In 2012, Target operated a "couple of forensics labs" and at least 23 "investigations centers" for surveillance. OP's article kinda sugarcoats it. Since it's been verified Home Depot does checkout facial recognition and builds profiles, silly to think most any other major retailer wouldn't.
I predict a new class of machine learning model that will ingest a large number of low resolution video frames and dump high resolution facial reconstructions.
This stuff will probably be sold to both private and public sectors.
I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious.
But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc.
And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon.
About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening.
If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con.
Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me.
The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
> When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood.
What could possibly be confusing about a person doing what most normal people do in a store?
I have a friend that does this for Home Depot. He describes his job as being a detective. Watching video to collect enough evidence so he can question employees shorting the company. Non-employees has their evidence given to the local police department once there is enough.
Often employees with talk about the other crimes they committed while being interrogated. He just plays along, ".. yes we had that too ... and that too". Give them enough evidence and they will hang themselves.
The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
>The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
I've read about this in Vegas, where there are people who can palm the the chips so quickly that they weren't able to discern it on 30fps cameras (they had upgraded to 120fps, I think). Didn't know if it was the sort of bullshit people like that like to tell stories about without any evidence or not.
> “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.”
Why wouldn't everyone just leave at that point? That's what I'd do, since if I'm being investigated, then my job there is over anyway regardless of my guilt or innocence. I'd have nothing to gain by volunteering to be interrogated.
People think that if they refuse to talk, they'll look guilty. An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview. If the person really is guilty, they'll probably get tripped up somehow during the questioning and get cornered. Of course they can still leave at any time but they think that as long as they keep talking, eventually they'll convince the investigators that they are innocent.
Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate. Cops just need someone to pin it on. Crime continues regardless of whether or not someone was wrongly convicted so what does it matter that one guy got away as long as the public thinks you're doing a good job? LP looks bad if theft continues, no one is applauding them for doing their job.
> An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview.
I can see that. I think they're misguided, but I can understand the impulse.
> Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate.
I'm deeply skeptical. Probably because of my own experience with this. When I was a teen, I was wrongly accused of stealing in the workplace, was subjected to interrogation, declared guilty and fired. I wanted to clear my name so badly that I went to the trouble of taking a lie detector test and sending them the result.
I learned to never cooperate if I'm ever in that situation again. There's no point. Just quit and move on with your life.
you do a couple of things to distract them on the way, like lead them around to a harder to reach room, ask them unrelated questions e.g. "did you see that goofy guy at the counter this morning", and give the impression that you want to hear their side of the story.
most people will comply esp. if slightly distracted or thrown off a little; the serious hoodrats would be picking a fight or pushing back and the pros would already be walking out the back door ASAP
I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered.
People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.
Beyond even the cops and DA absolutely refusing to do their jobs in any way, it also severely degrades the shopping experience.
You can either go to costco which is always mobbed, or if you make the mistake of going to Target, you will have to repeatedly get someone to unlock cabinets which hold laundry detergent, deodorant, toothpaste, etc.
That's Target degrading the shopping experience. It's understandable how they make a cost-benefit analysis and decide to, but let's not absolve them of responsibility for that choice.
Given the shoplifting levels, comprehensive lack of enforcement, etc they don't practically have a choice. See also SF whining a couple years ago because a Target actually reported all the thefts and it made Breed look incompetent. And the open retail-theft marketplace operated at 16th st bart.
They have many choices. Off the top of my head: accept the higher loss, raise prices on in-store purchases of those items to account for the higher shrink, authorize their security guards to forcibly stop and detain people, put vending machines that unlock with a payment card (deposit) rather than employee-operated locks.
I don't know why you're continuing to absolve the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility for their choice of dumping externalities on legitimate customers, except as part of some gish gallop of reactionary talking points that lash out with blame for everyone but those directly responsible for the frustrating conditions.
Yes, indeed. I don't understand why you're not blaming the criminals and the incompetent government enabling them, rather than merchants with thin margins. Or us, for not being enthused about paying for the thieves.
We can condemn each individual criminal for their personal choice to steal, but this does not have much bearing on the overall situation. There is no "government enabling them", rather there is a government that is necessarily choosing how to optimize its limited resources.
Meanwhile, a large store full of goods manned by a skeleton crew, which doesn't even hire a single person to chase down thieves, seems like quite the attractive nuisance. Why is it governments job to subsidize the security of this store's stuff through the threat of expensive post-facto enforcement against a bunch of judgement-proof perpetrators? Why do you keep absolving the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility and even agency ?
We're now at the point where Geico doesn't even ask you to cosplay working government by filing a police report. Because everyone knows that nothing will happen.
It's one of the purposes, sure. But I don't think the set of people who want to raise taxes, and the set of people complaining about rampant shop lifting have very many people in common.
Would you personally support cities levying higher sales taxes on in-store purchases at large stores that forgo traditional security guards (let's imagine matching the state rate, so effectively a doubling) to pay for the resulting costs of those stores not preemptively securing their merchandise?
Ha, I watched this happen at a Target here in SoCal. A group of people filled up their carts (3) with clothes and shoes, rushed out the door to a waiting van. Security didn't even try to stop them at all.
I would not expect an hourly employee barely making minimum wage with no benefits to even lift a finger to stop a potentially violent shoplifter. If it were me, I'd hold the door for them to get them out of there.
