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How Retailers Watch You
garzpacho writes, "With $30 billion lost to shoplifting and employee theft last year, retailers are turning to increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance systems to fight theft. Some systems, like RFID tags, have been well-publicized by privacy advocates. Others are less well known: video surveillance systems are being tied to software that can recognize specific types of activity and identify individuals; and data-mining software is being used to analyze everything from shoppers' habits to irregular register activity." From the article: "Despite this revolution in retail tech, you won't find many stores bragging about their new security tools. No one wants to tip off shoplifters or advertise that they suspect their customers. That's why so much of the technology is hidden in the first place. But another reason stores don't talk much about surveillance is that they know it sparks concerns about privacy. Consumer groups and legislators have opposed the spread of RFID and video surveillance for just that reason."
I can think of a number of times when I've bought something and the clerk -- whether new to the job, distracted, or just lazy -- has forgotten to deactivate or remove the RFID tag, and I've walked toward the front door and had the alarm go off.
The most recent was just two days ago -- I'd ordered a DVD on sale from Best Buy's website, and chose the store pickup option. Basically you choose a nearby store, they hold it for you at the customer service counter, and you walk in with your order info and pick up the item and a receipt. The customer service people presumably hadn't been trained to deactivate it, and I certainly didn't have any reason to go through the line -- I'd paid for it already, after all -- and the greeter/receipt checker certainly had no reason to think that it hadn't already been deactivated. It wasn't a big deal, as the guy had already seen my receipt and just took it over to the counter to deactivate it, but it was still an easily-avoidable false alarm.
The worst are clothing and/or department stores, especially around holidays. A couple of years ago I bought an item at Robinson's May on the second floor, walked downstairs, walked out the door, had the alarms go off -- and no one reacted. OK, I had a store bag, but if I'd been a shoplifter, I could have walked right off and no one would have noticed, despite the blaring alarm. I went back and forth a few times to make sure it was my bag, then went to the nearest cash register -- note, not anywhere near where I paid for it -- told them what had happened, and they didn't even check my receipt before pulling it out and removing the tag.
I've been at other clothing stores and heard the shoplifter alarm go off repeatedly during a half-hour stay. I think I've only seen an employee approach someone once. I assume this means there are so many false alarms that they have no sense of urgency when an alarm goes off, because most of the time, it's a customer who is going to come back of their own volition so they can get the tag removed and actually wear whatever it is. It's just sound and fury.
You can have the greatest detection tech in the world, but if people don't use it properly, it won't help one bit.
Does anyone remember the commercial where the suspicious looking guy with the trenchcoat walks around a store, stuffing things into his pockets and makes for the door only to have an employee stop him saying, "sir, you dropped something," and handing the item to him?
I wonder if indeed there will be stores in the future - perhaps entire malls - where to even enter you will need to have a wireless credit device.
I don't like the retailers watching me, but perhaps I wouldn't feel so strange about the actual merchandise itself watching me.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
My work here is dung.
How long will it be until these systems start to look at the ethnicity/gender/age of people and use that to gauge threat level? We're on a slippery slope here...
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Professional shoplifters will target multiple stores, so it would be in the interests of the retail industry to share information. Barring legislation they would have no reason to delete this information. If you act suspiciously once, you could be tagged for life. They could match all of your purchases (even cash purchases) with your face for life. The LCD screen near the entrance could change to match what they want to sell you.
Think data mining in the physical world. It's just going to get worse over time.
In my store I use a baseball bat. While a double-edged sword is quick, it also leaves a big, bloody mess, and lots and lots of police paperwork. I prefer just to crack 'em in the kneecap with my aluminum bat. It hurts a lot, and they have to just lie there until the cops get there.
It's pretty damn effective.
Lets please assume absolutely no privacy in any retail facility. Not even in the dressing rooms.
I make most of my own clothes; I have not shopped new clothes for 10 years, however the few times that i have used a dressing room, I put on a pair of new, clean underwear prior to leaving home to go shopping. This way, I have no cause to care if I am watched in the dressing rooms.
Also please don't assume you can see the cameras. I was given a demo of a high quality video camera that was smaller than amout 1/2 inch square and about 1/4 inch thick.
Retail facilities are not synominous with privacy.
Cleara
A long time ago when I worked in retail (Computer City), we had store numbers that suggested anywhere from 50-100% of our net-profit each week disappeared due to 'shrinkage' -- that was the innocuous term used for shoplifting. Back then companies weren't so blatant as to openly suggest a large # of our 'customers' were liberating the products, but that was precisely what was happening. Pretty slick stuff to.. it was back when Win95 was release, people would use razor blades to open the box, slide out the cds, and leave the box behind. That's why now shrinkwrapped software comes in that ridiculous overpackaging -- the corragated cardbord box inside a box is to prevent quick theft.
/I'm speaking as a Canadian, but our laws are roughly equivalent in this regard.
Stores are private property. Arrests and/or charges are still to be laid by legitimate police officers too, the most they can do is detain you. Your rights are not violated in any way.
