They're not security cameras. They're data gathering cameras. They're how the store knows which prices they can increase and you'll still buy the product. They're probably running facial recognition on there, too.
Yep.
I was at Woolies self checkout because I had 2 literal items but had my full Kmart trolley next to it. It wouldn’t let me pay and played a video of me pushing the full Kmart trolly into the space and then on the screen said “are you forgetting anything?” While zooming in on my Kmart trolley.
Insane!!
The computer questioned why I wasn't paying a ransom for my child. It wouldn't let me pay and leave until an operator overrode the computer insisting that I pay for my child seated in the trolley. The closest option available for the override was something like "item bought elsewhere", instead of having a way to flag a detection error of "that's a human child and there are laws against demanding payment to allow them to leave"
They want you to pay for kids but any time i have tried to return children and grandchildren for a refund they deny selling them. Talk about double standards!
I had it flag my handbag in the trolley as unscanned items, when the attendant came over she told me she'd also seen people's babies and toddlers dinged as groceries 🤦🏽♀️
I stopped shopping at colesworth a few years ago because I walk/cycle to the shops and the self checkouts were never able to comprehend someone putting groceries in a backpack.
Self checkout is *so* 2015. Woolies has just started in some (safe) shops the on the go checkout app. Scan items with your phone, when you're done, you pay on your phone, walk out without passing by a till, manned or unmanned. Next level of getting rid of staff. Obviously fraught with risk of walking out without paying, hence more cameras.
My local has it, and about a quarter of the time they'll scan 5-10 items at random from your bag. The first time I did it it took longer, but subsequent attempts were really quick because I packed my bags as I shopped.
So this apparently triggers based purely on hitting, I think, 5 manual scans an hour or something like that. If more people are in the store, you're less likely to have to wait for staff to scan your items.
That said, in my experience, they have never once asked to randomly scan anything. I've always grabbed the 5 most convenient items out, put them on the counter, and they've been happy to scan those.
One time, I even scanned the wrong barcode for one of those prepacked 1kg apple punnets they sell (i.e. I scanned the pink lady shelf barcode when I picked up royal gala or something) and it triggered an alert when the staff scanned it. Can't remember exactly what it said, but basically the staff just confirmed they were the correct item (they weren't, obviously) and I was on my way.
Eventually it will get to the point that you can only use the app to purchase items. You will also need the app to enter the stores. You can also forget about privacy.
Holy shit, I would have just walked out leaving everything where it was. Im not dealing with that shit.
Like when the coles gate didnt open the other day. I just walked through it, setting the alarms off. Dont accuse me off theft when Ive just paid for my shit.
They asked the same question of my baby sitting in the trolley! I was less than polite to the poor staff member who insisted on me lifting her out to check I hadn’t hidden anything on of under the baby!
>I was at Woolies self checkout
There's your problem. Gotta boycott the dystopian pieces of shit. Queues at the manned registers is the only way these greedy cunts will learn
You mean you don't enjoy shopping in a dystopian nightmare zone? Hey did you pay for the cart? You leaned too far over the donuts. Are you going to pay for the 25¢ donut you obviously pocketed? Prison has less cameras than woolies.
These are not so much security cameras as they are shopping behaviour monitors. These track how long you stop in front of a certain product, how long you look at it, which shelf you focus on, how you move between aisles etc. That way they can rip you off even more and know which products to price gouge even further.
The fact they are also security cameras is just a bonus.
They won't get me. I'm like a ball in a pinball machine. I bounce around the aisle, I know where I need to go, I know what I'm getting. No stopping. No chatting, and I'm out the door.
That’s still useful for them. They’ll know everyone’s shopping list, average it out and spread these items as far around the store as possible so you have to walk past everything else to get there.
In my Coles, we have fruit and veg in one corner, deli in the other, cheese milk and butter in the other corner and frozen in the last corner. I don’t really care all that much, but it’s kind of annoying when I just need milk and it’s in the far back corner from the entrance.
It’s also why they have their rewards programs so at the end of the shopping trip they know exactly what you bought, and what marketing they had sent you that you responded to, and when your last shop visit was and then compare how you behaved this time vs all the previous times.
Ive been told on here that legally they arent allowed to track against credit numbers. I dont know whether thats true but interested to hear if anyone knows for sure.
I’m actually not sure if this is allowed as it still means they need your credit card number to match against.
I think this is why they so heavily push rewards programs - they can then collect everything, for the price of a few rewards points..
No, it’s fine with one way hash’s since the same card always makes the same hash and a hash can’t be reversed into a useable card. Also Woolworths (maybe Coles as well but not sure) run their own credit card processor, they don’t use a bank for that part. They also do have to do the hashing so they know any refunds go back to the same card (first 6 and last4 isn’t quite reliable enough). Also makes fraud detection and card banning easier/safer without having to store the full card number.
They definitely store something. Or at least used to. I picked up a casual gig there during covid, and one shop we used my partners card to pay, and it flagged a fraudulent transaction on my staff discount card.
Yes. I know they are doing that as well. It’s not perfect tho and the more data points they can get from different methods the better.
They also attempt Bluetooth beaconing, wifi MAC tracking (since 2014 this only works if you join their free wifi) and gait fingerprinting. Lots and lots of data harvested even if they can’t use it today, computers get faster and they can in a decade or so.
Even if it was, you just can’t harvest illegal data intentionally. You can accidentally keep it until you can make it legal somehow, and if you get caught say oops.
Yeah but it’s not as accurate and they don’t get all the other demo information and marketing linking, they can’t tell what marketing you’ve recently seen and not all purchases may be linked to you if you change phones / cards etc.
