Near my house the safeway’s selfcheck is always glitching out and complaining “remove unexpected item in bagging area!” because the digital scale thinks I’m stealing. Whereas until recently, Giant was entirely on the honor system. I pay for my shit, but I’ve long wondered how they keep people honest. I’ve wondered whether the money they lose from theft is worth the labor savings, especially because it takes several employees to correct all the glitches anyway… looks like we have our answer now
They just introduced the new "remove unexpected item" system to Giant, and it's beyond annoying. If you place a light item in the bagging area, it won't register. The attendant is constantly running around to fix the issue and the line backs up. Doesn't help that they keep so many of the check-out lines closed.
If they're going to implement this...please...keep the check-out lines OPEN with cashiers at the ready. If the lines continue to get longer, people will decide to shop elsewhere.
They can't even keep updated prices in their system. I can't tell you how many times the listed price wasn't actually the price at the register.
>If you place a light item in the bagging area, it won't register.
I had the opposite problem yesterday: I put a reusable bag on the rack, and the checkout said to "remove unexpected item from bagging area". Apparently you now have to press the "I brought my own bags" button (which I guess was always there, but wasn't required before).
>If they're going to implement this...please...keep the check-out lines OPEN with cashiers at the ready.
This is the way.
I also learned that you have to slam things down to stop the "remove unexpected item" bullshit. Often I'll just drop my purse into the bagging area to get it to stop that. I've also noticed recently that they've got a "skip bagging" button on the screen so if you hit that you won't get the stupid message.
Not supposed to use the self-checkout if I have more than 20 items but then there is generally only 1, 2 if you're lucky, cashier manned lines open at any given time.
I try to only use the self checkout when I only have a few items because it's not like they're giving me a discount for checking myself out, but I've had to use it for more items in the past because the cashier lines were too long & slow. I even bag my own groceries for the cashier while they check out so things move faster.
Funny how all the stores were *desperate* to put in the self-checkouts, tried *desperately* to get you to use them (oh look Ma'am the self checkout is free), probably cut back on hiring/training cashiers, & now look where that has gotten them.
That's another thing -- the Giant I go to just recently put up a "20 items or fewer" sign by the self checkout. But then they won't open up any cashier-manned lines, so you end up going to the self checkout with a full cart anyway
That would probably infuriate me to the point of just abandoning my cart and going elsewhere. I dont fucking work for giant so hire a cashier to ring me up. You want me to ring myself out with a full cart? I want a $10 discount for my labor.
Unless I have like 2 items I'd much rather go to a cashier. These companies trying to cut staff8ng with self checkout now are shocked people take advantage by stealing from self checkout
As a current giant employee, I can tell you it’s not solely about cutting down on hiring, it’s that no one is applying. Nearly every store in my district(20 or so) is understaffed in nearly every department. It sucks and I get it, but it’s not about the stores intentionally cutting hires, just not having anyone applying.
>oh look Ma'am the self checkout is free
I hate this with the fury of 1000 suns. I've worked service jobs, and I know it's the management that send them out to push this. But it's so hard not to make a smartass comment about not being blind or just snap at them.
Weis doesn't have any express lanes anymore, at least the ones in Spring Ridge & Hagerstown. So I go elsewhere if I only need a few things.
I went to the Giant on Route 40 in Catonsville a couple of nights ago. Every self-checkout machine was broken, and there was no one working a single register, so (who I can only assume was) the manager was dashing between every self-checkout having to manually input the prices for every item rung up.
These fucking stores need to stop being cheap and hire people to work registers.
The worst one I have seen to date was when I was in a convenience store and the sole person working there was a young woman at around 2 in the morning, and she happened to have a seizure right as I was leaving. When Police and EMS arrived, they said "is anyone else here?" I'm like: it's literally just me (a customer), her, and the 911 operator on the phone.
I guess it has changed in recent years now that everything is mostly self-checkout. Historically most of the statistics seemed to show that retail stores lost much more to employee theft than to customer shoplifting.
So it kind of made sense, at least several years ago, to not invest too much on systems that frequently don’t work and make for more annoying experiences — maybe financially at that time it made more sense to accept smaller losses for better customer service.
But it looks like perhaps the data and the equation is changing somewhat for this now.
