I always liked the quote, “If you see someone stealing food, no you didn’t.”
The lack of a person watching you check out does not mean no one is watching. They absolutely are and you are being recorded the entire time you are in the store.
Also, these stores have tools that can tally up losses associated to you, and they’ll pull in the cops when the evidence is enough to warrant serious penalty.
Target is notorious for this. Loss Prevention has literal evidence binders for repeat offenders. They’ll tally up everything you’ve stolen, and then sit on it and continue tallying until you have stolen enough to be charged with a felony. Once they have a dollar over their local felony amount, they’ll send their LP team in to pull you aside and you get arrested for felony grand theft.
Imo I think observing a crime like that but not reporting it (so more crimes can be amassed by that person) should be considered legal endorsement of the activity. You were aware of the infraction and chose not to report it or otherwise act on. That you were hoping to “bank” more crime from the criminal seems irrelevant to me - you chose not to pursue legal action even after clearly being aware of the infraction, which tells me you chose inaction.
But of course bringing our laws in line with morality and reason would require an enormous overhaul of the system, so instead we have this bullshit.
Remember that even if you cover your face, they’re probably monitoring for your gait. Put a small rock in your shoe to change that…
Walmarts around me have cameras at each self check out.
Yup. I was using self checkout once and it flagged me when I was trying to pay but didn’t say why. The supervisor was on top of it and unlocked the terminal and it made him watch a 5 second video of “suspicious activity”, which was me moving my reusable bag to the other side at a low angle. Some AI they use saw that as trying to sneak an unscanned product past the scanner.
I thought it was terribly clever but he just rolled his eyes and apologized for the inconvenience. As if an underpaid Walmart employee is going to waste their time arguing with a shoplifter.
which was me moving my reusable bag to the other side at a low angle.
Seems like a system like that would be easily fooled by confidently moving an item across the scanner and into the baggage area without scanning it.
It’s tied to the scanner so it knows nothing scanned, if you can stack two items and scan only one you can trick it, but the scale will pick up to much added weight so you gotta do something light. Clothes are good.
My local walmart recently significantly expanded the self checkout area with the new scanners. Currently they either don’t have functioning cameras or they display a gray camera icon where it normally would show a live view.
Not that it matters here specifically, fuck Walmart. But don’t assume that just because a feed on a public screen is blank, that it isn’t being recorded or actively viewed elsewhere.
I’ve always had much better much at the non self checkout with cashiers getting distracted or forgetting to scan certain things. Especially at home depot I got a free 80 dollar shower head because my puppy was in the cart