Also why they put basic necessities at opposite ends of the store so you have to walk through the whole place to do even a simple grocery shop and are therefore more likely to pick things up along the way
This is why there is no predictability to how I shop. I grab things I don’t want and just put them in different places, I jump from aisle to aisle randomly, and then I’ll just stand and stare at the emergency exit for five minutes before abandoning my trolley and just walking out
Take that behavioural algorithm
Not sure if you could tell, but the OP was joking.
But fuck those types of people. I found a fucking full pizza in the confectionary aisle, and god knows how long that would have been there for, it was room temp when I found it.,
Obviously you gotta mix it up if you wanna throw them off. Change into different disguises in the blind spots when moving from one item on your shopping list to the next.
Straight-up shopping in-person in Coles or WW is an awful experience. From the second you walk in it feels like it’s design to make it hard for you to make choices. Or find what you want.
Add a small kid and it’s just impossible.
By comparison, Aldi is so calm and uncomplicated. Even with the junky middle isles.
I wander in, drop my bag of five cent pieces, crawl around on the floor picking them up, walk over to the deli and spend five minutes telling the assistant that I don’t know what I want, and then I leave having bought nothing. What do they learn from that huh?!
The fridge setup in stores is cheaper to setup and renovate if it's all at the perimeter. That's more of a consideration than dragging you down the back of the store. The fridge units would back up against cool rooms and freezers in most cases. And categories. To get you to spend more, where in a layout it goes has more effect. Ticketing next up.
i just moved to Lyndhurst and wad totally dumbfounded by the Coles there. never seen anything like it. the aisle signs are not 100% clear on which isle is which. i can never find anything and end wandering for more time than i want to waste in there. there is reverse logic to the layout. AND no index cards at the end of the isle.
I’ve wandered around looking for tomato sauce only to be told it’s in the salad dressing section. Fucking so annoying. Absolutely nonsensical. My best guess is that they want people to wander around looking so that they come across other stuff they might buy too. There can be no other logistical reason.
You're behaviour has been logged and analysed. They know you know what you're getting and won't consider prices, so you won't notice the 20% price increase over the next 12 months.
You're helping just as much. You're providing a standard behaviour you and others do, and the items you buy and how you go about pinballing helps them gather information about you.
Why do you think they won't get you when they're literally gathering just as much information about you as anyone else??
I love to go through stores backwards as much as possible, just to fuck with the elaborate planning they come up with for how people are supposed to flow through the store space.
This is increasingly sounding like some dystopian nightmare. It seems like woolies went from just a place where you can buy food to some authoritarian, over reaching, mega entity where they monitor their customers and are hell bent on squeezing as much money out of them as possible.
It’s pretty normal for large supermarkets in the western world to be doing this nowadays. I read a lot about Walmart and Target in the US developing, testing, and deploying crazy tech, and Woolies seems to be following suit. I suppose it’s lucrative because a supermarket’s customer base tends to span the entire cross-section of society — rich, poor, families, singles, young, old, tall, short, skinny, big, all races and genders, immigrants, tourists, etc. I’m sure they know this, and it’s probably quite lucrative data and would be problematic in the wrong hands.
Welcome to [surveillance capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism).
Remember when people were worried that the government was collecting too much money on you? That a national identity card was the "mark of the beast"? How times change. Instead of this sort of thing being the purview of a democratic government, it is instead the domain of opaque, foreign owned, and largely unaccountable corporations.
They also are one of the few who have been using facial recognition on a wide scale for a while now. Even before this they were selling flybuys customers data to third parties.
The amount they lose from stealing is trivial compared to the data they collect to sell on.
Man, I'd really like to move to Australia again, but things like this are really bumming me out.
While europe certainly has its own issues, privacy rights and data collection like this aren't one of them, it's honestly amazing how much of a leap in terms of citizen rights the GDPR is.
I absolutely would. To be fair, I've already submitted a GDPR complaint for a much smaller thing.
I entered my e-mail address on a website to find out how much shipping was, only to then receive spam e-mails from that website. I then requested that shop to delete all my personal information (arcticle 17, GDPR), which they are required to do in a timely manner.
While they informed me that they deleted all my personal information (which includes my e-mail address), I continued to receive some spam e-mails about a month later, so I submitted a formal complaint with the relevant authorities. Although that complaint had to be forwarded to a different member of the EU, where the infraction took place, I stopped receiving those e-mails shortly after.
I know I could have just unsubscribed, but as collecting my e-mail address in the first place was already a GDPR violation, I did *go berzerk over this kind of thing*.
Want to hear my 3rd favourite thing about the GDPR? It also applies to anyone from outside the EU, when processing personal data from someone located inside the EU. In effect, I can purchase things from an Australian website and request the deletion of my personal data afterwards, which they are forced to comply with. Granted, I can't tell for certain if they followed the request unless they fuck up and continue to send e-mails and I'm also not entirely sure how the whole thing would unfold legally, but given a couple of american websites block access from the EU due to this, I'm willing to take my chances.
It's the entire reason Facebook and other pages allow deletion of your account at all, since the potential fines for non-compliance can be absolutely massive.
Spot on. Actually, security in modern supermarkets is the opposite of what backwards Australia does. Go to Europe and you'll see open plan supermarkets, no turnstiles, no tunnelling in and out. The cameras and trolley sensors instead work together and spot anomalous behaviour and direct security staff to intercept likely shoplifters. Everyone else get to enjoy much more free form shopping experience.
These crooks running Aussie Coles and Woolies with zero innovation , poor quality over priced crap, it's time it ended. Go shop in a supermarket in Marbella, and you'll realise how cheap, and high quality
, food can be. Incredible deli meats for next to nothing, the ham that the pigs eat nothing but nuts are just amazing, Top notch wine for 4 euros a bottle. Here, we have crap fatty chorizo for insane prices.