> She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
One of Kanye's early songs he mentions stealing kakis from his job before he quit to become an artist. Not surprised, if you're an employee you have access to all sorts of things a customer does not. I imagine you also have access to areas where there are no cameras.
When I was younger, teen and early 20s, and working in retail. I noticed and thought it was kind of funny how in the job application process, these 100+ question interviews were all about trying to filter out criminals. They really treated employees as potential criminals first. Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
> Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.
Back in the stone age, I worked at 7-Eleven while in university. Nothing was really computerized at the store level then, even cameras were rare.
What was done all the time was a simple, templated, paper-based process that managers went through each month. I believe the gist of it was that it recorded sales for each shift in the month (7am-3pm, 3-11, 11-7), and who worked them. Some simple stats highlighted low sales correlated with employees, to point out who was likely entering smaller prices in the till and pocketing the difference. Now it's all bar-code scans of course, but it was a common problem at the time.
back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags
she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...
i'm surprised by this because it's so hard to sell used goods. i have an old suit from graduation that's in perfect condition and looks quite nice. the thing will NOT sell, not even for 10$, at all even though it's practically brand new.
I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.
This shows where their priorities lie. This is also the same company that got hacked and lost credit card data of customers through their HVAC system. Bet nothing has really changed there as far as cyber security goes.
A lot has changed on the inside at Target since then. They’ve rolled the whole stack in house (even switching to Linux), locked down, and hardened a lot both inside and out.
I was amused finding out that cashiers basically no longer sign onto the registers using the register. They sign onto a myDevice (a Zebra handheld) elsewhere and keep it with them, then use that to scan a rotating PDF417 on screen on the register to complete signon as a 2FA device.
That’s on top of a lot of built in POS restrictions now to limit where certain transactions (like gift card functions) are completable to avoid people trying to swipe devices or signons from outer area unattended registers.
That signin via device is hilarious because it didn't work the last time I was there; the lady had to find someone else who could sign in for her because her device wasn't connecting or something.
I'm sure you meant the code was changing periodically, but now I'm expecting some pseudo-cyberpunk "rapidly spinning barcode" authenticator to show up in a movie...
a) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities)
B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.
The markup is around 30% or higher on each item (or at least that was the case back when I last studied business)
I get there are overheads but that’s spread across all products and supermarkets have a lot of products.
So you’d still have to have a lot of theft in a supermarket before you get close to a dent in those 2% margins.
Edit: as an aside, this is also why high value items such as alcohol are usually at the back of the store. It’s easier to identify and catch someone stealing if they’ve attempted to conceal a product for the entirely length of the shop.
You understand that that 30% "markup" has to cover literally everything involved in running the store, right? The building, lights, shelves, labor, website, marketing, HVAC, etc etc etc
A 30% markup spread across 1 product or 3000000 products is still a 30% markup.
Yes, and you realize "theft" is a part of everything.
I don't think the comment you responded to was arguing that theft was moral or companies were being greedy. Rather, just that 30% markup is typical and it takes a fair bit of theft before that starts closing the gaps on the margins.
I wasn’t dismissing theft and supermarkets do not have 2% of their stock lost through theft (if 1 in 50 items were already stolen then that supermarket is dysfunctional at preventing theft).
Thus what you’re describing simply has no basis in reality.
Furthermore, you’ve completely misread every single comment in this thread and taken the least charitable conclusion from them.
You seem to believe that when the industry says they suffer a 2% loss due to shrinkage, they mean 2% of their inventory. That 2% figure refers to gross sales, not item inventory losses.
As I’ve already told you, the industry says they lose 1.6% to shrinkage and theft is just a subset of shrinkage.
So your figures are flat out wrong.
And I get it’s a gross figure, I was just putting it into simple terms for you because you’ve managed to misunderstand every other comment thus far. I was hoping turning the figure into a fraction might help you understand the ridiculousness of your comments. It was meant as an illustration rather than a literal scenario.
Anyway, like the other guy, I’m done chatting to you now. I’ve done business studies and worked in retail before moving to IT. Clearly you haven’t. And if you’re going to keep repeating incorrect figures then you’re beyond reason anyway.
The part you missed is that supermarkets sell a significant amount of stock.
If shop lifting is a serious enough problem in a particular store to make it financially unprofitable then there’s more at play than just the theft:
1. The store isn’t following best practices of having electronics tagged, and high value items at the back of the store.
2. The store isn’t making enough legal sales. This could be for a multitude of reasons from the stores location to its cleanliness. Or maybe they’re just stocking stuff people don’t want to buy or at the prices they’re advertised for
3. The overheads are unsustainable regardless of the sales. For example the land rental might be so high that the store wouldn’t turn a profit with the types of products they’re trying to sell.
Shops also factor in loss of stock in their margins. Eg spoiled food, damaged products and theft. This actually comes to less than the cost of personal nor rental costs.
There is still value in anti-theft measures. But that doesn’t mean that the GPs comments were correct when they said:
> it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.
…because if you run a supermarket correctly then it does. Despite what the knee jerk reactions to my initial comment suggest.
Let's assume an average marginal loss of 2% of gross sales to theft at a business with a net margin of 4% (typical of retail). Let's also assume wholesale markup of 50%, just to be conservative.
On two million in gross sales, a 2% loss equates to a $40,000. Assuming a 50% markup, the retailer has lost $20,000 in COGs. We'll ignore the other $20,000 for now.
On two million in gross sales, and a 4% net margin, the retailer can expect to make an annualized profit of $80,000.
