As I was heading toward the self-checkout kiosk with my shopping trolley during a recent early morning visit after dropping the kids off at school, I noticed Wegman’s has installed a new camera and video display mounted above the main touch screen showing the space in front of the scanning station with a seemingly ominous message in red at the bottom of the camera display: “MONITORING IN PROGRESS”.
I wish I could say this was a surprise but if I’m honest, the only surprise is that it’s taken them this long to install the cameras on the self-checkout kiosks.
This latest “innovation” comes about nine months after they unceremoniously binned their scanning app citing unsustainable losses due to shoplifting and fraud.
That was a darned shame because the scanning app was genuinely pretty slick. You’d start the app and then use the camera to scan the bar codes of the items as you added them to your trolley. It kept a nice running total of your spending to that point, you could look up where items were located down to the actual row, and then checking out was a breeze by scanning a special bar code on the self-checkout kiosk, tapping the phone for Apple Pay, collecting the paper receipt, and out the door we go.
By and large, the scanning application was pretty robust and fairly easy to use.
OK, there was this one instance where there was a UI bug that would lock up the application completely if you had to enter a numeric quantity for an item. Restarting the application wouldn’t fix it…no matter what you’d try, you’d end up back at the quantity entry screen which would not launch the keyboard and let you actually enter the quantity until your session timed out on the server (usually after a hour or so).
I’ll admit, I wasn’t thrilled providing them with free beta-testing and quality assurance and having to spend a half hour of my time discussing the bug with a manager who apparently couldn’t grasp the concept that I actually had coded more than a few user-interfaces in a distributed application with session management and I did know what I was talking about when it comes to diagnosing buggy software.
But all in all, it was usually a pretty frictionless shopping experience and I loved it.
During the pandemic with all of the masks and the noxious chemicals sprayed over the various checkout queues and kiosks to such a degree that the fumes hung about them like the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter, Wegman’s SCAN app was a *GOD-SEND* for social distancing and limiting contact.
Like the cameras taking several months to appear on the self-checkout kiosks, the only surprise when that unwelcome announcement that SCAN was going away thanks to other people who apparently can’t be bothered be honest and actually pay for what they put in their trolley to allow the rest of us to have nice things.
I’ll give Wegman’s credit…they did at least give a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
Whilst that didn’t come close to replacing the loss of my valuable time now being spent unloading the trolley and scanning each item individually until someone wised up about a month later and installed the hand-held bar code readers which at least has allowed me to scan each item in-situ and then quickly Apple Pay my way out the door, it was still a decent attempt at trying to soften the blow.
It’s not as seamless and nice as SCAN was but it’s as close as I was going to get thanks to the dishonest crims who wrecked it for us.
On the other hand, installing the cameras on the self-checkout kiosk is a gratuitous slap in the face.
It’s one thing to have been deprived of a beneficial feature due to the dishonest actions of others but I had made my peace with it.
It’s quite another to now have been essentially tried in absentia and judged guilty of dishonesty with the implication that I’ve got to somehow prove my innocence rather than having that honesty and innocence being presumed until proven otherwise.
So yes, my first reaction upon seeing that camera and display was a seething anger and I think it more than justified.
My first thought in fact was of a scene from the “Yes Minister” episode “The Writing on the Wall” where a proposal is hurtling round Whitehall to abolish the Department of Administrative Affairs and the crowning stroke to consign the Right Honourable Jim Hacker MP to the back-benches was to give him the horrifying job of spearheading the introduction of a EEC-wide identity card in the UK which not only would have made him dreadfully unpopular but likely gotten his party chucked out on their bums at the next general election!
Do keep in mind that this episode was filmed in 1980 well before Schengen made passage between countries of the European Union in the Schengen Zone pretty seamless for EU citizens and Britain had only been a very reluctant member of the European Economic Community as it was then known for about six years and even then there strong nationalist leanings amongst the members, particularly the British. That’s why they retained the pound sterling after the adoption of the euro, opted out of the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, and had several other carve-outs from complying with EU law.
Anyway, at one point Hacker’s political advisor asks how other EEC members would react to being required to carry a compulsory identity card and Sir Humphrey pretty much nails it:
“The Germans will love it, the French will ignore it, and the Italians and Irish will be too chaotic to enforce it. Only the British will resent it!”
Sir Humphrey Appleby, KCB, MVO, MA (Oxon), Permanent Secretary to the Department of Administrative Affairs
Of course, one can’t help but laugh at the British resenting all of the delays and passport controls as well as the economic costs of being out of the EU Common Market after their self-inflicted stupidity of Brexit which was made far more hideous by the hard-line policies of the Tories.
If you listen carefully, you can hear them lamenting not having “Europass Express” in their wallets allowing for seamless travel in the Schengen Zone they enjoyed not too long ago. I bet more than a few of them wish they could wave their passports over the readers in the green lanes when popping off for holiday on the continent.
The point is that the people who are going to resent the cameras being installed and being pretty much in our faces as if we wear some sort of Scarlet “D” for dishonesty are the ones who were never dishonest in the first bloody place.
I have no idea if they actually have someone actually monitoring all of those cameras installed across twelve checkout kiosks but even if they do, I doubt they’re going to be able to detect all of (or even a significant portion) of the dishonest buggers who will find a way to evade the cameras (both the one mounted on the kiosk as well as the CCTV throughout the stores).
Mind you, they might well be using them as a feint to trick the potential shoplifters into thinking that if there’s a message right in their face saying they’re being monitored more than the CCTV and the employee lurking between the sets of kiosks, they might well be more inclined to be honest in their dealings.
ASDA in the UK admitted as much when they were questioned after installing similar cameras on their self-checkout queues (and were very quick to point out that the cameras do not retain recordings nor do they have AI-powered facial recognition which could potentially expose them to some nasty liability under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
I’d love to share ASDA’s optimism on deterrence but I rather doubt it.
The hard-core thieves who are determined to steal will find a way and short of RF-tagging every item and having a foolproof way of ensuring payment as they’re walking out the door in such a way that they can’t evade it (rather like what Amazon was trying in Seattle and elsewhere at their stores with no checkout tills), I don’t see the technology truly preventing them from doing so.
I’m sure Wegman’s is betting that what deterrence they can bring with this technology will be worth it.
But for those of us who were never the problem, it’s one more very visible reminder that in today’s America, we are apparently guilty and have to prove our honesty and innocence rather than the other way round.
So forgive me if I rather resent being thought of as dishonest. I’m old enough to remember when honour and your word were good enough to transact business and there are some innovations that are definitely not in the right direction.
This would be one of them.