I don't even mind RFIDs too much, but think they should be designed to be easily removable once you leave the store. This will take a few years to sort out I'm sure, but inventory tracking is a huge potential cost savings.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
The other day when I went to my local Safeway supermarket, I selected a plastic hand-basket and noticed something odd. It had a small black box, about 1" X 1/2" X 1/4" sloppily zip tied to the underside of the basket. I flipped the basket over, and read some company logo along the lines of ShopTracker or some such thing. I was pretty irked, so I tossed it behind the stack of baskets and selected an unencumbered model. They want to know where you visit, and where you linger. No warning on the basket at all...
I just checked my last grocery receipt and I have saved somewhere between $200 and $250 this year so far using that card. That's good money for me to be saving. That's about a month and a half of gas money for my commute to work! I could care less if I lose a little privacy for that kind of savings because I get something that I can see the benefits of.
But what have I gotten out of **government** privacy invasions.
Jack.
Shit.
Unless you are one of those soccer moms or country club dads who is so terrified of a few sabre-rattling third world nutjobs that you think that anything that gives you a 0.000000000001% great chance of not being hit by a terrorist is worth it.
(Being a southern, I saw respond with a middle finger and rebel yell)
Targets security is going insane. I've seen them stop people who they watched pay for their items. The best was a guy who bought a Grill and only a grill. It was in a HUGE box and 2 target guys where wheeling it out for him. The security guard watched him pay for it and he still stopped him at the day to verify his receipt. All that does is tell your customers we dont trust you.
Remember those hand held beepers that home answering machines used to come with? I managed a 5 and dime back in the early 90's. The most advanced pieces of technology that we had were some two-way mirrors. Whenever I suspected someone of shoplifting (but couldn't prove it), I would stand next to the exit with one of those beepers and hit it when the person tried to leave. I had about even odds on the person either immediately professing their guilt, running, or otherwise doing something funny in response to the beeper. It was quite fun, actually.
And now my social commentary: we were in a really, really wealthy resort town. The people who were stealing (or at least who we caught stealing) were almost always the teenage daughters of the rich guys that came to the town for vacations... what gives? Any psychologists reading? I mean, we also caught some teenage boys and even a nun, but most were teenage girls. Older men and women were better at stealing, and usually it took the form of price-sticker swapping. We didn't catch them as often. Usually they would get caught by handing a mis-priced product to the cashier that had just spent an hour pricing the same item :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So what if you walk out of the store, and the alarm goes off, you know you aren't guilty, and just continue walking. What can the store do except ask you to stop and hope you do? Are there any laws against disobeying the order of a private security guard?
I own a store ( a lot smaller than Best Buy ). I try to encourage my employees to think like the boss; to have the same goals and the same motivations. To accomplish this, one of their perks is to be able to consign merchandise here. When it sells, they get 80%, the house keeps 20%.
So they have an incentive to prevent shoplifting, for it could be their stuff going out the door. THe most extreme case was when one of my employees ran after an obvious shoplifter, and tacked him across the street. He had him pinned down on the sidewalk, stolen merchandise spilled in plain view. He yelled for the employee in the place across the street to please call the cops. The other employee refused because he 'didn't want to get involved.' After all, why should he? He was paid by the hour and got the same amount whether he tried or not.
As someone who knows quite a few people who work retail and work retail loss prevention, you could have very simply been at a store where no one is authorized to do anything about shoplifters except specified loss prevention employees.
Or, a store where secrity watches you pretty closely on camera and the employees know that if you set off an alarm, and then get back to the register to have it deactivated, and loss prevention hasn't shown up already, that you're in the clear.
Or, you could live in a state where concealing unpurchased items is enough for a shoplifting conviction, in which case if you go through the securty gates with stuff in a bag, either you've already purchased the items and someone forgot to deactivate the tag, or loss prevention never saw you put something in the bag and there's nothing they can do about it anyway (and most times, if you're in the store with a bag from that store, loss prevention is going to be all over you.)
It may appear unreasonable to you, but you ust don't know how (or why) it works the way it does.
paintball
There is a reason they are sticking to you like fleas on a dog....I can sum it up in one word....
COMMISSION!
They get paid a commission on the sales. It is the same in places like Radio Shack. Want to get their attention real fast? Next time they ask, "can I help you?" Simply answer, "No thanks, just shoplifting". You then get about 3-4 people just following you around the store....It is great fun the whole family can enjoy...;-)
For the humor impaired, that last part is a joke.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Only on /. would someone make a point to mention that they put on clean underware before leaving their domicile. I think normal people must take clean underware for granted!
*rolling eyes*
Libertas in infinitum
I think stores should do all the freakish Big-Brother stuff they want to protect their valuable commodities, but people need to be informed. If the methods are effective, they will work whether people know or not (perhaps even better if they do)- if not, they will fail once a thief gets wind of the details.
You can't get software security by hiding your code, and you can't get store security by keeping us in the dark.