We deduct the $20,000 in COGs loss, the retailer is now making only $60,000 a year, that's a loss of 25% in profit.
And that's using 50% markup.
In your stated case, with a 30% markup, the retailer would have lost $28,000 dollars in COGs, meaning the retailer is now making only $52,000, a reduction of 35% in net profits.
There is no universe in which this is a non-meaningful amount or to be dismissed as "well, something else has to be going wrong. Theft just isn't that big a deal."
Those figures aren’t accurate (eg shrinkage is estimated at around 1.6% and theft is just one of many factors that contribute to shrinkage, so the actual percentage for theft is going to be even lower) but I’m done arguing with you because you keep taking my comments in bad faith, eg:
> Theft just isn't that big a deal."
That’s absolutely not what I said and if that’s the message you’re taking then you’re looking for an argument instead of discussing the facts.
It's not OK on HN to use quotation marks to falsely attribute a quote or position to another user. Please don't do this again here, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, which start with being kind and conversing curiously.
My point is that shop lifting is small scale compared to legal sales. So for a supermarket to make a loss from shoplifting, they’d either have to see a significant jump in items stolen.
This doesn’t mean that I condone theft; it just means I’ve ran the operating costs and margins for running retail stores and thought I’d share that insight.
Businesses price in shrinkage. The more theft occurs, the more employees they hire and the higher they mark up goods.
There's a difference between having a 2% margin and having a 30% markup. Margin includes things like employee salaries, spoilage, theft. That's why buying goods in a remote location will often carry a high price tag. The store selling that produce needs to account for these things in order to stay afloat. So even though they are selling something for $10 that you can get in a city for $5 that doesn't mean they aren't making the same 2% margin.
It's just so obvious at this point to see the wealth building up on one side and the technology that is necessary to protect it and wealth completely disappearing on the other, making people steal the deodorant in the first place.
I can't believe there isn't a society or couldn't be one where all this shenanigans isn't necessary.
When I moved to the USA I always thought it was interesting in how many ways you can just walk out a store without paying.
I'm from Belgium, and at least where I grew up at, the stores are much more corralled. One way in, one way out.
But this forensics is also why I don't use self-checkout. Not that I steal stuff, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I forgot to scan something and get in trouble.
I've had it happen to me that something was missed at Costco, you just walk back and pay.
Do Belgian fire codes not mandate multiple exits? One problem I have sometimes seen here is people running out of a fire exit, even if they set off an alarm in the process. And you can’t block or lock those exits.
It's funny to see Reddit posts driving HN posts. There was a viral post about a rather video friendly lady getting politely arrested for shoplifting at Target going around today.
A surprising number of people commented about how Target had made sure they got long sentences by waiting and recording them until they would get serious charges.
Target does tend to build cases, up to a certain point, so as to not waste LE time. But it’s not as much as people tend to think. If you steal a candy bar or a loaf of bread it’s just not worth it, but more? A TV? Yes.
people are reading this article misunderstanding that its purpose is to discourage theft by getting nerds to constantly talk about Target this, felony theft that, not by actually being effective at a technical level
Can't someone juice this conversation with some false/misleading advice for retailers, so that after it goes thru an A.I., the A.I.'s advice for retail operations makes shoplifting and employee theft easy and simple ?
This is why Target self check out is the best. They have confidence in their theft deterrence so their machine has a lot of leeway and yells at me less for weight issues.
Thats the risk right. If a cashier makes a mistake and doesn't scan and item, nothing happens. If you make the same mistake, you could be hauled off to jail, prosecuted, lose your job. Why put yourself through that risk. Its common enough, that its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.
> its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.
It has, a couple of times (that I noticed). It's a hassle because it meant that I had to return to the store to pay for the item that was accidentally skipped.
It's impossible to prove or falsify of course but lower cost to them from having to pay fewer cashiers in theory shows up for the customers in lower prices. The other benefit is self checkout usually crams more lanes into a smaller area so you can checkout more quickly than waiting for the 2 lanes at best I'd often see staffed outside of peak seasons before self checkout.
So do big box retailers and grocery stores not have any competition then? I don't want to be snarky but it's not exactly a mono or even duopoly space in most towns for grocery stores and big box retailers are more often single choices in medium and smaller towns but above that you've often got a choice of big box retailers to go to too.
Since WalMart and dollar stores compete in the same space to some extent they have competition. And most things you buy at target can be bought from smaller specialty stores that while not direct competition between them all you have same same variety of things available. (and different prices and quality levels so you can make your own trade offs)
I can check out faster by rarely having to queue for the register, and I can scan things faster than a tired bored retail worker and know it's accurate. Self-checkout is also much less likely for me to catch a cold/flu/etc. as I'm neither in close proximity to the employee who was in close proximity to every other customer that week, and is touching every one of my items after touching every other customers' items. And, I can bag the goods the way I want them bagged, either for easier carrying, cold items together, or for how I want it organized to un-bag at home.
So, I consider self-checkout a real plus, not them stealing my labor. The exception is when the system is ill-designed or ill-tuned, so it halts and I'm effectively debugging it for them, except nothing is fixed b/c the employee just logs in and waves it through. With that exception, I still much prefer self-checkout.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
(Typos / spelling mistakes certainly fit this category)
It's not tangential; it speaks to the editorial process or lack thereof at this publication that they couldn't catch a misspelling of a major American city. It casts the entire article in doubt.