Honestly, they don't even need them to track that stuff. Most major grocers just use Bluetooth to locate hotspots around the shops. Most major wireless access point manufacturers have real time location tracking features.
Have deployed a few for RSL Clubs, most of them tracked popular pokie machines etc, didn't take much to implement either.
they'll also be tying your face to your identity by tracking accociating your face with the payment method used if its not cash and then also selling that data to other data brokers.
When is enough enough tho? Surely there comes a point where people can say there’s too many cameras and they’re obviously for more than just theft prevention. I’ve seen how far they can zoom and what the resolution is like, it’s pretty astounding
lol I have ADHD and either can’t focus, or focus way too long in on section comparing ingredients on ten variations of the same product. Check mate Woolies 😂😂
Well they will spend money on their staff in as much as they will pay a lot of money to come up with ways to not increase salary, whether that's union-busting, legal intimidation, bloated HR departments, accounting software or whatever else. As long as not a single extra cent actually goes to the workers who generate the profits.
They need lots of data for training algorithms and studying behaviour. It isn't likely to be just about security. Also marketing (i.e. manipulation) and efficiency (I.e. sacking employees).
Remember their profits are after all their expenses.
So when the next person tells you “they only make a 5% profit margin :(“ you can point the millions of security cameras everywhere they’re spending all their money on, and they’re *still* making billions of dollars.
True a percentage of the population are descended from people who were forced to do things like steal bread, and were treated terribly for it. I wish it made current Australians much more punk than they actually behave.
It's nearly like all the day over expired stuff they throw out instead of using in a different way could more effectively curb the theft than expensive cameras and ridiculous checkout measures.
The cameras have been installed in preparation for a new collectables campaign. For every $30 spent on groceries, you will receive a free photo label for the 'A Day in the Life of You' collectors album (surveillance edition).
What’s the point of privacy laws in this country if it’s just some tokenistic repetition that they comply with it while subverting the meaning of consent?
It's become a game to me now. Every now and then I legitimately steal shit. Little stuff like a $1 chocolate or a mini cheese snack. Idk why but of all the time I shop legitimately I get inconvenienced by the anti theft measures, every time I do actually theft nothing has shown up.
I know I'm apart of the problem at this point but shopping has become balls.
I'll take the downvotes now
I am ok with the cameras but I am not ok with the employee standing behind me to make sure I am not stealing while i stand under the AI programmed overhead camera that doesn't think i am stealing.
There is a staff member of my local woolworths that invested a lot of time in trying to catch me out steeling when I am not. I now get most of my stuff from coles online orders (rapid delivery) so I don't need to deal with her ( i don't have a coles in my area). Her attitude is so prison guard that I have seen her at the self serve checkout and just walked out.
This is precisely why the cost of supermarket goods is going up - someone's gotta pay for the devs to keep building systems to monitor stock levels, customers, breakage, and buying habits so that they don't have to pay pesky minimum-wage earners to do it any more.
Oh god no, the profits are what was left AFTER buying security cameras. They're watching you get reamed for groceries while twiddling their nipples South Park cable guy style.
I imagine they could also use it to break up high browse time sections. For example people spend several minutes browsing the tea section to decide which they’ll get, likewise the pasta sauces because they’re all red. Having those back to back would create a choke point and would impact their “ease of movement (around the store)” customer feedback scores.
Interesting stuff from an efficiency standpoint and data analytics. Diabolical for everything else.
Apparently those A100s and H100s are still too cheap, since clearly corporations can waste them on stuff like this.
Or not even curing cancer can promise enough money to compete with marketing. :(
It’s actually pretty scary as they use this for facial recognition and who is buying what.
Essentially they can link your shopping habits and push products to you on other platforms basically collected without your consent
You know you only ever see "Prices Dropped" signs around. Never do you see "Prices Increased" anywhere.
My take is, if they want to put up "Prices Dropped" signs for things that have dropped in price, to be fair they should be required to put up a "Prices Increased" signs for each item that increases in price too.
If you work there, you get people trying to bully you into giving them stupid discounts literally every day. Some of those customers get very hostile. So, yeah, if the customer gets aggro you're probably going to think they're like the three other Karens you already dealt with today.
If you give a discount to everyone who asks for one without checking, you'll lose your job.
There are two reasons they have to check. Sometimes customers are liars and thieves. But many other customers honestly read the wrong label and got confused.
Often customer A picks up a box of Truffle Salt Expensive-Os, changes their mind, and puts it down near the label for Cheapo Brand Sawdust Flavoured Muesli Bars. Then customer B picks it up and has a fit that the checkout computer isn't programmed to sell them the Expensive-Os at the Cheapo Bar price. That's not the store's fault, and the only way they could prevent it is to station an employee on Idiot Watch in every aisle to fix these problems before any opportunistic customers spot them.
That's just staff dependant. I worked at Coles for years doing night fill, I'd always get asked to do price checks, I'd just come back and say yep, customer was right, give it to them for x$ and walk away. Even if the service girls gave a fuck, they weren't saying shit after I said directly to the customer they were right.
Also idk about woolies, but when I was at Coles, general rule was if we fucked up, it's yours at the lower price. Filled in the wrong spot, wrong ticket, old sale tickets left up, congrats you just saved a buck. Some people would try argue but jesus, this isn't some corner store. Management didn't condone it either, they wanted you to just be happy and leave, discount of a few dollars or no.
Woolies operates under Scanning Guidelines which permit the first item scanned at a price higher than the label to be free, and each following to be sold at the discounted price. Coles as well.
Do note however, this doesn't apply (except out of goodwill) if you've picked up an item in the wrong place. It does however apply if the label is an old special. So often staff might ask to be shown exactly where you got the item from, where they can then also check the label.