P.S on RFIDs, I just walked out of a library with an RFID tag that failed to register with the checkout machine as borrowed, but allowed me to get past the front door. Since I was informed about the tag (standard anyway, but for arguments' sake) I went and reported it. But if they were playing wise-ass on us, I would have kept the book for ever and ever. And ever.
I can tell you for a fact that theft at the Computer City stores we used to have here in St. Louis, MO (USA) was mostly by employees. I used to run a popular computer BBS back in those days, and one of their employees offered to barter hardware for download credits with me one time. I visited his apartment, willing to discuss the idea - and found a large walk-in closet stuffed full of brand new CD-ROM drives, RAM, hard drives, and other goodies. He worked at Computer City and admitted that a group of them were collecting up as much stuff as they could from the store, in order to get a "better salary out of the cheap bastards".
... One store by me was Arab-owned and operated, for example, and many people felt it should have been run by an American instead. Another just had constantly poor customer service. You could walk around for 30 minutes trying to get help and nobody would seem to be around. I think that's really why they experienced such high loss-rates. Employees were all out to screw the stores over, and many who shopped there didn't feel guilty buying property known to be stolen from the place either.
Another time, I was interested in buying an expansion board to do general MIDI with ROM samples on a Soundblaster AWE type csound card. Computer City supposedly had 2 in stock at the store closest to me, but when I got there, they were unable to locate anything except empty boxes. Shortly afterwards, a guy I knew told me that he had "connections" who could get me one of those cards cheap, as long as I didn't mind it was "hot". Funny... one of his buddies worked at Computer City.
That place seemed to generate a lot of ill will with people
Then I noticed that my normal shopping bill went up by a few dollars, in the space of a week. I started looking around, and sure enough, items that I regularly bought for $4.99, or whatever, now had "$4.99" in some bold color, and underneath in very small print, said, "$5.99 without shopper card".
So I got a card, and then had to replace it a year later when it wouldn't read anymore. "Just put your phone number in the number pad..."
"Ummm, I had a different number then, and don't remember what it was."
Now I just use my work number, and have discovered that most of my co-workers do, too, so we don't even have to lie on the stupid forms anymore: Someone from work has already signed up at every store in the area.
And what will they do when I move and someone else gets the phone number, if that is the "unique identifier" that they are using?
As the owner of a tangible piece of property, or as an agent ( employee ) of the owner, you have the right to grab people who steal from you. You can make a citizen's arrest. You just have to be able to convince a judge/jury in civil court that your actions are reasonable. You can use force, just no more than a judge considers neccesary.
...but I am married to one )
You are a perfect example of what I am talking about in GP. ( And I mean no offense by saying that. ) Your employers decided to give you an incentive not to prevent shoplifting. They told you only the bad side of grabbing shoplifters. And you responded accordingly.
It all makes sense from their point of view. When they have multi-million dollar deep pockets they are a target for a lawsuit by a lawyer operating on contingency. Even if that lawyer knows that his odds of winning are only 1 in a 1000, it still makes sense for him to try it. So they take the low-risk approach.
But for me, whose total possesions would bring less than a 100 grand if seized and sold at fire sale, it does make sense for me and my employees to use force. I have relatively shallow pockets. I'm not a potential target for a contingency lawyer. No lawyer will touch a lawsuit against me unless the plantiff pays thousands up front.
It is kind of ironic. Criminal law codes permit them to grab people, but civil law ( as it is currently understood ) makes it unreasonable.
IANALBIAMTO (
My worst problem with this is, as others, when the RFID tags are not deactivated. In my case, it was a pair of shoes someone had bought me for a gift. Problem was, the tag wasn't deactivated. Additionally, the tag was BUILT INTO the shoes! Every time I entered and left a store wearing the shoes, it would set off the alarms. I had more than one overzealous doordude try to stop me. Eventually I got to where I would warn them before I even stepped through and hold my hands out so they could see I wasn't carrying anything. One refused to listen and tried to detain me - I told him to get his *@*## hands off me before I had to defend myself against unlawful detainment. He was furious, but I had already explained to him the situation, and he was too stupid to comprehend that a tag might be on something I OWN and not have been deactivated!
Finally, when the shoes were completely worn out, I cut them up and found the tag. It was deep inside between two layers of cloth - it had to have been put in there at the factory.
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
I was doing some low voltage wiring repair at a high end lighting retailer. Turns out that their shrink was staggering before they simly installed some video cameras in the wharehouse. Some of them were not even functional, but you could not tell which. Their employee theft problem went away over night.
The threat.. implied or real.. of watching employees is often enough to encourage desired behavior. It is a direct application of game theory.
For supermarket chains, the serious losses are not from shoplifting. The really serious theft is the entire truckloads of goods that never make it in the backdoor of the store, but that the chain ends-up paying for. These operations are usually operated by insiders, often reaching up to quite senior management levels, as full-time businesses-within-the-business.
None of this tracking nonsense is going to make the slightest dent in that.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling