Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 544 points –
Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech
businessinsider.com

Some Walmart employees say customers are getting hostile at self-checkout — and they blame anti-theft tech::When Walmart's anti-theft self-checkout tech alerts an employee of a missed scan, it can cause some uncomfortable situations.

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The grocery store in my city became straight dystopian. It was always a sort of sketchy area but nothing that bad. After the pandemic, they added a second armed, vested private security in black, one-way turnstiles going in and out, increased cameras with screens on every aisle that showed you with the words "RECORDING IN PROGRESS". They even added locks to the frozen section, so you had to get an employee to help you buy ice cream. The police and security would tackle clearly unwell people who were shoplifting food, face pushed into the concrete type of thing.

The police and security would tackle clearly unwell people who were shoplifting food, face pushed into the concrete type of thing.

Cops can generally get away with that. Store security guards assaulting customers open the store up to a lawsuit.

True, the store security usually didn't actually do anything, the police would be doing that while the security talks to them, but on two occasions I did see the security tackle a person.

Jesus Christ that all sounded (unfortunately) normal until the locked freezers. That's a step too far. I mean, all of it is, but that's actually a ridiculous concept lmao

I wonder if that's a response to that stupid internet trend of opening ice cream containers to lick it and then put it back.

It's pretty funny to think, living in the US, nothing is odd about a privately employed person with a gun guarding groceries or people being violently arrested when they steal said groceries out of necessity.

The "bad" grocery store near me has taken to posting security cam pictures of people they catch stealing which is a terrible, awful, extrajudicial thing to do, but I would be lying if I said it does not make for some hilarious pictures. It's a big wall of shame right as you enter the store.

My wife's creepy racist incel uncle had a fit once when we went into a store and he saw himself on the security camera. He said he doesn't like seeing himself. My sister had the same reaction to seeing herself pre transition and apparently it's a common theme among trans people who haven't realized it yet.

I know it's a bit of a tangent, but he's rabidly transphobic up to the point just short of being blatantly hateful. He's obsessed with my sister and other trans people and made a lot of obsessive and creepy jokes about dating them.

This post triggered my PTSD.

That's more a body dysmorphia thing than specifically a trans thing. For instance, I hate seeing myself too, and I'm just fat, not trans. I disapprove of the appearance I have, and dislike being reminded of that. Yes, I'm working on it.

He's a completely out of shape incel, so that's a possibility. Considering everything else, he seems deep in the closet. He started mentioning trans stuff all the time before he found out that my sister is trans, which caused him to have an existential crisis, because he was obsessed with her and trying to get her to date him. He also has a creepy latent obsession with Russian women. He constantly talked about other trans women and joked about dating them and went through an entire hypothetical situation of introducing a specific trans woman he was obsessed with to his family.