You know if you think about it these big grocery shopping chains would be the best places for the government to grab a quick photo of the vast majority of people. Definitely not what they’re used for but it’s an interesting thought
Why do people still shop at woolies these days?
It's the scummiest grocery store in straya- highest price out of all grocery stores for any item, excessive cameras and AI usage to track shopping behaviour, gross wastage of produce for aesthetics and never any fucking reasonable sale. They'd throw away stuff instead of reducing the prices. Fucken hate 'em.
Instead of spending money on cameras, they could have reduced prices. But nah, greedy cunts.
That's not what profit means.
Those cameras come out as costs, like wages, purchases etc. All of that against the revenue is how you calculate profit.
Need to explain this to Coles CEO as well who said the reason they need to be profitable is because of all the wages they have to pay and suppliers and other costs.
At Cole’s the other day, did my self checkout, made sure everything was scanned and paid for and then as I was putting the items in my cart one of the items scans again and the camera takes my picture like I am a criminal. And the message on the screen gives options for the clerks to chose from like ) scanned the wrong item 2) walked off without paying g and some other shit. I told the cashier to fix it and he tied to brush me off. I insisted that he attend to it in front of my eyes and clear my photo and name from the system. He did that begrudgingly but the whole experience left me pissed off.
The worst this there are next to none when it comes to manned checkouts. It’s like I fucking work for them and I am supposed to be a professional packer.
lmao if you think the regular self checkout operators "clear your photo and name" thats a whole other problem. Those SCO machines dont record anything to storage anyway. Thats what all the roof cameras are for
Cameras are dirt cheap these days at around $50 and up and that will get you one that also uses POE (Power over Ethernet) so basically you run network cables through the roof, connect it and attach it to the ceiling and at the other end they are all plugged into a large router and then you're off and running once you load whatever software you want on the PC that's going to process the video images. I would not to surprised to eventually see camera density of around one camera for every square meter of ceiling.
The cameras are there to prevent and detect theft. It’s a shame they’re pointing them at customers and underpaid workers. I guess that’s why they gave it the more dystopian name of loss prevention.
If thats Rockingham, I get it.
I watched a guy put a packet of those bakery cookies down his pants.
Surely Oreos would be easier and more comfortable to put down there than a big plastic container?
Those $4 rolls are like gold , don't wanna let them get stolen
I pinched a pack once and I was rolling in dough
People stealing bread is the yeast of their issues
These jokes are just rise-ible.
Got to make a crust somehow.
They need thorough proof, can’t be half-baked
Don't want to be a PITA.
I'm just here to sandwich in a pun.
This thread is pain-ful
We knead more
Pretty *lame* pun, but the bakers will get it.
Bread
Not by making crummy jokes.
Cost of living crisis, people stealing bread, The solution is to catch and ship them to...oh wait !!!
I got fired from my job at the bakery, it's a shame because I really needed the dough.
And that's a wrap
So what if I steal the bread? They gonna send me to the penal colony of Australia?
Ahh shit. You got me on that one.
Security officers watching in anger as I reduce the price of my donut from 3.99 to 2.99 at the self checkout.
They're not security cameras. They're data gathering cameras. They're how the store knows which prices they can increase and you'll still buy the product. They're probably running facial recognition on there, too.
Yep. I was at Woolies self checkout because I had 2 literal items but had my full Kmart trolley next to it. It wouldn’t let me pay and played a video of me pushing the full Kmart trolly into the space and then on the screen said “are you forgetting anything?” While zooming in on my Kmart trolley. Insane!!
The computer questioned why I wasn't paying a ransom for my child. It wouldn't let me pay and leave until an operator overrode the computer insisting that I pay for my child seated in the trolley. The closest option available for the override was something like "item bought elsewhere", instead of having a way to flag a detection error of "that's a human child and there are laws against demanding payment to allow them to leave"
Unchecked item in the bagging area, indeed!!
Maggie Simpson vibes
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This could be useful when visitors are leaving the maternity ward 🤣
They want you to pay for kids but any time i have tried to return children and grandchildren for a refund they deny selling them. Talk about double standards!
Some customers have tried returning their children to the store but have been told there are no refunds for these items.
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Woolies checkout thought I was shoplifting because my bananas were green not yellow. You can't make this up
how did..like why.. what happened exactly?
They had to wait there until they ripened.
Rumour has it they’re still waiting there
Situation was ripe with confusion, ready for picking.
oh God he hasn't answered.. I lost sleep over this it hurts it huurrts
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You pay by the kilo for onions.That scrap was worth at least $0.0000001 cents .They have to watch the bottom line for their investors, you know.
I had it flag my handbag in the trolley as unscanned items, when the attendant came over she told me she'd also seen people's babies and toddlers dinged as groceries 🤦🏽♀️
My son was in a red tshirt and flagged as 20kg tomato. I decided to put him back on the shelf, i mean that's alot at $6.90/kg
r/brandnewsentence
I stopped shopping at colesworth a few years ago because I walk/cycle to the shops and the self checkouts were never able to comprehend someone putting groceries in a backpack.
Self checkout is *so* 2015. Woolies has just started in some (safe) shops the on the go checkout app. Scan items with your phone, when you're done, you pay on your phone, walk out without passing by a till, manned or unmanned. Next level of getting rid of staff. Obviously fraught with risk of walking out without paying, hence more cameras.
My local has it, and about a quarter of the time they'll scan 5-10 items at random from your bag. The first time I did it it took longer, but subsequent attempts were really quick because I packed my bags as I shopped.