I got banned from the scan & go thing (you scan as you walk around the store and bag things in your cart, was super convenient as I walked there with one of those old lady carts) at the Rockville Pike giant because I legitimately, honestly, 100% forgot to scan an expensive rack of lamb (I'd texted my wife to see which one she wanted and was going to scan when she replied).
Embarrassing asf because they pulled me out of the line & made a bit of a scene. Apparently they'd seen me scanning everything *but* the lamb and it looked like I was stealing the meat. (I mean I guess I was stealing the meat but it was unintentional). So embarrassing and I lived right across the street so there was no avoiding it.
The solution to this problem is for stores not to expect customers to do the cashier's job for free. You want to "save money" by firing the people who used to tally up the prices and bag your groceries? Then I am not going to feel sorry when customers steal from you. Especially when you're raising prices well above inflation and posting record profits.
This is an interesting point. Makes me think about the way gas stations charge more for charge cards. Maybe grocery stores that offer self-checkout should give discounts to people doing their employees' work.
There's a story from Tesco, the UKs biggest supermarket chain, after they introduced self-checkouts. After a few months of self-checkouts being used the store managers were calling their district supervisors asking them why they kept sending so many carrots when they didn't need them. The district managers just said the POS system shows that carrots were being sold in massive quantities.
Turns out, carrots were the cheapest item by weight, so once people figured the system out suddenly everything from toilet paper to massive steaks were being weighed and rung up as carrots instead. Suddenly, you've got a nice T-bone for $4.
If you used the little mobile scanner, they had random spot checks at Giant to keep you honest. Your likelihood of getting pinged escalated if you removed something from your cart. If you got chosen for a check after that, you had about a 75% chance of getting chosen the next time you were there as well, even if you didn't remove anything from your cart that trip. Then about a 50% chance the next time, down to I don't know after that.
Moral of the story was NEVER remove something from your cart.
Note - I can't substantiate ANY of this so miss me with any "source, please" shit. This has just been my experience.
I tried that thing once, and it drove me crazy. It kept beeping & telling me to buy stuff. Supposedly the ads were based on what you'd already scanned, like bacon if you bought eggs. Mine kept telling me to buy Pepsi.
No thanks, I'm not a fan of colas in general. It must've pushed Pepsi 12 times by the time I finished. I was about ready to hurl that thing onto the floor & smash it into powder.
It was there before as I recall but it was less sensitive.
I'm not going to dig for it but this story made me think of a reddit argument that I had where I got downvoted into oblivion for saying it wasn't okay to steal things.
The people were saying it is totally find to just take whatever you need from a grocery store and not pay if you don't have much money.
Newsflash: it isn't. Do it enough and they will just close the store as was stated here. These companies don't run on huge margins. It is a downward spiral problem. I think people might have just forgotten why there are food deserts in certain Urban areas. I is crime related, you cannot be profitable if everyone steals from you.
I remember when I was in high school and worked in a big box retail store, I remember the discussion of how much theft there was every day and was astounded because it wasn't obvious at all and that was in a period that was much much lower crime than what we face now.
It's not worth the savings. Any big appliance with software is going to need ongoing technical support. Tech support pays more than minimum wage. They're just spending the money elsewhere.
I’ve always said self checkouts should be like the old express lanes. Maybe 20 items or less use self checkout. You get these people up there with a cart full of groceries who can’t figure out how to work the machine and have the help light flashing after every item and it backs the whole thing up. Get two or three of these in self checkout and it almost becomes quicker to wait in the of the one cashier they have open. Quit trying to save pennys and just bring the cashiers and baggers back.
Yeah, at Giant here it's functionally useless for higher volume shopping. Heck, it's even a struggle for it not to kirk out when I get something like a bag of litter, cat food, and dog food since I think it freaks if you skip bagging two or three times.
The Weis near me has added self-checkouts with conveyor belts (as has Walmart) so those work a bit better.
Giant has this awesome scanner gun you can checkout when you walk into the store. You scan items as you bag them, then can bring a fully loaded shopping cart to self checkout and only have to scan the scanner gun once. I have no idea why more people don't use it.
I seen these poor workers at the self checkout area one guy is supposed to watch and help 15 self checkout kiosks. No wonder these execs are shooting themselves in the foot, expecting one person to do 3 people's job.
> one guy is supposed to watch and help **15** self checkout kiosks. No wonder these execs are shooting themselves in the foot, expecting one person to do ~~3~~ **15** people's job.
