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Computer Opens Unmanned Store For Holiday
tomhudson writes "The Walkato Times in New Zealand is reporting that someone forgot to tell the computer not to unlock the supermarket on the Friday holiday. 'About half of the 24 people who came into the supermarket paid for their groceries using the self-scan service. The service stopped working after alcohol was scanned, requiring a staff member to check a customer's age before the system is unlocked.' The owner, Mr Miller, was quoted as saying 'I can certainly see the funny side of it... but I'd rather not have the publicity to be honest. It makes me look a bit of a dickhead.' Rather than take legal action, Mr Miller is hoping that the people who didn't pay will do the right thing."
Good thing it's in New Zealand.
Maybe they didn't notice that nobody was actually working in the store?
Right at opening the staff of various stores are often occupied with opening duties. Putting out new signs, fresh food in the deli, etc. I could easily see walking in, picking up a few items and going through the self-checkout without knowing the stores was otherwise empty. I mean, sure, I might clue in something is wrong when going through the checkout and seeing no cashiers, but hey the self-checkout is working so why worry about it...
What does america have to do with it? This was in new zealand.
Also, the police were called due to reports of truckloads of groceries being removed. So while some people were honest, it appears the dishonest capitalized quickly.
From the article it appears it took less than an hour between someone realizing the store was unlocked an unattended to trying to run off with a pile of free food.
My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw New Zealand forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
What a fantastic official response. If only managers in America would openly admit to being the dickheads they are...
Tough choice. I wonder how many people stopped paying after the self-scan stopped working.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
About half of the 24 people who came into the supermarket paid for their groceries using the self-scan service
Note that this doesn't say that all 24 people who came into the supermarket took anything in the first place. I can easily see some going in and filling the shopping cart, but then noticing that registers are unmanned and leaving the cart in the shop (if e.g. the person doesn't feel like using self-checkout, or doesn't know how).
It would be interesting to know how many actually didn't pay for something that they took.
So I infer from the description that if those first customers did not lock up all the checkouts by scanning in Alcohol perhaps more of the later customers could have also paid for their purchases.
Well it's not America. Just look how long it look for looting to start in Japan, compared to Katrina. Cultures with history and a lack of diversity seem to get along much better.
And what about the people who stole groceries? What are they? 1 manager, how many thieving customers?
This is actually a useful social study and most liberals will NOT like the result. This "experiment" shows that a large number of people will ONLY obey the rules of society if somebody is standing behind them with a heavy stick.
Yes, a lot of people will behave. For the rest, we need armed police and guard dogs. Pity. If only there was some method of getting rid of the assholes. But we can't and so to counter 1 asshole, we need the entire justice system. (Because while not everyone paid, a few will also simply have left without taking anything)
If you ever handle an event or social place, you will know just how annoying the dickheads are, managers or otherwise. You can do so many things in a world without dickheads. For instance, you hate 3g coverage and price? No problem just use my Wifi. I don't mind you downloading email or browsing on it. Oh wait, I got to use a password because 1 dickhead in thousands will use it to break the law. No easy free roaming wifi for everyone else.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just because it's in New Zealand doesn't mean that the people who paid weren't American. After all, we're known world round for honesty and contributing to the less fortunate. That's why our prison rate is so amazingly low. Umm, right?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yes, then half of their customers would pay for things instead of 90% of them stealing things.
So let me get this straight... Somebody designed and built a computer-controlled lock system (that apparently also turns on the self-checkouts), and didn't think something like this would happen?
Would it be that hard to have an "unlock" button to pair with the computer's instructions? When the store's supposed to be locked, the button would do nothing. Between zero and five minutes after the scheduled opening, it unlocks the doors. Five minutes after opening time, a nice reminder sounds. After ten minutes, the computer could assume human error, and stop trying to unlock the doors.
Developing and installing the system would likely cost a trivial amount compared to the risk of leaving a store unlocked and unattended all day.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
1/2 of the people in the USA make money, the other 1/2 spend whatever they can get from the productive half. I'm guessing the numbers are not all that different in .nz so I'm not surprised the ratio worked out that way.
The non-productive half who sponge off the productive half probably see it as getting the middleman out of they way ... From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, etc.
