tiny, monochrome LED screen itemising each of my purchases, in cigarette-packet print, as the till-chick scanned everything through was suddenly as big as a copy of Cosmopolitan. In vivid Technicolor. With an image of every item and in very big print. I glanced right and left. It was the same at every other till. Each customer's shopping blaringly detailed for all to see. Today, mercifully, it was just sausages, onions, fresh thyme, and a bag of fresh chicken stock. But what if the screen had been regaling every adjacent passer-by with an itemised haul of, um, intimacies? It's bad enough when it's a bottle of Jamesons and some Williams Bros craft-ale. You can just imagine some onlooker's thought-bubble. 'Well, there goes Johnny Journo. Dylan Thomas: The Final Days.' But what of the day, decades hence, when my basket might include the products of deliverance from, as the commercials exquisitely put it, mild bladder weakness? As they say, every little helps. It is even worse at the self-checkouts. These I try to avoid. For one, I genuinely enjoy the brief social interaction with the lads and lasses manning real ones. For another, every different retail chain seems to use different machines and I can never remember on which side I may safely deposit my basket and on which as much as a fat carrot at once invokes the whine of 'Unauthorised item in the bagging area.' There is also an inordinately long list of items which cannot be sold to minors – stuff you probably would not think of: matches, kitchen-knives, bleach, glue and razorblades among them. So, again, the machine purses its digital lips, and there you are stuck till the harried attendant drifts over to confirm you are a verifiable old ruin, swipe his magic card and have a swift nosy at your messages. And worse – much worse – is to come. Across Britain, supermarkets are already rolling out artificial intelligence and autorecognition technology. In England and Wales, they can even hook up their facial-recognition cameras with police databases. VAR – the same technology that has already made football so farcical – is being deployed too. The selfsame tech that catches Erling Haaland's muscular behind offside now lurks, like a beast waiting to spring, lest you amble out of Asda with a can of sweetcorn you haven't paid for. Tesco, too, now trials such kit – though not, so far, in the Outer Hebrides. A wee bird's-eye camera will hang over each self-checkout, watching your every move. Should that Jolly Green Giant can not properly be scanned, it'll immediately play you a finger-wagging video – and, no doubt, in extremis, alert the hovering security-dude the size of a small house. Even a decade ago, most Brits would have balked at this sort of thing. In the Nineties, it would have been unthinkable. 'Some of this will make your life easier,' muses one observer. 'Some of it already does. But much of it asks for something in return: your data, your privacy, your patience, your trust. And not everything you're being asked to give is visible. 'This is not science fiction. It's not the future. It's your local Tesco.' Driving all this, of course, is the issue of what the trade calls 'shrinkage,' we call shoplifting and what our grannies called stealing. Annually, it costs British retailers billions. There were 516,971 offences recorded in 2024 – a signal leap from the 429,873 thefts logged the year before. But only one in five instances saw anybody charged: in more than half, no suspect could even be identified. Hence all this baleful new technology. The unsettling sense of being coldly studied by a machine. Watched, flagged, corrected and accused. That, actually, your caring sharing Co-op fundamentally distrusts you. Around 1990 that moral watchdog of the nation, the Free Church Presbytery of Lewis – unnerved by what had become a hedonistic and at times predatory Stornoway nightlife – called for closed-circuit television cameras to be dotted through the town. People stared, the tabloids tittered and the West Highland Free Press ran a very funny cartoon. No one could imagine anything as outlandish. Yet we have now had CCTV in the island capital for decades. From the Manor roundabout to outside An Lanntair, Big Brother is watching you. We are already well on the way to being one of the most surveilled societies in Europe. Even our most casual online browsing is eagerly monitored by all sorts of bots. When, fancying a new piece of kitchen kit, I casually Googled slow-cookers, for days on end thereafter adverts for said crockpots stalked me at every online turn. Retailers I had never heard of even sent me emails. Not everyone will tolerate this. The Germans will not stand for CCTV and, save where it is genuinely vital for public safety – like airports – you will see no cameras anywhere. That reflects not just dark folk-memory of the Nazis, but the decades much of the country then endured under a Communist dictatorship – a society so bleak, so grey and so stifling that, as President Kennedy cracked, 'We do not need to build a wall to keep our people in.' From secret policemen, regular informers and the occasional grass, it's reckoned that one in 6.5 East Germans worked for the Stasi. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, under the long night that was Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, the state could rely on one in three. Indeed, I am old enough to remember when much of rural Lewis, into the present century, felt like something very similar. People kept binoculars by their main window. Wizened crones knew every car and every numberplate. Murmured if you skipped church; found an excuse to drop by if you received a mysterious visitor or if Donny the Post had dropped off a strange parcel. Boys and girls courted, of necessity, in the hours of darkness: ministers did not dare step out of the manse, of a Saturday, lest there be talk of their casual disregard for sermon preparation. It sounds hilarious, but it was to some degree genuinely oppressive and why, for so many young islanders, getting on meant getting out. My mother still remembers an occasion in 1988 when, home on holiday, she joined my father, a senior clergyman, on a spin to the village where he had been born. He was casually dressed, they told no one where they were going, the latest family car had never been on the island before and they did not stop until they reached his uncle's croft. And they were not ten minutes in the house when the phone rang. It was a couple several townships away whom my father had signally helped when, months earlier, their son had died in tragic circumstances in Edinburgh. The Reverend Professor must now call on them, he must put up a word of prayer with them, and he must do it now. So much for that day of holiday. 'And you know what?' my mother still cackles darkly. 'After all that, they joined the Free Church Continuing.'
Daily Mail
11-06-2025
- Daily Mail
Walmart self-checkout error leaves customer calling cops after he's charged enormous sum for avocado
A shopper called 911 on Walmart over a self-checkout glitch — then claimed the store had 'robbed' him. An employee recalled the incident on Reddit, saying it began with pricing errors on a self-checkout register. 'This guy came up with a bunch of stuff,' the worker wrote in a post. 'He said one item said it was $9.99 on the shelf but was coming up $19.99. We got teamlead to check it out [and] got it fixed for him.' 'Same thing with another Item. That one we couldn't change.' Things really unraveled when the customer made a mistake ringing up avocados. 'I guess he accidentally hit 999 avocados instead of the nine he intended [and] his total jumped up to over $1300,' the employee said. The Reddit user claimed the customer told him to 'get the f***' away from him and dialled 911. However, the customer was in for a surprise after deciding to take on one of America's largest retailers. 'This dude creates a whole circus then shows everyone the self checkout screen. We fix it but he still won't shut up,' the employee claimed. By then, asset protection employees were involved and warned the infuriated shopper they would call him a trespasser if he didn't calm down. He refused to back down, and after demanding Walmart compensate him for 'pain and suffering and distress,' he was kicked out of the store. 'They do end up trespassing him, and since he won't leave, his own cops he called put him in handcuffs and take him outside,' the worker added. Other Reddit users claiming to be Walmart employees sympathized with the employee over the matter and shared similar work horror stories. 'Truly unhinged, but you know he absolutely was making a scene intentionally after the second "price correction,"' a commenter wrote. 'I had a customer who was causing a disturbance and making it very hard to work,' another person revealed. 'They kept threatening to call the cops. I dialed the number and handed them the phone. It's amazing how quickly they left...' Walmart registers have been a growing nuisance in the eyes of social media users. The company has been working to ensure customers are safe from card skimmers, and several stores are using gadgets at self-checkout. Some locations have also removed self-checkout lanes, while its membership-only retailer Sam's Club axed them out at all stores to explore AI 'Scan & Go' technology. The register changes came after the chain announced its plan to invest $9 billion in store makeovers. The remodeling began in at least 650 locations, but the company has not revealed if self-checkout changes were part of it. While the changes were meant to raise customer satisfaction, they were not enough to cheer up shoppers who were furious over price hikes from tariffs. With prices jumping as much as 80 percent, the retailer was forced to slash about 1,500 US jobs last month on top of the hundreds initiated by the company in 2024.