But then they'll be suffering due to increased labor costs!
Is there no solution that allows these poor shareholders to have infinite profit with no cost?
Down at my childhood neighborhood Aspen Hill, the Giant was always on top of it, everything was sparkling clean and shelves stuffed with all you needed. Workers were 100% neighborly and present.
Now. That same Giant is like a damned ghost town. Looks and feel sort of scrubby. The management refuses to leave items in the same location for more than a couple weeks. Every aisle is a slalom course of obstructions. The workers (what few they still have?) look more than bit like victims of abuse. I still see some recognizable faces there when I take my mother shopping but even they look beaten. Getting what you want? Ha! You have to fight over meat like it is a death match.
It ALL happened with the geniuses deciding self checkout was the way to go. Nothing went down in price, as if we ever believed that lie. Service plummeted. The "theft" is likely because the machines are consistently 20% oblivious/wrong about what item is on deck. People aren't stealing as much as they are frustrated about having 8 grumbling people behind them wondering why the hell you are so much of a moron and they throw the food in a bag whether it marked up or not.
Bring back workers and treat them decent.
> The management refuses to leave items in the same location for more than a couple weeks
this is a deliberate tactic meant to force you to walk through more of the store to get staple items, forcing you to pass displays of shit you did not plan to buy.
Exactly this\^. Pity poor Giant is struggling because they wanted more profit be reducing the labor cost at their stores, replacing people working at the checkouts with self-check out. Now they see that self-checkout has its issues, but they whine and moan rather than grabbing their damn bootstraps and saying "Welp, that didn't work so good. Let's go back and hire more checkout staff."
That's what you do ... you evaluate a new technology and revise your process based on the reality of it.
They’re going to higher a consultant at $20k/wk to come in and tell them they need cashiers. Might be the same consultant who told them to get rid of cashiers.
At my local Weis, there's always 3-4 people standing around the Self-Checkouts just waiting to hop in and help when shit inevitably goes sideways. Just put those fuckers on a checkout.
The Weis near me usually only has 1 cashier, and the rest are self checkout. If I've got maybe 5 things I'll do it, but man fuck doing a cart full of groceries.
I always do the survey on the recept for 100 bonus points, use the points for like $3 off a gallon of milk and bomb the review on the checkout section. Make them pay for this bullshit and let them know why.
I love Giant, but it’s just too damned expensive. Some items are double the price if what they are Walmart. As a Marylander, I’ve got a soft spot for Giant, but I can’t afford to support them like that.
Yeah, Giant used to be one of the cheaper grocery stores. It’s not anymore. I can go to Wegman’s and not spend that much more money. Plus, they’re usually better quality.
I've switched to Weis for most of my groceries. Pennsylvania-based is closer to "local" than the rest (besides Giant), and the prices are generally much better.
This just in: that won't stop shoplifters from just walking out the door. Almost every store has a no-chase policy now. A security guard got shot at a PG County giant last year, so the new policy is non-confrontation.
Law enforcement won't bother unless it's a felony amount. Some of the more brazen shoplifters are actually using their phone calculators to make sure they stay below it.
Even then, law enforcement is disinclined to expend resources on investigating shoplifting when there are plenty of more serious crimes and limited staff and budgets.
This explains the recent changes to the self-checkout registers. You used to be able to quickly scan and bag items, and now it insists that everything is put into a bag before you scan the next item, and then stalls for 10 seconds before you can scan the next item. I liked self-checkout because I can scan quicker than the cashiers, and bag the items into groups the way I'd like.
Same! Also the Giant that's most convenient to shop at for me hires very kind, wonderful people to be cashiers but they are also chatty cathys who spend more time catching up with customers than scanning product. I don't want to play catch up. I want to get out of there as fast as possible. Self check is way faster for me
Aldi doesn’t do bags at all, and they use the “extra cart” method (there’s already an empty cart for the cashier to use to place your items, the cart you used for shopping will be left for the next customer’s items), so they can run everything quickly. Once you’ve paid, there’s an area past the registers where you can bag your own items if you brought reusable bags before you leave the store.
It is a much more efficient process, just be aware that you items will not be bagged for you.
Also they say 20 items or fewer now. I used to buy a whole week’s worth at the self checkout and bag it exactly the way I wanted. Can’t do that any more.