It never feels tangential, and I'm not saying your point isn't a good one! It's just that if you zoom out far enough, it's obviously not the topic, and this sort of subthread has a way of attracting more attention (and therefore upvotes) than discussion that's about the topic and genuinely curious.
Here's my favorite way of explicating that guideline: it's not that these things aren't annoying—they are annoying! That's why people make posts like this and upvote them. It's just that, at a global level, they aren't optimal for what we're, er, optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Hence that guideline.
Not quite phonetically, but spelled as pronounced? I'd assume we're talking about Space City in Texas vs the street in NY pronounced like a house that weighs a ton.
looks like the lowly shoplifter is going to bring down capitalism.
All that theft! no more profits. fuck me.
All major businesses have insurance to cover all losses from internal and external theft. Those same lossses are tax right-offs. in other words, the amount of money lost to shoplifting is less money they pay in tax.
I wonder of all the cctv, facial recognition and monitoring costs work out more than the actual shoplifted losses.
there is more to meet the eye than a lowly shoplifter here.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry’s broken video player in the mail to claim the postal service broke it and get money for it.
“It’s a write off Jerry. It costs them nothing. They just write it off!”
Of course that Kramer also didn’t had any idea of what a “write off” was. He was also just throwing words around to justify theft.
No, they've solved everything! It's all magically covered by insurance so if we just all steal everything from Walmart we can be infinitely rich and it doesn't hurt anyone or cost anything!
In 2012, Target operated a "couple of forensics labs" and at least 23 "investigations centers" for surveillance. OP's article kinda sugarcoats it. Since it's been verified Home Depot does checkout facial recognition and builds profiles, silly to think most any other major retailer wouldn't.
https://privacysos.org/blog/target-is-really-really-into-sur...
AI will probably automate this.
I predict a new class of machine learning model that will ingest a large number of low resolution video frames and dump high resolution facial reconstructions.
This stuff will probably be sold to both private and public sectors.
Democratising the Mission Impossible fake face technique.
Ironically, probably helping minorities at the same time.
https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
Probably not in Illinois!
https://www.aclu-il.org/en/campaigns/biometric-information-p...
I have a friend who works for Nordstorm doing this kind of work. She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
This is a longstanding problem. I worked at the receiving dock of a retailer long ago, and the amount of procedure and double-verification involved was a bit of a drag, all of it obviously aimed at making sure that neither I nor the guy driving the truck could make things "fall off the truck" without it being obvious.
But even then, it was common knowledge that most "shrinkage" (generic term for stolen/damaged/expired/destroyed merchandise) was from employee theft (except in grocery stores... there it is second to expired goods).
If you go to a store and note the security camera locations one thing that is obvious is most of them are pointed at the employees.
Except at my store where internal shrink is dominated by me throwing things.
I remember a guy in high school basically taking orders for things to steal off the Walmart truck; expensive electronics (for back in the day) like XBoxes, Playstations, etc.
And of course, while working at Kohl's, you had people occasionally put items away in the back, tucked behind shelves, so that when they went on ultra-clearance they could pull them out and buy them.
That definitely brings an experience from college into focus for me. We were cleaning out the back room and came across a luggage set that had slipped behind some shelves and was missed for like 3 years. It was originally priced at $400 but was so old or was clearanced at $40. I bought it, thanking my lucky stars that we had luggage for our upcoming honeymoon.
About a week later, loss prevention called me in and asked me a ton of questions about the luggage and how it came to be behind the shelves. It was before I worked there so I had no idea. The whole thing seemed weird to me at the time. Now it makes sense. Wild.
Yep, anywhere clearance is handled by "computer" and not someone physically noting and putting a sticker on it you have this happening.
If you find something wedged behind a shelf it's sometimes a customer just putting something back where it doesn't belong, other times it's the long-con.
Some stores won't clearance below a certain point because of this; they'd rather ship pallets off at 20% "loss" to an outlet broker than enable clearance shrinkage.
In a sort of reverse of that story, back when my teenage son was working at Target, my wife asked me to get a vacuum cleaner. So I went to the Target webpage and found a mid-range model, and texted my son to buy it and bring it home after his shift. He came home and said the only one left was the display model but that he got it for me.
The next day, security called him in to the office, which freaked him out a little, of course. They asked him why he had bought that vacuum cleaner. He said I'd asked for it. They then all laughed, and told him that it was a commonly stolen model and they were using it as a honey pot. When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood. It was always the dad causing problems. And they sent him back to work.
> When he walked over and took it off the shelf, they were concerned. When he then went up to the front and bought it, they were confused. They said now they understood.
What could possibly be confusing about a person doing what most normal people do in a store?
I'm guessing because they expected him "employee disappear it" and not pay for it.
I have a friend that does this for Home Depot. He describes his job as being a detective. Watching video to collect enough evidence so he can question employees shorting the company. Non-employees has their evidence given to the local police department once there is enough.
Often employees with talk about the other crimes they committed while being interrogated. He just plays along, ".. yes we had that too ... and that too". Give them enough evidence and they will hang themselves.
The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
>The hardest to catch are the slight of hand employees that can take money from the safe while it looking like they put all the money in. This is even with cameras watching the safe.
I've read about this in Vegas, where there are people who can palm the the chips so quickly that they weren't able to discern it on 30fps cameras (they had upgraded to 120fps, I think). Didn't know if it was the sort of bullshit people like that like to tell stories about without any evidence or not.
