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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I think you're being naive here.

The scale exists, but it doesn't know the difference between a pound of ham and a pound of prosciutto, scan the ham, put the prosciutto on the scale, scan the ham again, put the ham on the scale. And they're not constantly monitoring the tape for minor irregularities in movement.

They’re very precise. Steaks are individually plastic wrapped here, so you’d have to find a ham that weighs exactly 454 grams or whatever. They beep very loudly when there’s any issue. The staff meticulously check your bag if the system flags any issues. I’m sure people still steal stuff, but it’s less easy than the original post assumes.

You clearly live in a much nicer area than me; meticulousness is absolutely not part of standard operating procedure at my local grocery stores.

THey have the technical ability to be very precise, but any modern store is going to have them calibrated to allow some gratuitous shifting.

You need only look at the difference between plastic and reusable bags to see how generous they must be by default. If you put a reusable bag down without an item, they're heavy enough to register as one, so there's a bit of technique to putting your first item down.

My local grocery stores' self-checkout kiosks all have a special "reusable bag" button - you press it, put your bags on the bagging surface, and continue on with grocery scanning. My one issue with it is that my bags tend to collapse in on themselves when empty, and the scale freaks out when I correct that to put stuff in them.

They make you weigh the bags first here. I suppose this presents the opportunity to finagle the system, but they always seem to watch me like hawks, and I’m hardly the median grocery store shoplifter demographically.

Hmm.. I'd like to claim that I've been prevented from just rescanning the same item twice, but I'm not sure of that. I'll try and see if that works for duplicate items next time I'm shopping.

I just double-scanned some store-labeled bagels today. I had two packages and one of the barcodes was damaged, so I scanned the other one twice. Worked fine. Even when I picked up the first one off the scale (to rescan it) and put the second one on, Indiana Jones-style.

I could 100% see fresh sliced deli meat being unique enough in a barcode (Item, weight to 1/100th of a pound, timestamp down to a second) that simple double scanning logic would catch you messing with this.

For pre-packaged anything meat with similar package weights, though, you'd doubtless be able to double scan.

The most I steal is exotic peppers being coded in as jalapenos or white onions as yellow, and that's 90% convenience of fast scanning and 10% the price difference.

I can scan the same item twice at my local grocery store. (The legitimate use-case is to scan one item X times when you're buying X copies, rather than manually going through the entire stack of the copies).

Maybe the scanners used in other countries are different, but here you will not be prevented from scanning the same item twice, provided that an equivalent item is placed on the scale. I often do this with multiple half gallons of milk for convenience reasons. The UPCs are the same.

This ignores Target and Home Depot, which allow you to use the hand scanner and never weigh the items anyway.

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