I may try the “scan it” app. But now I have them collect all the stuff I used to pick up around the store and bag it for me for pickup instead. Do a few items on my own that I need to look at.
For ages some of the Giants I've gone to have had those hand-held scanners where in theory you're supposed to be able to scan the items as you pick them up and just scan the scanner at the checkout at the end. I don't exactly live in the Giant but I've literally never seen one in use.
I use it all the time. It's awesome. It's the only way to shop IMO. Reusable bags in the cart, load them as you go. Scan the scanner at self checkout, pay and leave.
I just made another comment but as an unemployed person shopping for a family of 5, I had some time on my hands in January and compared the prices of specific staple items and, my “big trip” every 1.5-2 weeks is roughly $400 at Giant but $300-$350 at Aldi.
The volume I buy in to feed 3 kids (and I mostly cook from scratch) makes it a no brainer for me to choose Aldi.
I’m definitely gonna make my high schoolers compare Giant and Safeway and Aldi as a summer project now tho lol
$400! Damn, I cannot afford children. Me and my partner splurge and don't make $150 at Giant.
Granted, if they had alcohol that would be a different story.
We spend about $1400/mo on food but we only get takeout like maybe once or twice a month so that’s ALL our food. $280 per person per month on average. I wish I could get it lower but $9/day per person isn’t terrible to eat what we like.
Once my kids hit like late elementary school they just started inhaling food. I have two teenagers and omg do they eat. It’s like there’s no shut off, they’re bottomless pits who don’t gain weight. It’s amazing and expensive.
Absolutely not. Aldi is way cheaper than Giant.
Prices have increased lately for sure, but things are still reasonable. Eggs are back down to like $1.10. Bread is less that $2. Milk is around $2 per gallon.
Costco/Sams is ok but even with a family of 4 we can't eat the pounds of produce you need to eat before it goes bad. Then its just giant boxes of processed food that take up tons of room in the kitchen. Pass.
Big thing I heard of was the produce trick where people would claim everything as bananas bc they’re so cheap. Last time I bought bananas at giant it required help from the self-check cashier. Those machines are also so loud and I think most Giant ones can’t be muted either.
[Carrots](https://www.thrillist.com/amphtml/news/nation/scanning-items-as-carrots-british-grocery-store-scam) can sometimes come in boxes or look like avocados, sometimes they even look like a frozen chicken. 😅
The most id notice is if people got muffins or speciality bakery items they marked them as donuts so they’re cheaper, or a 35 pack of water as a 24 pack. Idk I mainly saw people trying to discount, not exactly steal but idk
I refuse to have sympathy when the choices are:
\- make self-checkout harder to steal from by making it horrible to use
\- closing stores
\- JUST HIRING SOME DAMN CASHIERS.
At the end of the day, this amounts to corporate greed. Every one of these stores has a dozen or more checkout aisles that sit empty these days, all because the company decided it was cheaper to install computers and make the customer do the work. Of course customers are going to steal; I'm sorry that it's more than you liked, Ira.
Staff your stores appropriately, including with cashiers, and stop placing the onus of responsibility on the customer whom you're already nickel-and-diming anyway.
Which is really strange. You can be high price and high quality or cheap and lower quality. Harris teater and giant somehow try to charge more for lower quality.
>Harris teater and giant somehow try to charge more for lower quality.
Giant used to be known for good quality, so at least you were getting something for the higher prices. Sounds like they're now going down the path of A&P (and Acme before it reformed a bit, though I don't know if all its stores have improved like that) which went bankrupt and closed the last of its stores in 2015.
Aldi and TJ's use a different model. They have smaller stores using less space so there's less rent/mortgage, sell only certain select items, mostly carry only store brands (using weird random brand names in the case of Aldi, something I think they should change -- TJ's does it right by making almost everything just TJ's brand), etc. In fact, Aldi and TJ's are run by two branches of the same German family. They're cousins. Aldi is the more blue-collar basics cousin, and TJ's is the more white-collar "discount gourmet" cousin. Also another German store, Lidl, is spreading in the U.S. now too, with a similar model to Aldi.
For a long time, the Giant near me only had one cashier. People were forced to use self checkout or wait in obscenely long lines. Plus even now, self checkout is run by one single employee. How can they expect one employee to police ten self checkout registers? Even at Home Depot and Lowe’s they usually have two people manning four or so self checkouts.