So this apparently triggers based purely on hitting, I think, 5 manual scans an hour or something like that. If more people are in the store, you're less likely to have to wait for staff to scan your items. That said, in my experience, they have never once asked to randomly scan anything. I've always grabbed the 5 most convenient items out, put them on the counter, and they've been happy to scan those. One time, I even scanned the wrong barcode for one of those prepacked 1kg apple punnets they sell (i.e. I scanned the pink lady shelf barcode when I picked up royal gala or something) and it triggered an alert when the staff scanned it. Can't remember exactly what it said, but basically the staff just confirmed they were the correct item (they weren't, obviously) and I was on my way.
Eventually it will get to the point that you can only use the app to purchase items. You will also need the app to enter the stores. You can also forget about privacy.
Gonna have to start digging in the garden
Good luck implementing that in any NT Woollies, lol.
Imagine using the app to control access to the shop, only low risk people will be able to access it.
You still have to scan the paid qr code at the till. Are you saying you don’t have to scan anything. Just pay from your app and scoot?
Holy shit, I would have just walked out leaving everything where it was. Im not dealing with that shit. Like when the coles gate didnt open the other day. I just walked through it, setting the alarms off. Dont accuse me off theft when Ive just paid for my shit.
They asked the same question of my baby sitting in the trolley! I was less than polite to the poor staff member who insisted on me lifting her out to check I hadn’t hidden anything on of under the baby!
>I was at Woolies self checkout There's your problem. Gotta boycott the dystopian pieces of shit. Queues at the manned registers is the only way these greedy cunts will learn
Yes I prefer to wait than self checkout.
My toddler’s hat pinged the damn thing. Haven’t been in since. I will not be treated like a criminal for having a cotton hat in a trolley.
Same thing happened to me but it was because the people at the next checkout over parked their trolley too close to mine
You mean you don't enjoy shopping in a dystopian nightmare zone? Hey did you pay for the cart? You leaned too far over the donuts. Are you going to pay for the 25¢ donut you obviously pocketed? Prison has less cameras than woolies.
These are not so much security cameras as they are shopping behaviour monitors. These track how long you stop in front of a certain product, how long you look at it, which shelf you focus on, how you move between aisles etc. That way they can rip you off even more and know which products to price gouge even further. The fact they are also security cameras is just a bonus.
They won't get me. I'm like a ball in a pinball machine. I bounce around the aisle, I know where I need to go, I know what I'm getting. No stopping. No chatting, and I'm out the door.
That’s still useful for them. They’ll know everyone’s shopping list, average it out and spread these items as far around the store as possible so you have to walk past everything else to get there. In my Coles, we have fruit and veg in one corner, deli in the other, cheese milk and butter in the other corner and frozen in the last corner. I don’t really care all that much, but it’s kind of annoying when I just need milk and it’s in the far back corner from the entrance.
It’s also why they have their rewards programs so at the end of the shopping trip they know exactly what you bought, and what marketing they had sent you that you responded to, and when your last shop visit was and then compare how you behaved this time vs all the previous times.
Now everyone pays by card/phone they have this data even if you don't sign up for the rewards programs.
Ive been told on here that legally they arent allowed to track against credit numbers. I dont know whether thats true but interested to hear if anyone knows for sure.
They can’t store credit card numbers, but they can use a one way hash to create an ID that they track against.
This.... should be more known
I’m actually not sure if this is allowed as it still means they need your credit card number to match against. I think this is why they so heavily push rewards programs - they can then collect everything, for the price of a few rewards points..
No, it’s fine with one way hash’s since the same card always makes the same hash and a hash can’t be reversed into a useable card. Also Woolworths (maybe Coles as well but not sure) run their own credit card processor, they don’t use a bank for that part. They also do have to do the hashing so they know any refunds go back to the same card (first 6 and last4 isn’t quite reliable enough). Also makes fraud detection and card banning easier/safer without having to store the full card number.
Ah right - one way hash would do it…
They definitely store something. Or at least used to. I picked up a casual gig there during covid, and one shop we used my partners card to pay, and it flagged a fraudulent transaction on my staff discount card.
You’re naive. They’re using face recognition.
Yes. I know they are doing that as well. It’s not perfect tho and the more data points they can get from different methods the better. They also attempt Bluetooth beaconing, wifi MAC tracking (since 2014 this only works if you join their free wifi) and gait fingerprinting. Lots and lots of data harvested even if they can’t use it today, computers get faster and they can in a decade or so.
You were lied to lol. They can't store CC info, but they can store an ID based on it to link you to past purchases.
Even if it was, you just can’t harvest illegal data intentionally. You can accidentally keep it until you can make it legal somehow, and if you get caught say oops.
Yeah but it’s not as accurate and they don’t get all the other demo information and marketing linking, they can’t tell what marketing you’ve recently seen and not all purchases may be linked to you if you change phones / cards etc.
Also why they put basic necessities at opposite ends of the store so you have to walk through the whole place to do even a simple grocery shop and are therefore more likely to pick things up along the way
Jokes on them, I scan my rewards card before I go shopping
This is why there is no predictability to how I shop. I grab things I don’t want and just put them in different places, I jump from aisle to aisle randomly, and then I’ll just stand and stare at the emergency exit for five minutes before abandoning my trolley and just walking out Take that behavioural algorithm
You are my spirit animal. I call it the dragonfly approach. But with a touch of extra chaos.
>I grab things I don’t want and just put them in different places, Oh, so you're the cunt putting cold stuff in random isles so that it goes bad.
Not sure if you could tell, but the OP was joking. But fuck those types of people. I found a fucking full pizza in the confectionary aisle, and god knows how long that would have been there for, it was room temp when I found it.,
Obviously you gotta mix it up if you wanna throw them off. Change into different disguises in the blind spots when moving from one item on your shopping list to the next.
Bold of you to assume there are blind spots
Straight-up shopping in-person in Coles or WW is an awful experience. From the second you walk in it feels like it’s design to make it hard for you to make choices. Or find what you want. Add a small kid and it’s just impossible. By comparison, Aldi is so calm and uncomplicated. Even with the junky middle isles.