Once you get walked into the room and the folks on the other side of the table start into the Wicklander-Zulawski[1] playbook… it’s game over.
“Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.”
[1] https://www.w-z.com/private-sector/
> “Take a seat, the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time.”
Why wouldn't everyone just leave at that point? That's what I'd do, since if I'm being investigated, then my job there is over anyway regardless of my guilt or innocence. I'd have nothing to gain by volunteering to be interrogated.
People think that if they refuse to talk, they'll look guilty. An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview. If the person really is guilty, they'll probably get tripped up somehow during the questioning and get cornered. Of course they can still leave at any time but they think that as long as they keep talking, eventually they'll convince the investigators that they are innocent.
Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate. Cops just need someone to pin it on. Crime continues regardless of whether or not someone was wrongly convicted so what does it matter that one guy got away as long as the public thinks you're doing a good job? LP looks bad if theft continues, no one is applauding them for doing their job.
> An innocent person would want to clear their name so they'll sit for the interview.
I can see that. I think they're misguided, but I can understand the impulse.
> Loss prevention isn't like the cops, they actually want to catch the thief because if they don't, the thief continues to operate.
I'm deeply skeptical. Probably because of my own experience with this. When I was a teen, I was wrongly accused of stealing in the workplace, was subjected to interrogation, declared guilty and fired. I wanted to clear my name so badly that I went to the trouble of taking a lie detector test and sending them the result.
I learned to never cooperate if I'm ever in that situation again. There's no point. Just quit and move on with your life.
[dead]
They've seen too many copaganda shows where open communication with the investigator solves the misunderstanding and they go find the real bad guy.
you do a couple of things to distract them on the way, like lead them around to a harder to reach room, ask them unrelated questions e.g. "did you see that goofy guy at the counter this morning", and give the impression that you want to hear their side of the story.
most people will comply esp. if slightly distracted or thrown off a little; the serious hoodrats would be picking a fight or pushing back and the pros would already be walking out the back door ASAP
Yes, keep this in mind when you see corporations pushing news stories about surging epidemics of shoplifting (https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/former-home-depot-ceo-org...). Shoplifting is not growing, and external theft generally accounts for about a third of retail inventory losses. See for example: https://popular.info/p/lies-damn-lies-and-shoplifting-statis...
I think part of the fixation on "shoplifting" is that a Reddit video showing someone walking in and filling up a bag of merchandise viscerally gets people going in a way that "statistics about wage theft," "invisible employee-caused shrinkage," and "process/control failures" doesn't get people hot-and-bothered.
People will get mad because they visually saw someone steal a tube of toothpaste, but not care about other forms of mass-theft because it's not on YouTube.
Beyond even the cops and DA absolutely refusing to do their jobs in any way, it also severely degrades the shopping experience.
You can either go to costco which is always mobbed, or if you make the mistake of going to Target, you will have to repeatedly get someone to unlock cabinets which hold laundry detergent, deodorant, toothpaste, etc.
That's Target degrading the shopping experience. It's understandable how they make a cost-benefit analysis and decide to, but let's not absolve them of responsibility for that choice.
Given the shoplifting levels, comprehensive lack of enforcement, etc they don't practically have a choice. See also SF whining a couple years ago because a Target actually reported all the thefts and it made Breed look incompetent. And the open retail-theft marketplace operated at 16th st bart.
They have many choices. Off the top of my head: accept the higher loss, raise prices on in-store purchases of those items to account for the higher shrink, authorize their security guards to forcibly stop and detain people, put vending machines that unlock with a payment card (deposit) rather than employee-operated locks.
I don't know why you're continuing to absolve the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility for their choice of dumping externalities on legitimate customers, except as part of some gish gallop of reactionary talking points that lash out with blame for everyone but those directly responsible for the frustrating conditions.
> gish gallop of reactionary talking points
Yes, indeed. I don't understand why you're not blaming the criminals and the incompetent government enabling them, rather than merchants with thin margins. Or us, for not being enthused about paying for the thieves.
We can condemn each individual criminal for their personal choice to steal, but this does not have much bearing on the overall situation. There is no "government enabling them", rather there is a government that is necessarily choosing how to optimize its limited resources.
Meanwhile, a large store full of goods manned by a skeleton crew, which doesn't even hire a single person to chase down thieves, seems like quite the attractive nuisance. Why is it governments job to subsidize the security of this store's stuff through the threat of expensive post-facto enforcement against a bunch of judgement-proof perpetrators? Why do you keep absolving the well-capitalized corporation of responsibility and even agency ?
>Why is it governments job
Because it’s literally the excuse for taxation?
And I'm sure there will be some excuse for sf's clearance rates -- and that juiced by people not bothering to report crime here -- being horrific.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/police-sfpd-san-fr...
We're now at the point where Geico doesn't even ask you to cosplay working government by filing a police report. Because everyone knows that nothing will happen.
It's one of the purposes, sure. But I don't think the set of people who want to raise taxes, and the set of people complaining about rampant shop lifting have very many people in common.
Would you personally support cities levying higher sales taxes on in-store purchases at large stores that forgo traditional security guards (let's imagine matching the state rate, so effectively a doubling) to pay for the resulting costs of those stores not preemptively securing their merchandise?
There's also the part where reddit has communities of shoplifters who give each other tips and post propaganda about how more people should shoplift.
Sure, and a large part of those communities are people just cosplaying.
Anything to maintain your belief that crime isn't real.
