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…
Hey hey hey, no snitching on people who take food. Corporations won’t starve, just because a starving person took some food from them.
No snitching period. Why would you side with a massive corporation that steals from mentally disabled people and old people, decimated America as we knew it, destroying every local economy, and demanding prices so cheap from brands that they’ve made shittier products with slightly different labels to meet that demand? Fuck Walmart. If you rat someone out for stealing from Walmart, then you’re a brainwashed asshole.
That feels like an eye for an eye logic. Shoplifting has a very real impact and incentives dystopian surveillance even more.
I don’t normally mention people stealing but that’s mostly because it is plain obvious as they are terrible at being inconspicuous. They only time I mentioned that I saw someone stealing is at a dollar general where there was a single employee.
Also if you do see someone stealing do not approach them or accuse them of stealing. That can go very badly and could lead to a serious escalation.
Fun fact, dollar general has a habit of locking employees in the store and demanding they do work off the clock.
Dollar general has stolen now more from it’s own employees than anyone has ever stolen from dollar general. That’s before you get to the horrifically unethical shit they get up to that’s legal.
Fuck em.
Oh on that case why don’t you just go and burn down the store with everyone inside. I’m sure that’s what they deserve.
Seriously though I don’t see how one justifies the other. Fighting fire with fire never goes well.
They know that loss increases with self checkout. They just did the math and figured it’s less than the cost of hiring all the extra cashiers.
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.
