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Discendo Vox posted:...okay, why? Because companies took the mere whiff of supply chain woes to crank up prices and not look back? And then bragged about the massive record profits they made during COVID? Who the gently caress cares about shoplifting? No one with any brain cells.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:22
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Professor Beetus posted:Because companies took the mere whiff of supply chain woes to crank up prices and not look back? And then bragged about the massive record profits they made during COVID? Who the gently caress cares about shoplifting? No one with any brain cells. that too
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Oct 21, 2023 02:24
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Discendo Vox posted:The common element here is substance abuse disorders, I suspect. I mean that could be a factor but even back when I was pounding like 12 beers a day I was still paying for it. There are compounding factors at work.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:27
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My local target recently started putting glass cases up to keep people out of basically everything medicinal, cleaning supply, or personal grooming. This includes poo poo like vitamins. It has made me stop going to said target because you press the button to get it unlocked and it takes 15 minutes for some underpaid worker to show up because they only (seemingly) have one set of keys but this person is also expected to be ringing or doing other tasks as well.
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Oct 21, 2023 02:45
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Professor Beetus posted:Because companies took the mere whiff of supply chain woes to crank up prices and not look back? And then bragged about the massive record profits they made during COVID? Who the gently caress cares about shoplifting? No one with any brain cells. So does this apply to all shoplifting, or shoplifting from companies that cranked up prices to a certain amount, or what? DR FRASIER KRANG posted:I mean that could be a factor but even back when I was pounding like 12 beers a day I was still paying for it. There are compounding factors at work. Oh absolutely. It's not necessary and certainly not sufficient, just a common element.
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Oct 21, 2023 03:07
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I work retail adjacent (tire shop inside of a general retailer, which one should be obvious) and the biggest increase in inventory issues recently has been a combination of mis-shipments from vendors (I ordered one thing, and you sent me a different thing) and just plain fuckups (I ordered a thing, and your overworked underpaid delivery driver delivered it to the wrong place). It's especially bad in our immediate vicinity, because the overworked/underpaid staff at our competitor across the street don't bother to read invoices for deliveries, and sometimes the delivery driver doesn't either, so they end up with our delivery, and they don't keep the paperwork so they never notice. So I imagine their inventory must be absolutely hosed. And we don't pay unless the vendor can give us a stamped "we received this" invoice from our store, so that just gets eaten by the vendor. Otherwise most of the shrink in our general retail part of the store mostly comes down to broken/expired poo poo from delivery trucks, with the very occasional TV that goes out the door because we're so short staffed that nobody bothers to stop the person to check a receipt. I worked inventory management on the store level for a decade before I realized nobody at corporate had the slightest idea how hosed it was at the store level or had any idea how to fix it, which is why I no longer do inventory management except for my very specific and easily managed department now.
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Oct 21, 2023 03:26
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It has been a minute since I worked retail, but several years ago I helped open a Wal-Mart supercenter. I worked there for a while in various food-related low tier management roles. There were some pretty aggressive strategies used by the company to gently caress with competitors, particularly when opening a new store. For example, actively recruiting and poaching experienced workers from nearby competing stores. That's fine, of course. Other methods were pretty questionable, though. We were expected to maintain high levels of stock of certain fresh goods, regardless of whether or not it made sense based on our sales. One particularly noteworthy example of this was in the meat department. We stocked both Select and Choice grade meat. The Choice stuff was significantly more expensive, but visually it looked pretty much the same. Nobody bought the Choice stuff, so it would all expire. Our meat manager started doing a "manager special" sort of markdown on it regularly a couple of days before it expired, and people would buy it all up at the lower price. But the district manager noticed what was happening and forbade it, because he didn't like the optics of the manager special stickers on the higher end meat. So every few days, we would trash all of the expensive meat and replace it with new expensive meat that would then fail to sell and be trashed itself. Repeat. We had a couple of Kurdish guys that had to do all of the meat throwaways, they would always be absolutely enraged about it. Rightfully so, of course, seeing the insane waste day after day. Occasionally, some shoplifter would stick a pack of steaks in their pants and run out the door. I once saw a lawn and garden worker try to chase down a meat-pants-shoplifter, this guy was shaking with rage at the successful shoplifting heist of a steak or two.
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Oct 21, 2023 06:22
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Discendo Vox posted:So does this apply to all shoplifting, or shoplifting from companies that cranked up prices to a certain amount, or what? Hall monitor behavior. Is your mother a Target?
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Oct 21, 2023 08:15
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Professor Beetus posted:Hall monitor behavior. Is your mother a Target? My mother was a Spencer's. Do you need to be personally related to something to care about being specific in discussing it with others? If so, pretend your mother was a struggling privately held local pharmacy.
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Oct 21, 2023 09:08
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I mean if you just want to talk about shrink in general and how it's not at all theft... I've had the misfortune of working at both Wawa (East US gas station chain) and Publix (East US grocery retailer) in a management capacity for years each. I've got stories. At Wawa we used a distributor called McLane. They're one of the biggest, You've likely seen their trucks. Anyway they serviced lots of different types of stores, including other fuel stations. We would routinely get product with a competitor's name on (7-11 iced coffee cans were the single most common incidence of this for some reason but we'd get cups and jackets and stuff too) which we had to throw out. Each truck crew had an allotted amount of shrink the company would tolerate through mis/non-delivery, but also had to complete their 9 hour route before their 8 hour day ended, so if you showed them a product that wasn't from your store they wouldn't take it back, they wouldn't even look at it, they'd say "file a claim". Wawa Corporate used to pantomime outrage over this at Goose Jam, their annual internal propaganda event. Reality was somewhat different. Wawa negotiated with McLane to set the amount of acceptable loss from their services, and paid less for every loss point they accepted. So they accepted quite a few.. Everyone knew that ~5-7% of the poo poo that was supposed to get from the warehouse to the store simply would not, and that was acceptable. It wasn't even theft, I'm certain (McLane drivers are timed and GPS tracked, it's a horrible job) it was simply pushing people too hard and not accounting for the inevitability of error. As a totally separate story, the Publix I worked at was next to a university. We tracked theft in non-food much more closely than food, because nonfood cannot expire and can be used as an indicator of a given store's overall theft. At the closest 3 Publixes to the university, the number one thefted product was makeup, and the common thread between all the people caught stealing it was that they could afford it. Not, like, "I can pay!" levels of affording it, no, "My attorney father is going to make your life miserable over this" afford it. Our loss prevention teams were trapped like rats because they were tracking our single largest confirmed theft category (still well under 5%) because Corporate told them to, but it was a waste of time in terms of stopping the problem because the second anyone mentioned making the company's day even moderately inconvenient from a legal perspective we'd let them walk. We wouldn't even pantomime banning them because those stores would see tens of thousands of unique visitors a day, and a banned customer who knows you cannot realistically enforce on them starts walking out the fire door with carts of poo poo. The poors who couldn't afford poo poo? Oh we ran them through the loving wringer of course. Needless to say, both companies are poo poo. As is McLane. And all the others.
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Oct 21, 2023 10:42
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Shrinkage is built into your pricing for everything, and people shoplifting is historically negligible compared to employee theft, up to and including theft rings, which are usually only discovered after six or seven figures in losses. They didn't put the electronics in a cage because they thought you the consumer would steal them.
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Oct 21, 2023 11:57
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HootTheOwl posted:I have seen no evidence of this being true The two studies I'm aware of that tackle the income of shoplifters are this and this . The former is from over 40,000 face to face interviews conducted from 2001-2002, and a summary of the data:
That being said, all of these factors pale in predictive power to measures of impulsiveness and antisocial behavior. The strongest predictive things were other kinds of theft, making money illegally, scamming people for money, pyromania, and destroying property. The latter study I linked is much more narrow in scope. First, it only looked at those arrested for shoplifting, vs general shopper surveys. Second, the data is all the way from 1981-82, so its not clear how well things hold up. Third, all of the arrest data is only from a single city in the North West, which only had 34 arrests in the time examined. Nevertheless, keeping these limitations in mind, about 51% had family incomes over $51k in 2023 dollars, with about 57% of that 51% had family incomes over $119k. So, in totality, at least a large percentage, probably a majority, of those shoplifting aren't low-income. And even for those that are low-income, they aren't necessarily stealing out of necessity. I grew up very poor and lived in homeless shelters, and "having any food" was never really a concern. Being unable to purchase video games, having no internet, living in a homeless shelter, sure, these were common. But having food and clothes was always a given. I'm sure there are places in the US where this isn't true, but those that are both poor and shoplifting aren't not necessarily stealing out of necessity.
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Oct 21, 2023 13:11
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Just reading the abstracts I can tell you that you have not presented evidence to the contrary.
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Oct 21, 2023 13:44
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HootTheOwl posted:Just reading the abstracts I can tell you that you have not presented evidence to the contrary. Well drat they didn't put the weak correlation between shoplifting and higher income in the abstract, instead focusing on the much higher correlations of antisocial behavior and psychological disorders (which I mentioned in my summary). I guess we better pack it up and call it a day then, everyone who steals is basically starving to death on the street.
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Oct 21, 2023 14:04
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litany of gulps posted:Walmart stuff Also yeah, the sheer amount of food that got thrown out daily was completely insane
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Oct 21, 2023 14:45
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DeathChicken posted:the sheer amount of food that gets thrown out daily is completely insane  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 21, 2023 14:47
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I steal out of spite, not need. I do it as compensation for the fact that I and most everyone else have gotten steadily poorer for years despite booming profits and production... all of this on a dying planet, of course. Oh, by the way, I have a PhD and work four (yes, 4) jobs because I cannot live on my full-time salary. I apologise for nothing. I practise a lifestyle of media deafness (and not using Reddit) because I am tired of people becoming outraged over trivial/stupid problems. One problem that is not trivial nor stupid, yet no-one talks about, is the amount of food that is destroyed everywhere. Of course, nobody cares because the media doesn't talk about it for obvious reasons. The EU has terms such as the milk ocean, butter mountain, and wine lake because technology has allowed people to produce masses of cosumables... which cannot be sold because prices would be pushed down too much and cause crises. That's modern capitalism: people go hungry in 'rich' countries while piles of food are destroyed because otherwise it would threaten the system. Capitalism is literally deadly allergic to abundance.
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Oct 22, 2023 00:41
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MegaZeroX posted:Well drat they didn't put the weak correlation between shoplifting and higher income in the abstract, instead focusing on the much higher correlations of antisocial behavior and psychological disorders (which I mentioned in my summary). I guess we better pack it up and call it a day then, everyone who steals is basically starving to death on the street. You seem to be suggesting that there is a link between antisocial behaviour and impulsive behaviour, and being more likely to shoplift. Neither study you posted supports this. The first shows that the more likely a person thinks they are to get away with shoplifting, the more likely they are to do it. And the second shows that those who evaluate this poorly (ie mistakenly think they will be able to get away with it when in reality they will not) are the ones getting caught and prosecuted for it.
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Oct 22, 2023 01:33
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HazCat posted:You seem to be suggesting that there is a link between antisocial behaviour and impulsive behaviour, and being more likely to shoplift. First of all, the thread started with the comment: celadon posted:It seems pretty reasonable that if you are hungry and need food and there is food nearby, in a pile of food of such quantity that noone could imagine your taking food to eat would directly cause another person to suffer hunger, why shouldn't you be allowed to take it? To which I responded MegaZeroX posted:The problem comes that these sorts of cases don't make up most of the financial losses from shoplifting. Which then was responded with HootTheOwl posted:I have seen no evidence of this being true Which then caused me to make that post. The primary thing I wanted to demonstrate was that shoplifting was not an activity primarily done by poor people, and by extension, we can infer that shoplifting due to hunger is not the majority of shoplifting. It isn't the only argument to make (since its not difficult to argue that those stealing some food here and there are going to be stealing less than shoplifters stealing for other reasons), but it is sufficient. I presented the only two studies I'm aware of that tackle the income of shoplifters. The one with data from 2001-2002 is high quality, and the one the analysis was for. I only presented the one with data from 1981-1982 from a single city, based only on arrest data, for completeness, to demonstrate I'm not trying to cherry pick income data from a favorable study. I attempted to summarize the findings of the high quality study as well, to present the study's findings as a whole. I wanted to be clear being high income (and most of the demographic data) is a very weak predictive factor, and the primary predictive factors were the measures of antisocial behavior and secondarily mental health measures. I believe this is an accurate representation of the first study. The results summary from the abstract (bolding some parts for emphasis) study posted:The prevalence of lifetime shoplifting in the U.S. population was 11.3%. Associations between shoplifting and all antisocial behaviors were positive and significant. Besides stealing, the behaviors more strongly associated with shoplifting were making money illegally and scamming someone for money. Strong associations between shoplifting and all 12-month and lifetime comorbid psychiatric disorders were also found. The strongest associations with shoplifting were with disorders often associated with deficits in impulse control, such as antisocial personality disorder, substance use disorders, pathological gambling, and bipolar disorder. High rates of mental health service use were also identified in this population. This seems to be cut and dry exactly what I said. I'm aware the second study may have different conclusions. Again, I wasn't attempting to summarize any data from it beyond the income factor for completeness. MegaZeroX fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 15:47
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Having seen a lot of the broad-strokes of food waste in action from the nonprofit food rescue side of things, it is pretty silly to have even the least bit of concern about food being shoplifted. The people doing the work will recover cases and cases of pre-cut fruit or even just raw fruits and veggies, even ones with pretty long shelf lives. The main reason the same thing doesn't happen with meat or dairy is simply because there aren't enough refrigerated trucks, nor enough soup kitchens/food banks/etc with adequate refrigeration to handle even a fraction of the volume. To some degree I'm sure that consumer electronics or cosmetics make for more attractive targets if you care about the dollar value of what you shoplift over its personal utility, but it seems like pretty mediocre value to try to profit that way - congrats, you now have similar earning potential to a Mary Kay salesperson. It just doesn't add up for anyone who can hold down even a burger-flipping job - entry-level wages have gone way up basically everywhere since the pandemic, like I just saw $18.25 for a Target in the northeast. Surely Cali has similar wages, if not higher, and it isn't like there's a lack of places hiring. Surely on an individual level you need a higher effective compensation for the job doing crimes to be appealing unless you are totally excluded from the typical job market. Given that, the "supply chain theft/loss" explanations seem way more compelling to me. The closures of stores being due to just a general lack of profitability in places with absurd rents and commensurate costs of living kind of makes sense to me, but I don't really see a reason why companies would game it out to be better to blame it on shoplifting - what is the narrative benefit of saying that rather than just saying "we can't continue to operate in SF because rent is just too high for us to keep these stores open"? It seems to me like the second option would be more likely to get favorable treatment from city governments or whatnot, and they'd rather have reduced rent or tax breaks than stepped up police presence in practice, so why tell a fake story like that? Capitalists being actively malicious to the poor and playing into Fox News narratives just feels like a bit too "just so" of an explanation to me - I don't see how it gives them any sort of leg up in making money, which is what a capitalist ought to be doing
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Oct 22, 2023 21:55
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Rents being too high reflects poorly on *their* class, though. Blaming it on shoplifting is reminding people of the kind of theft that isn't socially tolerated.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:21
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BougieBitch posted:Capitalists being actively malicious to the poor and playing into Fox News narratives just feels like a bit too "just so" of an explanation to me - I don't see how it gives them any sort of leg up in making money, which is what a capitalist ought to be doing Honestly I think it's a quaint if oddly conspiratorial idea that corporations need excuses to raise prices or need to explain store closures.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:26
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Owling Howl posted:Honestly I think it's a quaint if oddly conspiratorial idea that corporations need excuses to raise prices or need to explain store closures. I think it helps to minimize consumer shopping around. Like if my closest grocery store suddenly starts charging more money for bread and eggs and milk, I would start shopping at new stores to see whether theres lower prices available at stores I don't normally go to. If my closest grocery store raises prices amid a media blitz proclaiming 'All prices going up everywhere! Caused by external factors that are not unique to any one store!' I'm probably less likely to shop around, as I've been explicitly told that the price hikes I see are going to be found at any grocery store I go to.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:36
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Owling Howl posted:Honestly I think it's a quaint if oddly conspiratorial idea that corporations need excuses to raise prices or need to explain store closures. It’s pretty quaint to believe that corporations are actually profit maximizing entities that act like described in Econ 101.