Alternately it might be a mapping of peer pressure, 1/2 will zombie like copy whatever they see other people doing, and the half who are actually alive will think about what they're doing.
Then you get into weird religious interpretations, that non-adherents are more honest than the general population, thus the high 50% payment rate (doesn't matter if they're celebrating the good friday religion or the earth day religion?)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I never use the self check line. Never. The reason is that it is a small contribution of me keeping people at work and not have them replaced by machines.
I gladly pay with the few minutes it costs me.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In related news, grocery supermarket chain Pack-N-Save has announced they will be laying off 75% of their workforce. After a one-day experiment to test customer honesty and self-checkout systems, the chain discovered it would be cheaper to fire all of their checkout employees and let customers do it themselves.
Other retail chains are expected to follow suit sometime later this year.
-David
The non-self service clerks have a handy paper flip-book that they can use (though they seem to remember almost all of them without looking them up).
I can assure you thru extensive personal experience, having worked my way thru school at a retail grocery store, that 99% of all produce dept sales come from 1% of the products. Bananas, Apples, lettuce, cucumbers, grapes, peppers, mushrooms, that's about it. Things like kiwi fruit are stocked for the "ambiance", virtually no one buys them, and they get tossed out as a decorative expense when they start looking bad. Ditto the coconuts, star fruit, etc. Furthermore, there may be 12 slightly different kinds of apples, all with very slightly different prices, but very often the same code will be used by lazy clerks. Finally, many produce depts operate on something remarkably like the salad bar model of you can buy as much as you want at a couple bucks per pound. I worked at a place that did crude unofficial audits of inventory using a flat rate per pound assumption... Also they trained us when receiving shipments from the warehouse to not waste time adding up values, but to go based on a typical dollar value per pallet. If it came from produce, ring it up as apples and you're pretty much close enough that no one will ever complain, neither management nor customers. Produce is not at all like the meat dept where you have a dynamic range of about 20 dB, from 25 cent/pound bones for dogs right next to 25 dollar/pound prime beef tenderloin...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Link
Includes some CCTV footage.
OK, this is somewhat off topic, but what the hey – it about honesty and controls.
I just heard a story about the person who ran the gift store at Kennedy Center. For those of you who don’t know, this is where the president goes when he wants to hear a little light opera or what not. The gift store was run by volunteers, mainly older retired people who like high culture. Not the profile of the average criminal. And yet people where ripping off the till right and left. A few dollars here to pay for a cab, lunch, whatever.
The manager puts in some really simple controls. Goes away from the honor system to sings with prices, receipt books, etc. Shrinkage drops from 40% to 8%. Remove all controls and yeah, a lot of honest people will chisel the system a little. Sigh.
This American Life, Esp 431, See No Evil, Act Three. I Worked at the Kennedy Center and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
That is during the time that you could pay. Before the alcohol was scanned. More than half choose to pay.
After you could no longer pay the rate dropped of to 0%. But while you could pay I am guessing that significantly higher than 50% paid.
Now lets see how many people come back and pay later in the week.
Then with math and facts on your side you can say snide shit about things and have some actual knowledge.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I went for some groceries yesterday evening. The total came to $59.xx and the clerk gave me $42.xx in change.
I looked at the two extra $1's and then at the receipt to double check her error. I handed the money back to the clerk and went on my way.
My point is that I am currently unemployed and "homeless" (currently staying with a friend). Sure, it would have been in my favor to just ignore her error and keep the extra two bucks. Under the circumstances, I gave it back because:
Sometimes people are motivated to be honest because they know that even though their honesty might cause them to lose some money, that monetary loss is offset by a gain in reputation and character. Honesty != Selflessness.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I expect that means a lot of them were too oblivious to even notice anything was off. Perhaps the normal staff tends to be 'away' from their post as a matter of course. :)
Your anecdote also points out just how pathetic many people will be. The parents that were picking up the eggs were cheating. They were cheating against two year olds. When my son was 3, we found out that there was an informal chess club in our town. He liked chess, so we figured it would be a good place to let him play against other kids that might be at his skill level. We ended up quitting because the other parents wouldn't stop telling their kids what moves to make. It was disgusting watching the parents teaching their 8 year olds to cheat against a 3 year old.