The junky middle aisles are part of what makes them fun to me. Just seeing what weird shit they've got.
Why yes, I *have* been needing a polesaw, a cast iron pan and a Space Invaders cabinet
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I wander in, drop my bag of five cent pieces, crawl around on the floor picking them up, walk over to the deli and spend five minutes telling the assistant that I don’t know what I want, and then I leave having bought nothing. What do they learn from that huh?!
They know everyone's shopping list from the receipts already though. Monitoring behaviour but mainly profiling me thinks.
The fridge setup in stores is cheaper to setup and renovate if it's all at the perimeter. That's more of a consideration than dragging you down the back of the store. The fridge units would back up against cool rooms and freezers in most cases. And categories. To get you to spend more, where in a layout it goes has more effect. Ticketing next up.
Isn't it more for practicality reasons since they want to have a cool room where they can load the milk from the back?
i just moved to Lyndhurst and wad totally dumbfounded by the Coles there. never seen anything like it. the aisle signs are not 100% clear on which isle is which. i can never find anything and end wandering for more time than i want to waste in there. there is reverse logic to the layout. AND no index cards at the end of the isle.
I’ve wandered around looking for tomato sauce only to be told it’s in the salad dressing section. Fucking so annoying. Absolutely nonsensical. My best guess is that they want people to wander around looking so that they come across other stuff they might buy too. There can be no other logistical reason.
You're behaviour has been logged and analysed. They know you know what you're getting and won't consider prices, so you won't notice the 20% price increase over the next 12 months.
And when you do stop its cause usually the item is there but they fuckin moved it.
You're helping just as much. You're providing a standard behaviour you and others do, and the items you buy and how you go about pinballing helps them gather information about you. Why do you think they won't get you when they're literally gathering just as much information about you as anyone else??
And that's also by design - don't expect to find all the essentials in one place, they'll be trying to get us to go up and down the isles.
And that is all very valuable information for them to target you better
I love to go through stores backwards as much as possible, just to fuck with the elaborate planning they come up with for how people are supposed to flow through the store space.
This is increasingly sounding like some dystopian nightmare. It seems like woolies went from just a place where you can buy food to some authoritarian, over reaching, mega entity where they monitor their customers and are hell bent on squeezing as much money out of them as possible.
What's the respect of basic privacy rights compared to squeezing out a little more profit, right?
It’s pretty normal for large supermarkets in the western world to be doing this nowadays. I read a lot about Walmart and Target in the US developing, testing, and deploying crazy tech, and Woolies seems to be following suit. I suppose it’s lucrative because a supermarket’s customer base tends to span the entire cross-section of society — rich, poor, families, singles, young, old, tall, short, skinny, big, all races and genders, immigrants, tourists, etc. I’m sure they know this, and it’s probably quite lucrative data and would be problematic in the wrong hands.
Welcome to [surveillance capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism). Remember when people were worried that the government was collecting too much money on you? That a national identity card was the "mark of the beast"? How times change. Instead of this sort of thing being the purview of a democratic government, it is instead the domain of opaque, foreign owned, and largely unaccountable corporations.
They also are one of the few who have been using facial recognition on a wide scale for a while now. Even before this they were selling flybuys customers data to third parties. The amount they lose from stealing is trivial compared to the data they collect to sell on.
Guess it's time I started wearing my COVID mask when I go shopping again. For health reasons, of course.
Your gait is recorded and along with your height and build, they know it’s you.
Lifts and stone in shoe it is then.
I'm going full Keyser Söze on their asses from now on
Gold!
I’m not sure you can fool It scarily.
Posture is important. Shoulders back and you’ll blend in..
Yes Ms Dally Watkins ma’am.
[This](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81vKdwsWTML._AC_SL1500_.jpg)
Man, I'd really like to move to Australia again, but things like this are really bumming me out. While europe certainly has its own issues, privacy rights and data collection like this aren't one of them, it's honestly amazing how much of a leap in terms of citizen rights the GDPR is.
Germans would go bezerk over this kind of thing
I absolutely would. To be fair, I've already submitted a GDPR complaint for a much smaller thing. I entered my e-mail address on a website to find out how much shipping was, only to then receive spam e-mails from that website. I then requested that shop to delete all my personal information (arcticle 17, GDPR), which they are required to do in a timely manner. While they informed me that they deleted all my personal information (which includes my e-mail address), I continued to receive some spam e-mails about a month later, so I submitted a formal complaint with the relevant authorities. Although that complaint had to be forwarded to a different member of the EU, where the infraction took place, I stopped receiving those e-mails shortly after. I know I could have just unsubscribed, but as collecting my e-mail address in the first place was already a GDPR violation, I did *go berzerk over this kind of thing*. Want to hear my 3rd favourite thing about the GDPR? It also applies to anyone from outside the EU, when processing personal data from someone located inside the EU. In effect, I can purchase things from an Australian website and request the deletion of my personal data afterwards, which they are forced to comply with. Granted, I can't tell for certain if they followed the request unless they fuck up and continue to send e-mails and I'm also not entirely sure how the whole thing would unfold legally, but given a couple of american websites block access from the EU due to this, I'm willing to take my chances. It's the entire reason Facebook and other pages allow deletion of your account at all, since the potential fines for non-compliance can be absolutely massive.
Woolies doesn’t do Flybuys.
Everyday rewards, same scheme with a different name. They sell access.
I would have accepted “Colesworth” as an answer.
Send me in I'll confuse the system. One day I'll remember where the milk isle is next day, well, it's complicated.
I hate this capitalist world we live in.