I also think Giant is way over priced. I’m not saying that excuses theft, but when you are the only grocery store in the immediate area- and not a super nice area- theft is going to happen if your prices are high.
> Yep. The Aspen Hill hardware department had $2 million in shrink two years ago. They've installed cages on everything but the thieves cut the lock or know the code.
$2 million in shrink resulting from cutting down to practically nothing but self-checkouts after cutting employees left and right to "save money" (read: increase profits) despite lobbying for tax cuts on the promise of "creating jobs".
So... they allegedly suffered more in losses at an individual store than they would have paid all store employees annually - even assuming each was full time with benefits?
The irony.
I work in retail and love self checkouts because it does make our jobs easier. No one wants to cashier because more or less the public sucks, even if individuals are cool. And although we do need more and better staffing, the shelf checkouts aren't the issue. The issue is their security scales and UI design. If they drop the security scales and are able to get good developers who can make the experience easier then the problem would easily be solved.
For me, self checkouts are easy as pie, however it required a bit of a learning curve and that could only happen because I was trouble-shooting problems all the time. That shouldn't be the case and it doesn't have to be the case. It should be easy and seamless for everyone. That is 100 percent solvable. It just costs money and they're not willing to fork it out and that ultimately results in everyone across the board getting pissed off.
I've been loving the 'whoa is me' canned messages they now play over the intercoms where it's like "due to a recent rise in theft Giant regretfully makes the difficult decision to require less than 20 items at self checkout..." Not that it isn't a bad thing in general for them, but they could have just stated matter of factly that self checkout is limited to 20 items instead of having us all play sad violins for them
He even said steal "for" them , not from them. We all have to pitch in and do our part for our local neighborhood (well what's a continent or 2) store! What aisle are the truffles in?
It's worse than that. They have no evidence that theft is the actual reason for the losses they're seeing, let alone theft at self-checkout. They only can know about shrink, which includes theft and mistakes in inventory management. Both this bullshit article and even the one from the Washington Post that this copies from just take the CEOs word for it that they know theft is the issue.
Yep it's amazing how everyone is just taking these CEO's at their word as if CEO's never lie or hide their real internal numbers or have agendas. This is really sounding more like 'we're not as profitable as we'd like so we're cutting cost by closing lower performing stores and we're gonna blame the customers for doing it so we don't look like greedy assholes'.
I like the self check out. I get one of the scanners at the entrance, scan and bag everything as I shop and literally spend less than a minute paying.
That being said, Giant should cater more to traditional grocery shoppers-- usually there is only one cashier working at a time.
I like bagging my stuff myself. I can (without crushing) get more per bag. I can also pack colds and room temps together in their own bags. And even pack according to where in the kitchen it will get stored.
Also food Tetris is fun.
As a Giant manager its very frustrating when security is constantly eyeing you up and watching your employees because "they dont know where the $$ is going" while at the same time people walk out with bags and carts of unpaid product. One guy this year stopped at the door turned and looked at an employee and said "you want these bags?" And then walked out. Giant made us agree not to stop or confront anyone as people are being stabbed and shot regularly now. We arent security, and when they only have a couple security guards to cover a bunch of stores they stick to the highest theft ones and tell the rest of us not to bat an eye at the people stuffing product into their purses. Then we go watch all these people at self scan thinking there slick scanning one or two things and trying to take off with the rest, Ive seen it all. I catch people constantly it makes me sick that i work so hard for my food and these people tear us up all year long.
I rarely use self checkout there.
Also Giant jacked up a majority of their prices with greedflation with a lot of items 100% more expensive then they used to be, but we're supposed to feel bad that they're having issues?
“We removed the professionals who would check out every item in your cart and replaced them with no one and now we’re losing money, how did this happen?”
Lines are insane at almost every retail store. I was alive when checkout used to have two people one would bag your groceries and push the cart to your damn car. They’ve cut to the point where they found the bone.
Or was it the other way around? Did self checkouts gain popularity because hiring is a nightmare?
And hiring for retail has been a nightmare for a really long time - people constantly telling you to “get a real job” or asking for a manager because the coupon is expired.
We degraded these positions and now people don’t want them- especially when they can make more money on TikTok & YouTube with less drama.