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Oct 22, 2023 22:46
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BougieBitch posted:Drivel Your forum name is remarkably appropriate. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 22, 2023 22:53
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Tellingly, there’s no real reason for “product that expired so we threw it away” and “stolen product” to be lumped into one category. BougieBitch posted:To some degree I'm sure that consumer electronics or cosmetics make for more attractive targets if you care about the dollar value of what you shoplift over its personal utility, but it seems like pretty mediocre value to try to profit that way - congrats, you now have similar earning potential to a Mary Kay salesperson.
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Oct 23, 2023 04:00
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Okay, just to clarify because posts on this topic were scattered across a few threads and I'm not sure all the pieces are necessarily clear to posters here: Target, among others, has pulled out of the Bay Area in recent months. Here's a representative news story: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/target-closing-stores-retail-theft-bay-area/13831482/ The problems in the Bay Area have been getting a lot of attention since around the start of this year. It's hard to say how out of the ordinary they are, because retail and office space have both been doing horribly since the start of the pandemic and it's hard to find good analysis that could give context to the numbers relative to other urban centers (in or out of the US). One major factor that muddles the analysis is that news gets more widely spread and repeated when it is sensational, and in particular "crime-filled cities" is a perennial favorite especially for conservative sources with an agenda. It's easy to see how the media benefits from being sensational about "audacious retail theft" or whatever, because if you describe it like a bank robbery then you can turn a topic that has basically no legs as a story into something that people actually read. What is less clear, and the point I was trying to make in the last two paragraphs, is why RETAILERS would be so sensationalist about things. Here's the statement from Target's website about the closures: "We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and contributing to unsustainable business performance," We've seen people breaking down the numbers in this thread and others - on the whole the cost of shoplifting is very much marginal nationally, a fraction of overall shrinkage. Maybe some of these particular stores have some totally out of whack theft happening where it actually keeps them from being profitable, but even the statement hedges by saying "contributing to", meaning that there are other factors (Bay Area rent, Bay Area cost of living for their employees). If they just needed something to say, they could have named ANY factor! The part that really feels weird about this statement is that, reading it, it feels to me like a really BAD idea to point out this reason in particular. When I see "theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests", that message seems to me like it would screw their other stores over. When some random pearl-clutcher in Minnesota or Oklahoma reads that, wouldn't their first thought be "Target is dangerous, theft and organized retail crime could endanger ME!"? Doesn't that just contribute to negative customer attitudes towards brick-and-mortar retail? I suppose in a sort of "thousand monkeys, thousand typewriters" way it was inevitable that some retailers would make statements that would feed this particular media narrative, but it has been a persistent one. Here's Walgreens giving the same explanation in 2021: https://qz.com/2077384/why-is-walgreens-really-closing-its-stores-in-san-francisco They specifically got called out for not substantiating the theft numbers and in the 2022 closures they instead said it was due to a lack of staffing: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/11/28/pharmacy-closures-berkeley-oakland-customers-frustrated So why do these explanations keep happening? It doesn't seem like it would benefit them from a narrative perspective, and they are perfectly capable of just saying "no comment" or "poor performance relative to other stores". OneEightHundred posted:
The comparison was deliberate, at least partly. If you are selling stolen cosmetics, what price do you sell them at? Surely not the same price as the store you stole them from, right? No one is going to buy them at that price, you have no legitimacy as a seller. What is the price that will get 50 tubes of stolen lipstick sold every couple days so you can do this on a continuous basis? I can't say I have an exact number, and maybe you can sell some of them for 70% of retail if you know some people that trust you, but if you are trying to totally clear out your stock and do it again you are probably gonna have to accept some pretty low offers. Ultimately, someone trying to do this as a career is very likely to end up in the exact same position as a person who falls for the Mary Kay scam - they have a bunch of makeup they have to sell and no one they can sell it to. Maybe online retail makes this less difficult than I'm assuming, but I sort of assume that the shipping costs and platform fees just make it untenable, and if this was really such a common thing you would have a bunch of similar people across the country undercutting each other into oblivion anyway BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 04:04
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BougieBitch posted:It's easy to see how the media benefits from being sensational about "audacious retail theft" or whatever, because if you describe it like a bank robbery then you can turn a topic that has basically no legs as a story into something that people actually read. Meanwhile things like dudes walking into a store, shoveling a bunch of stuff in a bag, and leaving while security does nothing has actually been going on for ages, it just wasn't considered newsworthy until it started being useful for boosting a "shoplifting epidemic" narrative. BougieBitch posted:Ultimately, someone trying to do this as a career is very likely to end up in the exact same position as a person who falls for the Mary Kay scam - they have a bunch of makeup they have to sell and no one they can sell it to. quote:if this was really such a common thing you would have a bunch of similar people across the country undercutting each other into oblivion anyway However, the channels they are sold on are still massively better for thieves than the prior alternatives of offloading them at pawn shops and flea markets, which is part of the problem.
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Oct 23, 2023 05:03
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I worked for Lowe’s when I was younger. The store was a pretty low earner store because it was in a small town. Made about 11 million a year in profit. Now unless half the people in your store are stealing stuff, it wouldn’t even make a dent in that profit. When people shoplift it’s usually for stuff they can easily hide and roughly a few hundred dollars at most. Even some of the theft rings I heard about would get maybe 50 grand in items over months of stealing. These are the people they will put a lot of effort into and they don’t usually last a real long time. Anything that is something they think is valuable a store will lock up. It’s all just bullshit and they lose way more money dropping stuff like a pallet of tile off a forklift than anything they lose from shoplifting. But they will cry a lot more about those filthy crackheads stealing a black and decker drill then actually hiring more staff to dissuade shoplifting to begin with.
Invalid Validation fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 05:19
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BougieBitch posted:So why do these explanations keep happening? Let’s say a four or five stores failed to take full yearly inventories from 2020 to 2023 all in high cost of living big cities. Someone made the decision that skipping them was okay because they pushed the previous decision to switch to a fancy real-time inventory management system sold by a tech company. They believed that the inventory given by the system was accurate. Finally those stores staff up enough post pandemic and they do a full count inventory. Whoopsy diddle fucksy wucksy they find the normal inventory shrink was being missed by the system and they had more shrink than expected and they found out about three years worth all at once. If the someone who hosed up has control of the narrative how do they explain it?