Ha, I watched this happen at a Target here in SoCal. A group of people filled up their carts (3) with clothes and shoes, rushed out the door to a waiting van. Security didn't even try to stop them at all.
Nor should they, tbh. A few hundred bucks worth of shoes isn't worth getting hurt over.
I would not expect an hourly employee barely making minimum wage with no benefits to even lift a finger to stop a potentially violent shoplifter. If it were me, I'd hold the door for them to get them out of there.
> She claimed the bigger problem financially is employees in retail, i.e. stealing clothes in large scale to be sold on eBay.
One of Kanye's early songs he mentions stealing kakis from his job before he quit to become an artist. Not surprised, if you're an employee you have access to all sorts of things a customer does not. I imagine you also have access to areas where there are no cameras.
When I was younger, teen and early 20s, and working in retail. I noticed and thought it was kind of funny how in the job application process, these 100+ question interviews were all about trying to filter out criminals. They really treated employees as potential criminals first. Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
> Its ironically more paranoid than working in the financial industry.
Having owned a liquor store for a while, it's not paranoia. The majority of the people you can get to work low end retail jobs will try to rip you off in any way they can.
"if I only had a bartender that stole from me 1/3 of the time I'd keep him..."
or so the saying goes
Criminally minded employees are bad for the bottom line in retail.
Criminally minded employees are good for the bottom line in finance.
The firms in question will filter accordingly.
Employee theft requires different tactics to fight and doesn’t pose the same consumer privacy concerns.
Great point! I know some pretty advanced statistical analysis is used in my friend's case to detect anomalies in ordering, shipping, etc.
Back in the stone age, I worked at 7-Eleven while in university. Nothing was really computerized at the store level then, even cameras were rare.
What was done all the time was a simple, templated, paper-based process that managers went through each month. I believe the gist of it was that it recorded sales for each shift in the month (7am-3pm, 3-11, 11-7), and who worked them. Some simple stats highlighted low sales correlated with employees, to point out who was likely entering smaller prices in the till and pocketing the difference. Now it's all bar-code scans of course, but it was a common problem at the time.
biggest threats are insider threats
back when bookstores were a thing most places I used to work in one, and had a manager watch us, the entire time, as we took romance novels we couldn't sell out back and ripped off the covers before tossing them in a ship-back bin. Ditto for a few others like best sellers and some mags
she took two us out back to do it, leaving only one person on the floor to run the checkout -- field day for any serious thief. but they were more worried about us...
i'm surprised by this because it's so hard to sell used goods. i have an old suit from graduation that's in perfect condition and looks quite nice. the thing will NOT sell, not even for 10$, at all even though it's practically brand new.
I can actually comment on this a bit as I ran an eBay business during college selling second-hand clothes. A lot of it is about volume and brand. For example, women made up a majority of our sales even if it was men's clothing. Certain brands like Nike, Polo sold better & having hundreds of items up vs. just one and having 5 stars. All of that combined allowed us to sell items daily.
This shows where their priorities lie. This is also the same company that got hacked and lost credit card data of customers through their HVAC system. Bet nothing has really changed there as far as cyber security goes.
A lot has changed on the inside at Target since then. They’ve rolled the whole stack in house (even switching to Linux), locked down, and hardened a lot both inside and out.
I was amused finding out that cashiers basically no longer sign onto the registers using the register. They sign onto a myDevice (a Zebra handheld) elsewhere and keep it with them, then use that to scan a rotating PDF417 on screen on the register to complete signon as a 2FA device.
That’s on top of a lot of built in POS restrictions now to limit where certain transactions (like gift card functions) are completable to avoid people trying to swipe devices or signons from outer area unattended registers.
That signin via device is hilarious because it didn't work the last time I was there; the lady had to find someone else who could sign in for her because her device wasn't connecting or something.
I'm sure you meant the code was changing periodically, but now I'm expecting some pseudo-cyberpunk "rapidly spinning barcode" authenticator to show up in a movie...
Every retail business has a “priority” of preventing theft. When profit margins are 2%, it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.
Turnover dominates margins as a factor in physical retail profitability.
a) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities)
B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.
Most because it’s hard to quantify how much money they don’t earn because we refuse to shop there due to everything being locked up
The markup is around 30% or higher on each item (or at least that was the case back when I last studied business)
I get there are overheads but that’s spread across all products and supermarkets have a lot of products.
So you’d still have to have a lot of theft in a supermarket before you get close to a dent in those 2% margins.
Edit: as an aside, this is also why high value items such as alcohol are usually at the back of the store. It’s easier to identify and catch someone stealing if they’ve attempted to conceal a product for the entirely length of the shop.
You understand that that 30% "markup" has to cover literally everything involved in running the store, right? The building, lights, shelves, labor, website, marketing, HVAC, etc etc etc
A 30% markup spread across 1 product or 3000000 products is still a 30% markup.
Yes, and you realize "theft" is a part of everything.
I don't think the comment you responded to was arguing that theft was moral or companies were being greedy. Rather, just that 30% markup is typical and it takes a fair bit of theft before that starts closing the gaps on the margins.
Then I think the parent comment lacks an understanding of the difference between gross and net margins.
That's an uncharitable reading of their comment.
It's the only reasonable reading if someone is dismissing 2% loss due to theft for a retailer.
I wasn’t dismissing theft and supermarkets do not have 2% of their stock lost through theft (if 1 in 50 items were already stolen then that supermarket is dysfunctional at preventing theft).