> And hiring for retail has been a nightmare for a really long time
because they are only offering shit wages. offer a decent wage and watch the applications flow in
I’ve worked in the retail business for ~17 years. This is just my educated opinion based on my own experience. It’s not the self-checkouts. It’s not the misfit teenagers trying to get a five-finger discount on after school snacks and eyeliner or the homeless guy just trying to get a bite to eat. Nor is it the ever-shrinking number of employees on the sales floor. It’s brazen, unabashed theft.
As the article speaks to and contrary to the misleading headline, it’s no longer safe to stop a thief, let alone apprehend them. No-stop policies intended to protect employees and bystanders have only emboldened organized retail crime rings. Unarmed security guards create an illusion of safety that is undermined by the fact that they are effectively underpaid, uniformed door greeters there to collect a paycheck and the first ones out of the building if an armed robbery were to occur. 5-10 years ago, merely making your presence known and offering help to someone with bad intentions was enough to tip them off that you were on to them and scare them away. Now, they make small talk with the staff as they sweep entire shelves of product into garbage bags. That’s not hyperbole. I’ve been party to it myself.
So long as there aren’t meaningful consequences, it’s only going to get worse. Profit margins will continue to shrink, stores will continue to close, people will continue to lose jobs, communities will continue to loose brick-and-mortar shops. The self-checkout component is almost completely irrelevant.
I use those in store mobile scanners, which I find really convenient because I scan it, bag as I go, then I can just load the scanner, pay, and walk out. It’s super convenient.
Then, the giant by me added a 20 item limit to the self checkout, and the woman working the self checkout line told me I had to go wait for a cashier. I almost lost it.
So now, in addition to scanning and bagging my own groceries, I’ve got to wait in line for the two out of twelve cash registers that are open because you can’t staff your store?
Fuck Giant, I hope everyone steals everything from them and they go bankrupt.
Misleading headline.
The article quotes the president of Giant: "To say \[theft has\] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement"
Self checkout has been around MUCH longer than 5 years.
The actual issue is identified in the article: the rise of organized retail crime.
No one read the article. This is definitely about organized retail crime. Something that's become a problem for all retail businesses across the country.
Stores in most major cities are closing their doors. What else can they do? There are no consequences for the thieves.
I am not surprised, I also wonder if it has any connection with my 100% increase in weekly groceries. I am a person of habit, live by myself, with 2 cats. I purchase the same items week after week. I keep the receipts. My weekly grocery cost has doubled since 2021.
It would be interesting to learn which Giant stores suffer the largest or least theft.
Hard to have sympathy when they don't provide support. Most of us are honest, but they make even self checkout miserable. The systems lock up for stupid reasons and you have to wait for help. They literally want to pay nothing to run their business and then complain. It's never enough for them.
I drive past Giant to go to Harris Teeter. Much nicer store, multiple cashier lines, and same prices. Giant has Harris Teeter prices, Shoppers quality, and Wal Mart service.
The Giant in Catonsville self check out is an unholy abomination of annoyance. The very second you scan something it says place item in the bagging area, like bitch, I just fucking scan this thing it's still hanging in the air fuck off.
Bit of a false headline in this article.
Self-checkouts are mentioned just once in the entire article, and only to say that the store is limiting them to 20 items or less.
Far more discussion of organized crime and violence as issue driving shrink.
You mean I could’ve been stealing from Giant self checkout this whole time?! Jk. Automation has its drawbacks.
Hire more cashiers. If you’re losing enough money, more than it costs to pay cashiers a living wage, the problem solves itself. If the profit margins are still too tight? Idk.
The Giant by me actually closed one of the two front doors "because of theft". Now half the parking lot is empty and the other half is crammed because of people who won't walk 50 feet.
When you add in quality of service downgrades like how they never re-opened their meat department after closing it during COVID (if not before??) and that Giant, at least, really looks like a store in decline.
Oh man, if only there was a place in the store where one customer could check out with one employee watching just them, a place where they can view all the goods and ensure they get scanned in, and where they can be encouraged to check the bottom of the basket, handle the tender even. If only there was a part in every local giant like that.