Eww, replacing people with machines is desirable. It frees up the people to do something more important, instead of a tedious job of threshing grain, carrying buckets of water, digging trenches with shovels, or adding up columns of numbers. (Or writing variations of the same subroutine over and over -- yep, part of the job of a programmer is to replace himself.) The point of technological progress is to make things cheaper (which also often leads to making it practical to make things better) and ultimately, making things cheaper always comes down to not wasting peoples' time on tedious things that could be automated.
And yet, your conclusion is correct anyway. What's fucked up about self-checkout is that it isn't technological progress, because it doesn't replace a person with a machine; it just replaces a person with another person. And the new person (the customer) is less well practiced/skilled at the activity than the old person (checkout clerk). If anything, the expert is so good at the job that they're mentally on auto-pilot anyway, so you could even argue it replaces a (semi-) machine with a person, making it a technological regression. (Ah, the joys of externalizing costs.) It's sort of like they're un-invented the assembly line by selling assemble-it-yourself kits.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It suggests that dishonesty is the status quo, and that honesty is some self-sacrificing act of heroism.
It must be fun living in utopia but you stated the state of the world and its affairs correctly.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
We are talking about a grocery store here. People do need to eat
The store was supposed to be CLOSED. How much outrage would you have felt because a grocery store was closed on a holiday when "People do need to eat"? I'm guessing zero. So your point is rather specious.
While I like the sentiment, I think you might be contributing to the problem in a way.
If we had systems such that we could routinely and easily replace some jobs with machines, and we actually deployed those systems as much as possible, we'd ultimately wind up hurrying along the day where we finally change our underlying systems to reflect the massive increases in productivity we have achieved.
I work a 40 hour week (usually more) as my mother did. Yet, because of advances in tech, I am vastly more productive than she was at her job. Even worse, proportionately to executive wages, I'm paid less than my mom was despite doing vastly more work and contributing more to the bottom line.
Once we hit a point where we have permanently high (25% or so) unemployment there will have to be a change to the way things run or there will be armed revolt. I say hurry that day along rather than artificially delaying it.
Also, I always get stuck behind someone who causes trouble and a delay when I don't use self checkout.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
When people realize they can get away with something they shouldn't do, many people do take advantage of the situation.
Most, however, do not. If the majority were like that, looting would occur 24/7 even without blackouts or disasters, given that there aren't enough police in the world to stop them, and they'd pretty much all get away with it if they were the majority.
What makes police necessary is that there are people like that. What makes police effective rather than a futile gesture is that these people are the minority.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Good thing this happened in NZ. Apparently in the US it is acceptable for people who leave a store without paying to be shot on sight.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you mean Christchurch, you are a bit late.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The broken window fallacy is when you destroy goods in order to stimulate the economy. Saying 'I will choose interactions that require human employees' is not the same thing at all.
In fact, the entire argument is stupid, as the breaking windows is correct, from the POV of what the parent is trying to do, which is keep people employed.
I love how so many people have internalized 'Everyone must do what is best of the economy' that they bring up the 'broken windows fallacy' in non-economic situations.
Breaking the windows of a store does not help 'the economy' in a global sense. And wasting the resources of a store by deliberately choosing interactions that require humans doesn't help the economy in a global sense. Those things are true.
But it sure as fuck help glass manufacturers, or, in this example, minimum wage cashiers, at the expense of the store.
And, you know what? Fuck the store. The parent, and me, will support the min wage cashier instead. We have rightly realized that giant corporations don't pass any savings on to anyone, so doesn't even slightly matter what we do.
I get the exact sort of bullshit in response when I talk about how offshoring is bad. I don't care if it helps the giant abstract economy. I will cheerfully admit it does that, but I don't fucking care at all. I care that it, you know, actually doesn't seem to help any actual workers, and harms quite a few. We do not exist to be ground up by 'the economy' and spit out.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Yes, then half of their customers would pay for things instead of 90% of them stealing things.
What bollocks, there is nothing other than greed/tight-fistedness which makes people illegally download music instead of paying for it. If a business sells its product for $x and you think that is too expensive, you don't fucking buy it.
Sorry, but people don't download stuff without paying as a political protest.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it