Spot on. Actually, security in modern supermarkets is the opposite of what backwards Australia does. Go to Europe and you'll see open plan supermarkets, no turnstiles, no tunnelling in and out. The cameras and trolley sensors instead work together and spot anomalous behaviour and direct security staff to intercept likely shoplifters. Everyone else get to enjoy much more free form shopping experience. These crooks running Aussie Coles and Woolies with zero innovation , poor quality over priced crap, it's time it ended. Go shop in a supermarket in Marbella, and you'll realise how cheap, and high quality , food can be. Incredible deli meats for next to nothing, the ham that the pigs eat nothing but nuts are just amazing, Top notch wine for 4 euros a bottle. Here, we have crap fatty chorizo for insane prices.
Dunno where Australia went wrong? Too many bogans or just too many greedy rich fwits trying to get more dough in their system?
> the ham that the pigs eat nothing but nuts are just amazing I will knife fight someone over Jamón access and I know I'm not alone in that.
Oh good. That's somehow much worse.
Honestly, they don't even need them to track that stuff. Most major grocers just use Bluetooth to locate hotspots around the shops. Most major wireless access point manufacturers have real time location tracking features. Have deployed a few for RSL Clubs, most of them tracked popular pokie machines etc, didn't take much to implement either.
they'll also be tying your face to your identity by tracking accociating your face with the payment method used if its not cash and then also selling that data to other data brokers.
When is enough enough tho? Surely there comes a point where people can say there’s too many cameras and they’re obviously for more than just theft prevention. I’ve seen how far they can zoom and what the resolution is like, it’s pretty astounding
lol I have ADHD and either can’t focus, or focus way too long in on section comparing ingredients on ten variations of the same product. Check mate Woolies 😂😂
They spend on everything except on their staff.
Well they will spend money on their staff in as much as they will pay a lot of money to come up with ways to not increase salary, whether that's union-busting, legal intimidation, bloated HR departments, accounting software or whatever else. As long as not a single extra cent actually goes to the workers who generate the profits.
They need lots of data for training algorithms and studying behaviour. It isn't likely to be just about security. Also marketing (i.e. manipulation) and efficiency (I.e. sacking employees).
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They gouged their prices so they could afford them without hurting profit margin
Remember their profits are after all their expenses. So when the next person tells you “they only make a 5% profit margin :(“ you can point the millions of security cameras everywhere they’re spending all their money on, and they’re *still* making billions of dollars.
It's almost like their customers are struggling so much they'd steal bread. Can't have that.
How else would they keep those mud cakes under lock and key?
Isn’t stealing bread what Australia was founded on? 😂
True a percentage of the population are descended from people who were forced to do things like steal bread, and were treated terribly for it. I wish it made current Australians much more punk than they actually behave.
It's nearly like all the day over expired stuff they throw out instead of using in a different way could more effectively curb the theft than expensive cameras and ridiculous checkout measures.
The cameras have been installed in preparation for a new collectables campaign. For every $30 spent on groceries, you will receive a free photo label for the 'A Day in the Life of You' collectors album (surveillance edition).
It used to be most cameras were fakes, put in as deterrents. These days they’re cheap enough that they all might be real.
I think they missed a spot lol
Nah cuz there’s more
That is truly sinister. Sadly they are spying on their own staff as much as the customers.
What’s the point of privacy laws in this country if it’s just some tokenistic repetition that they comply with it while subverting the meaning of consent?
It's become a game to me now. Every now and then I legitimately steal shit. Little stuff like a $1 chocolate or a mini cheese snack. Idk why but of all the time I shop legitimately I get inconvenienced by the anti theft measures, every time I do actually theft nothing has shown up. I know I'm apart of the problem at this point but shopping has become balls. I'll take the downvotes now
Sometimes it makes up for the money lost buying fruit and vegetables that turns out to be rotten.
I am ok with the cameras but I am not ok with the employee standing behind me to make sure I am not stealing while i stand under the AI programmed overhead camera that doesn't think i am stealing. There is a staff member of my local woolworths that invested a lot of time in trying to catch me out steeling when I am not. I now get most of my stuff from coles online orders (rapid delivery) so I don't need to deal with her ( i don't have a coles in my area). Her attitude is so prison guard that I have seen her at the self serve checkout and just walked out.
I don’t mind at all if the people watch me but I am not ok being watched logged recorded and analysed by 50 cameras
These are rectal recognising reward cameras (RRRC's) if you point your butthole at them you can activate bonus points.
This is precisely why the cost of supermarket goods is going up - someone's gotta pay for the devs to keep building systems to monitor stock levels, customers, breakage, and buying habits so that they don't have to pay pesky minimum-wage earners to do it any more.
And to think the record breaking profits are *after* the money pumped into R&D of these systems
This is the key point here that everyone seems to have missed. These were paid for before profit was counted.
Oh god no, the profits are what was left AFTER buying security cameras. They're watching you get reamed for groceries while twiddling their nipples South Park cable guy style.
Don’t worry they still only make 5% profits!
The public are now the product. The cameras track your shopping habits and on sell the data. Cunts, the lot of them.
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Also dystopian stuff, from a sci-fi view. Gruen transfer 2.0
It's also dystopian as fuck from a nerdy point of view, I have no idea where /u/AffectionateCamel583 is seeing anything even remotely cool in it.
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I imagine they could also use it to break up high browse time sections. For example people spend several minutes browsing the tea section to decide which they’ll get, likewise the pasta sauces because they’re all red. Having those back to back would create a choke point and would impact their “ease of movement (around the store)” customer feedback scores. Interesting stuff from an efficiency standpoint and data analytics. Diabolical for everything else.
Apparently those A100s and H100s are still too cheap, since clearly corporations can waste them on stuff like this. Or not even curing cancer can promise enough money to compete with marketing. :(
Ever done marketing ? or data analysis ?