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Oct 23, 2023 05:26
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MegaZeroX posted:The two studies I'm aware of that tackle the income of shoplifters are this and this . The former is from over 40,000 face to face interviews conducted from 2001-2002, and a summary of the data: If you want to understand this, it's the stratified justice system. If your position is precarious for some reason(probation, can't afford an arrest, etc) you avoid the risk that comes with getting caught. The more socially advantaged you are the less likely you are to have a prior or probation that could worsen punishment, the more you are capable of legal MAD that makes pursuing a minor theft not worth it from the stores perspective, the less likely you are to trigger the prole detector working the receipt checks, etc. The meat prestige price point is telling about how broken retail is from supply and demand. Pricing items to move stock isn't as important as matching a magic spreadsheet in corporate. Which is based on a very out of touch rich person costs more = feels more valuable bit of psychology. Barrel Cactaur fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 15:30
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I will chime in and say that the Whole Foods I work at hasn’t employed in-store loss prevention since before the pandemic. I think part of it is that our management is incredibly timid in its dealings with customers: everything is about ensuring the customer comes back, even if the customer is an abusive shithead. I think a year ago they called the cops on a dude, but that may have had as much to do with him shoplifting as his “distraction” being taking a dump on the sales floor. He was caught because he apparently went to other stores from which he also stole, though I don’t know if he also poo poo on their floors as well… Whole Foods does donate losses deemed safe for consumption: I work in Bakery specifically, so I only really know about that, but most baked goods are reasonably shelf stable for a bit beyond their sell-by date (customers, by and large, do not seem to understand this). However: they’re very restrictive in regards to what orgs can actually come and pick up: they have to be currently registered in the system (Whole Foods is run by a bunch of numbers fucksteins, basically) or they’re not allowed to take anything. So if none of the approved charities shows up on a given day, welp, into the trash it goes! Throwing that stuff out is the worst loving feeling. It’s especially bad around the holidays: I was out there last Christmas Eve with a coworker, throwing out four full bins of losses (we were closed on Christmas, so we had to pull two days worth of losses, though this year they’re going to be open, because gently caress us) that could’ve made killer breakfast and dessert spreads.
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Oct 24, 2023 07:13
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Semi-interesting development, I can't find a news link that doesn't look like some regurgitator website, but Target is rolling out a 10-item limit at self-checkout at a bunch of locations.
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Oct 26, 2023 04:52
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OneEightHundred posted:Semi-interesting development, I can't find a news link that doesn't look like some regurgitator website, but Target is rolling out a 10-item limit at self-checkout at a bunch of locations. The Daily Mail did a piece on it, getting confirmation from Target itself: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/consumer/article-12615397/Target-store-self-checkout-Walmart-Kroger-Giant.html quote:The company confirmed to DailyMail.com that it was testing the limit on items in order to reduce wait times and better understand guest preferences.
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Oct 26, 2023 05:24
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Self checkout item limits are pretty common afaict, the place I shop has a 20 item limit and it appears to be motivated by congestion during high traffic periods.
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Oct 26, 2023 05:27
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Where I am there is very limited staff and a large portion of time there is only one regular check line open regardless of the traffic in the store.
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Oct 26, 2023 05:47
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Discendo Vox posted:appears to be motivated by congestion during high traffic periods. The single self-checkout area setup causes long lines when it gets backed up (even though the lines are relatively fast-moving), and it's positioned in a way that it usually loops around the racetrack right in front of the entrance, which is a great recipe for getting customers walking in to turn around and leave.
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Oct 26, 2023 06:26
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Discendo Vox posted:Self checkout item limits are pretty common afaict, the place I shop has a 20 item limit and it appears to be motivated by congestion during high traffic periods. It makes sense to use self checkout as the "quick lane", the problem is most stores have gravitated towards funneling everyone through self checkout and having no or minimal regular checkouts open. The targets around me have shifted more and more towards this model, expanding their self checkouts and having them accommodate larger cart loads (multiple bagging stands available per checkout, a big counter to work with, stuff like that) which of course means those areas get more congested. So what will likely happen if they follow through? People with actual cart loads will all wait in huge long lines for the human staffed checkouts while all of your groceries melt.
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Oct 26, 2023 16:42
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I wish the US would do a queue system like other countries.
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Oct 26, 2023 16:54
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| # ? May 26, 2024 00:27 |
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Alterian posted:I wish the US would do a queue system like other countries. Some stores do. Microcenter and JoAnn Fabrics are two stores I know of that do it this way. I think most people prefer it, it just requires stores to rearrange their front checkout line, so it means it never gets done unless figured into the original construction.
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Oct 26, 2023 17:23
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