Thus what you’re describing simply has no basis in reality.
Furthermore, you’ve completely misread every single comment in this thread and taken the least charitable conclusion from them.
You seem to believe that when the industry says they suffer a 2% loss due to shrinkage, they mean 2% of their inventory. That 2% figure refers to gross sales, not item inventory losses.
As I’ve already told you, the industry says they lose 1.6% to shrinkage and theft is just a subset of shrinkage.
So your figures are flat out wrong.
And I get it’s a gross figure, I was just putting it into simple terms for you because you’ve managed to misunderstand every other comment thus far. I was hoping turning the figure into a fraction might help you understand the ridiculousness of your comments. It was meant as an illustration rather than a literal scenario.
Anyway, like the other guy, I’m done chatting to you now. I’ve done business studies and worked in retail before moving to IT. Clearly you haven’t. And if you’re going to keep repeating incorrect figures then you’re beyond reason anyway.
I literally said that.
The part you missed is that supermarkets sell a significant amount of stock.
If shop lifting is a serious enough problem in a particular store to make it financially unprofitable then there’s more at play than just the theft:
1. The store isn’t following best practices of having electronics tagged, and high value items at the back of the store.
2. The store isn’t making enough legal sales. This could be for a multitude of reasons from the stores location to its cleanliness. Or maybe they’re just stocking stuff people don’t want to buy or at the prices they’re advertised for
3. The overheads are unsustainable regardless of the sales. For example the land rental might be so high that the store wouldn’t turn a profit with the types of products they’re trying to sell.
Shops also factor in loss of stock in their margins. Eg spoiled food, damaged products and theft. This actually comes to less than the cost of personal nor rental costs.
There is still value in anti-theft measures. But that doesn’t mean that the GPs comments were correct when they said:
> it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.
…because if you run a supermarket correctly then it does. Despite what the knee jerk reactions to my initial comment suggest.
That's just not how the math works.
Let's assume an average marginal loss of 2% of gross sales to theft at a business with a net margin of 4% (typical of retail). Let's also assume wholesale markup of 50%, just to be conservative.
On two million in gross sales, a 2% loss equates to a $40,000. Assuming a 50% markup, the retailer has lost $20,000 in COGs. We'll ignore the other $20,000 for now.
On two million in gross sales, and a 4% net margin, the retailer can expect to make an annualized profit of $80,000.
We deduct the $20,000 in COGs loss, the retailer is now making only $60,000 a year, that's a loss of 25% in profit.
And that's using 50% markup.
In your stated case, with a 30% markup, the retailer would have lost $28,000 dollars in COGs, meaning the retailer is now making only $52,000, a reduction of 35% in net profits.
There is no universe in which this is a non-meaningful amount or to be dismissed as "well, something else has to be going wrong. Theft just isn't that big a deal."
Those figures aren’t accurate (eg shrinkage is estimated at around 1.6% and theft is just one of many factors that contribute to shrinkage, so the actual percentage for theft is going to be even lower) but I’m done arguing with you because you keep taking my comments in bad faith, eg:
> Theft just isn't that big a deal."
That’s absolutely not what I said and if that’s the message you’re taking then you’re looking for an argument instead of discussing the facts.
So I’m done.
How many employees does it take to move $2mil in sales? That's not the owner running a mom-and-pop store with only him running the till, is it?
For a retail location, 2 million might be a lot, or not very much. It's going to be incredibly dependent on what type of retail we're talking.
[flagged]
It's not OK on HN to use quotation marks to falsely attribute a quote or position to another user. Please don't do this again here, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, which start with being kind and conversing curiously.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That’s not even remotely what I was saying.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
———
My point is that shop lifting is small scale compared to legal sales. So for a supermarket to make a loss from shoplifting, they’d either have to see a significant jump in items stolen.
This doesn’t mean that I condone theft; it just means I’ve ran the operating costs and margins for running retail stores and thought I’d share that insight.
That wasn't what was said.
Businesses price in shrinkage. The more theft occurs, the more employees they hire and the higher they mark up goods.
There's a difference between having a 2% margin and having a 30% markup. Margin includes things like employee salaries, spoilage, theft. That's why buying goods in a remote location will often carry a high price tag. The store selling that produce needs to account for these things in order to stay afloat. So even though they are selling something for $10 that you can get in a city for $5 that doesn't mean they aren't making the same 2% margin.
At lease they have a vulnerability disclosure program. https://security.target.com/vdp/
TFA is a just a poor summary of an improperly cited 2009 forbes article. A somewhat recent article with additional information here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...
How much forensic-grade surveillance profiling is an acceptable amount while I peruse deodorants and potato chips?
You can't peruse the deodorant, we have it locked up.
[dead]
It's just so obvious at this point to see the wealth building up on one side and the technology that is necessary to protect it and wealth completely disappearing on the other, making people steal the deodorant in the first place.
I can't believe there isn't a society or couldn't be one where all this shenanigans isn't necessary.
there is. but you'll probably have to force the issue.
When I moved to the USA I always thought it was interesting in how many ways you can just walk out a store without paying.
I'm from Belgium, and at least where I grew up at, the stores are much more corralled. One way in, one way out.
But this forensics is also why I don't use self-checkout. Not that I steal stuff, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I forgot to scan something and get in trouble.
I've had it happen to me that something was missed at Costco, you just walk back and pay.
