Peter Whitehead writes about self-pay in retail stores.
I recently visited a huge DIY hypermarket, but saw only one employee during my visit to the multi-acre site. That single employee was frantically supervising the self service checkouts. The bays where customers place scanned items were massive compared with food market equivalents, and a large sign above each read ‘Security Scales’, to warn customers about their true loss-prevention purpose. The queue waiting to use these beasts was long, and my need for a pair of hinges small enough to excuse me from such terrors. You may never have used a self-scan-pay checkout, and like me, you may avoid them; but it will probably not be long before you are forced to try one.
It seems that self-service checkouts are going to be everywhere soon, and with them come new observation challenges for staff and security guards. No doubt the makers of these systems have reassured retailers about their security features, but potential problems are still ‘iceberg’ obscure, and future catastophies may be titanic.
The first objective (for you as a customer!) should be protection from innocent-errors. Some retailers have guidelines for their managers such as ‘x items or up to £x value unscanned to be treated as honest mistakes’, so obviously those retailers feel that a safety margin for innocent error must be made. Where a customer fails to pay for items below the chosen limits, then customer service and assistance would be extended. But it will not take long for dishonest visitors to discover and exploit those limits and sceptical staff to leave the safety guidelines behind. Thefts one way, damaged reputations the other!
Reliable security-tag deactivation must be resolved, since some tags are reluctant to be auto-deactivated unless held unusually close to till scanners, or a higher % of customers will activate EAS alarms as they leave stores. An innocent self-pay customer was stopped in an East Kent porch, subjected to a bag search and tag discovery and then ushered back into the store. Shoppers who saw this episode assumed the victim to be a thief. Litigations will eventually force the retail trade to find solutions to such problems. Manufacturers may claim that product bar-codes can selectively call for ‘customer service’ support, but where a high % of products are tagged or ‘age restricted’ then too many staff will be needed for self-scans; they might as well have stayed with manned checkouts!
One of the biggest difficulties is ‘brat-skill’. Teenagers (and younger!) experiment so quickly with any system, and soon find weaknesses. At light-speed they delve into ’till options’ that handle sell-by-weight, special offer, reduction and clear-out sales and discover how to use customer inputs to dishonest advantage. When schoolboys can buy their sandwich for the price of an apple or less, then retailers have a problem. These same thieves may then wonder whether they could buy a power tool for the price of a matching-weight bag of nails. and the petty scam becomes a more serious risk.
Other problems are more severe. A store detective coach being watched by experienced detectives on a self-checkout ‘upskill’ pretended to purchase £80 value of items and appeared to scan, bag and pay, then walked to the ‘challenge me or not’ point, but none of the SDs saw any clear evidence of non-payment. The problem is that these tills have to wait for the slowest responding customers to react to prompts, and in these time-frames a dishonest person can be far from the store before anybody realises that a ‘scam’ has occurred. The only way that the trainer could have been discovered would have been either a CCTV observation together with a display monitoring the transaction, or a supervisor watching and monitoring at the pay points. You might assume that this is exactly what retailers require, but some are removing monitors from pay areas to encourage supervisors to circulate more customer-service rather than just stand and stare at screens. More than half of all customers using self-pay systems tend to need assistance, either for age restricted purchases or for technical support.
One of the biggest risks is the loss of customers after a bad, delayed or upsetting self-pay experience. A lady who wanted to purchase liquor as privately as possible went to the self-pay point, not realising that when she scanned the booze, amber and then red lights would light up above her till. Another embarrassed innocent! Previously (and subsequently!) she took her purchases to till operators as the lesser of two evils.
The details of the known scams should be protected, but frankly, the thieves are moving so fast with their weight calculations, scanners, bar-code writers etc that the rogues-guide to self-checkouts could be rewritten every month. I personally hope that the retailers stick with manned tills, because when shopping I prefer to be served safely and securely by a checkout professional. Anyway, we need to keep people in jobs just now!
If any readers feel that a high percentage of checkout operators is dishonest (as a balancing argument) then they might write in and tell us how many checkout operators are employed by their (anonymous) company, and how many are caught stealing each period, Then we can do some maths with that. But I don’t think it will stack up!