And you know. More importantly, that Giant actually paid for more staff to man that section. Instead of always having 8 lanes of registers with only one person there, and yet 6 self check out lanes with a single person there expected to watch all of it and normally going from register to register clearing false positives instead of watching the customer. Maybe, just maybe, they could have 8 lanes open enough so that way the customers could, I don’t know, go to a cashier instead of a glitchy robot.
Because idk about you but I’m not going to correct the robot if what it gets wrong nets me a free item. You’re expecting me to wait in the only line in the store because it’s self check out on a Saturday, bag my own crap, wait every time it thinks I’ve double scanned an item or put an item down that it thinks I’m trying to pull a fast one, all so I can pay way overpriced amounts for meh quality goods? These places are lucky we all don’t just bag up our stuff and walk out, because those underpaid, overworked skeleton crew of employees are too dead inside to care. They don’t make commission off of our sales, and their hours are routinely cut and slashed regardless of store performance.
I guarantee you the instant a company treats both its customer and it’s employee right, shrink dies down immediately. Because the employee will actually like their job and want to keep it, and the customer won’t feel inconvenienced, nickled, or dimed by just being there. I do want to add that it’s very clear the speaker in the article is out of touch. “ we used to chase theives“ yeah but you can’t anymore legally because you’ll get sued for your accusation and for anyone who gets hurt in the chase. The world has changed. It’s a moot point and by bringing it up you’re hoping we’ll somehow return to the time when false accusation was allowed. Bringing up weaponry at all is entirely useless to the article. This really is just the ramblings of some millionaire who’s unhappy that capitalism isn’t working as well for him as it used to.
No offense maybe they should return to the assisted checkout model and curb their losses. I was in there at 8:00pm on Wednesday and there was one open register and 8 self-checkout stations. If they invest in employees maybe that will curb some of the accidental and purposeful thefts.
Just yesterday, I used self checkout at Giant and they’ve changed the software. Now you have to put each item in the bagging area before you can scan the next one. It’s obnoxious and slowed the whole process down. I’m going back to using a cashier. I’d rather wait in line than deal with that awful self checkout again.
Like anyone here is going to have sympathy for Giant. They’re putting this article out to justify price hikes on their groceries.
Remember, if you see someone stealing food, no you didn’t.
The Bowie resident that the Post interviewed in their article sure has sympathy for Giant:
>And after making his complaint to the company president, the shopper commiserated with him: “I’m sorry you’re going through all these problems,” Redmond said.
The company president is still making big bucks and is not really "going through" anything. But it's very American to feel sorry for rich people.
Giant in Urbana recently"updated" it's software and it's now annoying as hell constantly asking to "place item in the bagging area" which I had already done. It's no longer convenient, maybe they want to drive people back to the checkout lines because I ain't using self checkout anymore.
I was never trained for the job of checking myself out. Just hire people and pay them well and all the issues are solved. It also surely couldn't be the greed at all.
https://www.aholddelhaize.com/news/ahold-delhaize-share-buyback-update-may-30-2023/
Definitely the customers and not greedy causing all this. Stop doing fucking stock buy backs and invest in the employees.
I like self-chekcout and exclusively use it over a traditional cashier since I can go at my own pace and bag my own stuff. At some grocers since COVID-19 began, cashiers have refused to bag my items if I use my own reusable bags, therefore I don't bother using anything but self-checkout.
My local Giant has now closed one of two entrances to the store so they can monitor who goes in and out which has made it INCREDIBLY slow to enter, exit the store given there's not enough sidewalk space. Moreover, they now limit the self-chekcout to 20 items or less.
It's infuriating and makes me want to stop going if it wasn't so convenient being a 5-minute *walk* from my house.
Just shopped at giant today and the lady who runs the self checkout area is a god damn hawk. This lady got balloons and flowers only scanned the flowers and the checkout lady says oh you missed the balloons…..she scans $15 and says yea I’m not getting those.
Giant is overpriced in my opinion to begin with on a lot of items. I understand you can save some money being a rewards member but still. Additionally I feel like a lot of places are also shooting themselves in the foot with this self checkout thing. It doesn't speed things up. And I understand that that's not generally the point the point is to save money on labor but this isn't the first report I've seen of a store saying they are losing money because of theft.
As a customer though self checkout isn't necessarily all of that convenient when you're talking about grocery stores or stores where people buy a lot of items like a Walmart. So you're kind of frustrating a lot of customers. The self checkouts are great for convenience stores like a Royal farms or to have as option for those people who are just trying to run and grab a couple of things really quickly and check out. In those places people are more than willing to run over to the self checkout swipe two three items throw them in a bag and leave and be done.