Do Belgian fire codes not mandate multiple exits? One problem I have sometimes seen here is people running out of a fire exit, even if they set off an alarm in the process. And you can’t block or lock those exits.
It's funny to see Reddit posts driving HN posts. There was a viral post about a rather video friendly lady getting politely arrested for shoplifting at Target going around today.
A surprising number of people commented about how Target had made sure they got long sentences by waiting and recording them until they would get serious charges.
Target does tend to build cases, up to a certain point, so as to not waste LE time. But it’s not as much as people tend to think. If you steal a candy bar or a loaf of bread it’s just not worth it, but more? A TV? Yes.
Specifically they wait until it's enough to charge with felony theft.
people are reading this article misunderstanding that its purpose is to discourage theft by getting nerds to constantly talk about Target this, felony theft that, not by actually being effective at a technical level
Can't someone juice this conversation with some false/misleading advice for retailers, so that after it goes thru an A.I., the A.I.'s advice for retail operations makes shoplifting and employee theft easy and simple ?
so does walmart, have had one for a long time
This is why Target self check out is the best. They have confidence in their theft deterrence so their machine has a lot of leeway and yells at me less for weight issues.
If I were confident that I wouldn't mistakenly be accused of theft, I might use self-checkout. But I'm not, so I don't.
Thats the risk right. If a cashier makes a mistake and doesn't scan and item, nothing happens. If you make the same mistake, you could be hauled off to jail, prosecuted, lose your job. Why put yourself through that risk. Its common enough, that its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.
On the flip side, you could also sue and win lots of money. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/walmart-shoplifting-la...
> its probably happened to you that a cashier has missed a scan.
It has, a couple of times (that I noticed). It's a hassle because it meant that I had to return to the store to pay for the item that was accidentally skipped.
How much do they pay you to work as a cashier there?
It's impossible to prove or falsify of course but lower cost to them from having to pay fewer cashiers in theory shows up for the customers in lower prices. The other benefit is self checkout usually crams more lanes into a smaller area so you can checkout more quickly than waiting for the 2 lanes at best I'd often see staffed outside of peak seasons before self checkout.
There has never been any instance of a company passing on cost savings to its customers unless forced by market competition.
So do big box retailers and grocery stores not have any competition then? I don't want to be snarky but it's not exactly a mono or even duopoly space in most towns for grocery stores and big box retailers are more often single choices in medium and smaller towns but above that you've often got a choice of big box retailers to go to too.
Since WalMart and dollar stores compete in the same space to some extent they have competition. And most things you buy at target can be bought from smaller specialty stores that while not direct competition between them all you have same same variety of things available. (and different prices and quality levels so you can make your own trade offs)
Source:
I can check out faster by rarely having to queue for the register, and I can scan things faster than a tired bored retail worker and know it's accurate. Self-checkout is also much less likely for me to catch a cold/flu/etc. as I'm neither in close proximity to the employee who was in close proximity to every other customer that week, and is touching every one of my items after touching every other customers' items. And, I can bag the goods the way I want them bagged, either for easier carrying, cold items together, or for how I want it organized to un-bag at home.
So, I consider self-checkout a real plus, not them stealing my labor. The exception is when the system is ill-designed or ill-tuned, so it halts and I'm effectively debugging it for them, except nothing is fixed b/c the employee just logs in and waves it through. With that exception, I still much prefer self-checkout.
The payment for me is in not having to wait in line behind 3 different people who are buying 100 items each, and are using many different coupons.
I would pay more for self check out since I am much faster than the employees ever are and I value that more than extra cash.
17 an hour except at a few high CoL stores.
Pointing the beeping raygun is actually pretty fun
Friendly reminder that Target is still on the boycott list.
[dead]
"Huston"? This does not bode well for the writing/editing process at whatever site this is.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
(Typos / spelling mistakes certainly fit this category)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not tangential; it speaks to the editorial process or lack thereof at this publication that they couldn't catch a misspelling of a major American city. It casts the entire article in doubt.
It never feels tangential, and I'm not saying your point isn't a good one! It's just that if you zoom out far enough, it's obviously not the topic, and this sort of subthread has a way of attracting more attention (and therefore upvotes) than discussion that's about the topic and genuinely curious.
Here's my favorite way of explicating that guideline: it's not that these things aren't annoying—they are annoying! That's why people make posts like this and upvote them. It's just that, at a global level, they aren't optimal for what we're, er, optimizing for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Hence that guideline.
Not quite phonetically, but spelled as pronounced? I'd assume we're talking about Space City in Texas vs the street in NY pronounced like a house that weighs a ton.
Definitely talking about Houston.
We have a problem.
looks like the lowly shoplifter is going to bring down capitalism.
All that theft! no more profits. fuck me.
All major businesses have insurance to cover all losses from internal and external theft. Those same lossses are tax right-offs. in other words, the amount of money lost to shoplifting is less money they pay in tax.
I wonder of all the cctv, facial recognition and monitoring costs work out more than the actual shoplifted losses.
there is more to meet the eye than a lowly shoplifter here.
This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry’s broken video player in the mail to claim the postal service broke it and get money for it.
“It’s a write off Jerry. It costs them nothing. They just write it off!”
Of course that Kramer also didn’t had any idea of what a “write off” was. He was also just throwing words around to justify theft.
[flagged]
No, they've solved everything! It's all magically covered by insurance so if we just all steal everything from Walmart we can be infinitely rich and it doesn't hurt anyone or cost anything!