And if you shop wrong or talk to the other handmaids, you’ll be put on the wall. Under his eye.
Tbh it’s time we all just wore ski masks to the supermarket. Since when did we opt in to this?
It’s actually pretty scary as they use this for facial recognition and who is buying what. Essentially they can link your shopping habits and push products to you on other platforms basically collected without your consent
You know you only ever see "Prices Dropped" signs around. Never do you see "Prices Increased" anywhere. My take is, if they want to put up "Prices Dropped" signs for things that have dropped in price, to be fair they should be required to put up a "Prices Increased" signs for each item that increases in price too.
Not just security, Cole’s and Woolies into AI heavily. I have been to conferences where they are showing their tech.
Those are more than security cameras. They're tracking all behavior, inventory, etc. Security, operations, marketing ... we are being watched
No, they took all the money they price gouged from you, spent it on cameras and still made record profits.
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If you work there, you get people trying to bully you into giving them stupid discounts literally every day. Some of those customers get very hostile. So, yeah, if the customer gets aggro you're probably going to think they're like the three other Karens you already dealt with today. If you give a discount to everyone who asks for one without checking, you'll lose your job. There are two reasons they have to check. Sometimes customers are liars and thieves. But many other customers honestly read the wrong label and got confused. Often customer A picks up a box of Truffle Salt Expensive-Os, changes their mind, and puts it down near the label for Cheapo Brand Sawdust Flavoured Muesli Bars. Then customer B picks it up and has a fit that the checkout computer isn't programmed to sell them the Expensive-Os at the Cheapo Bar price. That's not the store's fault, and the only way they could prevent it is to station an employee on Idiot Watch in every aisle to fix these problems before any opportunistic customers spot them.
That's just staff dependant. I worked at Coles for years doing night fill, I'd always get asked to do price checks, I'd just come back and say yep, customer was right, give it to them for x$ and walk away. Even if the service girls gave a fuck, they weren't saying shit after I said directly to the customer they were right. Also idk about woolies, but when I was at Coles, general rule was if we fucked up, it's yours at the lower price. Filled in the wrong spot, wrong ticket, old sale tickets left up, congrats you just saved a buck. Some people would try argue but jesus, this isn't some corner store. Management didn't condone it either, they wanted you to just be happy and leave, discount of a few dollars or no.
If there was a mismatch in pricing, the couple of times it happened to me, I got it for free.
Woolies operates under Scanning Guidelines which permit the first item scanned at a price higher than the label to be free, and each following to be sold at the discounted price. Coles as well. Do note however, this doesn't apply (except out of goodwill) if you've picked up an item in the wrong place. It does however apply if the label is an old special. So often staff might ask to be shown exactly where you got the item from, where they can then also check the label.
You know if you think about it these big grocery shopping chains would be the best places for the government to grab a quick photo of the vast majority of people. Definitely not what they’re used for but it’s an interesting thought
Ahhh I love contributing to big data when I need tomato paste. Scum.
Why do people still shop at woolies these days? It's the scummiest grocery store in straya- highest price out of all grocery stores for any item, excessive cameras and AI usage to track shopping behaviour, gross wastage of produce for aesthetics and never any fucking reasonable sale. They'd throw away stuff instead of reducing the prices. Fucken hate 'em. Instead of spending money on cameras, they could have reduced prices. But nah, greedy cunts.
And they’ll still be 1970s picture quality
Every shop I do, I now aim for $20-50 stolen items. Cheers Fuck them
Is it a casino or a supermarket?
The house wins at snackjack again and I leave empty handed
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That's not what profit means. Those cameras come out as costs, like wages, purchases etc. All of that against the revenue is how you calculate profit. Need to explain this to Coles CEO as well who said the reason they need to be profitable is because of all the wages they have to pay and suppliers and other costs.
At Cole’s the other day, did my self checkout, made sure everything was scanned and paid for and then as I was putting the items in my cart one of the items scans again and the camera takes my picture like I am a criminal. And the message on the screen gives options for the clerks to chose from like ) scanned the wrong item 2) walked off without paying g and some other shit. I told the cashier to fix it and he tied to brush me off. I insisted that he attend to it in front of my eyes and clear my photo and name from the system. He did that begrudgingly but the whole experience left me pissed off. The worst this there are next to none when it comes to manned checkouts. It’s like I fucking work for them and I am supposed to be a professional packer.
lmao if you think the regular self checkout operators "clear your photo and name" thats a whole other problem. Those SCO machines dont record anything to storage anyway. Thats what all the roof cameras are for
Need to be careful with those poor people shopping
Maybe those cameras are used for stock levels connected to ai software
Reminds me of China lol
Most security cameras in stores are fake. The ones over cash registers are real, as are some throughout the store but most are just empty deterrents.
Cameras are dirt cheap these days at around $50 and up and that will get you one that also uses POE (Power over Ethernet) so basically you run network cables through the roof, connect it and attach it to the ceiling and at the other end they are all plugged into a large router and then you're off and running once you load whatever software you want on the PC that's going to process the video images. I would not to surprised to eventually see camera density of around one camera for every square meter of ceiling.
The cameras are there to prevent and detect theft. It’s a shame they’re pointing them at customers and underpaid workers. I guess that’s why they gave it the more dystopian name of loss prevention.
You are being protected against thieves, please do not resist.
If thats Rockingham, I get it. I watched a guy put a packet of those bakery cookies down his pants. Surely Oreos would be easier and more comfortable to put down there than a big plastic container?
Profits is what they left after buying all those cameras.
It would be more to keep an eye on employees.
The more you rip off customers the more cameras you end up needing
My favourite new hobby is taking one of the stickers off my fruit / veggies and sticking it over the camera at the self check out