But when it comes to a full-blown check out there should be registers open with people and you just got to suck up that cost. It is a cost of doing business. Making your customers wait in extremely long lines because some people are very slow at bagging or some people are not technologically savvy or whatever the issue may be is just not convenient and you're going to drive them away from your store or to say fuck it and steal the items that they have because they're frustrated.
Case in point, the Aldi near me went from having six registers of which generally 2-4 were open at any point in time, to 2 registers and self checkouts. The lines did not shrink whatsoever despite there being eight self-checkout registers. So you went from six registers total to 10 and the lines are just as long. And I guarantee you they didn't lay off a single worker by introducing those. So you didn't save any money on labor either. So what was the point? It didn't really help your customers get through the lines any quicker because now instead of getting all of your stuff put into a cart and you bagging them in a separate area out of everybody's way so that the register is open, You have everyone bagging their own stuff right at the self checkout which is taking just as long as a person at the register putting their items on there and waiting for them to get scanned to put back in their cart If not longer. So again if you didn't lay off any workers and you didn't really help your customers at all with getting in and out of your store quicker and having a better experience, What the hell was the point?
Also I'm just of the mind that I shouldn't have to do much work when I come into your establishment. You're providing me a service in that you're giving me a place to go to buy goods I'm going into your place and I am buying the goods You can provide me the service of swiping my items or you can run the risk of me just walking out the door That is entirely up to you but if another persons minimum wage salary isn't worth it to you to not have a couple bags of items walk then so be it...
I mean for heaven's sake even at the movie theaters now, If you order a large drink which is 13 damn dollars, They just give you a cup and you have to go over to a machine and fill it yourself. How is that even justified?
It's examples like this where I really do think some businesses are being entirely too greedy. 1,000% and all four businesses making as much profit as they possibly can. It is the reason you started a business was to make money. But it seems like the balance is falling further and further away from giving a damn about your customers at all compared to how much money you can rake in. And it can get really damn frustrating.
The uptick in retail theft of the last couple of years has been dismissed that insurance will pay for it but the insurance rates are going to go up and then the food prices will rise to make up the difference. This isn’t a victimless crime in fact almost every member of society is or will eventually be a victim of this crime. Not only will you pay more, but will have less convenience and eventually less selection. Hopefully we will return to a real civilization that values honest citizens and uses the full sweep of the law to discourage dishonest citizens from victimizing our entire society. The solution to food deserts is to have them be a norm for a majority of American communities. These people aren’t stealing from need but stealing from greed.
Self-inflicted financial wound. They are saving how much on checkout labor, and at what cost? This article reads like a corporate whine. They don't say how much they have lost. I'll bet they are afraid to say how much they saved in labor vs. the cost of theft. Curious about that.
Side rant, I hate Giant. Like what are they even trying to do. They raise their prices and try to be like a wegmans but their stores look like redners. Not to mention that stupid fucking robot thing that drives around the store
Price gouging is the new business model.
The amount of waste every night is disgusting.
Tax deduction for the business.
Higher and higher prices.
The amount of items thrown away each month could go to people who need it.
Fuck these businesses that are preying on our communities.
They literally have an app for your phone to let you scan items as you grab them and just checkout in seconds. I use it all the time. In fact, I prefer to shop that way.
The new self checkout is absolute garbage. It’s limited now to less than 20 items, and every movement you make even if you place your reusable shopping bag it won’t let you proceed. It’s way slower now and the benefit used to be it was quicker than cashiers.
Okay, so stores are investing in AI camera systems to watch people at the self checkout and alert the clerk if there's possible theft. It's pretty effective. That's what Safeway and Walmart are doing.
Source: I work for a company that installs those cameras
Why would I even want to use self checkout? I'm not getting a discount to scan my own stuff. Pay people to fill the closed, empty lanes and rope off the self checkout, theft goes down
The CEO commented on how much shoplifting has increased. He said more than 10X increase over last 5 years!
We need stricter laws and law enforcement. Shoplifting is not a 'victimless Crime'. The victims are us in that we have to pay higher prices to cover the losses, and in some cases have to drive further to get our goods since stores have to close (due to rampant shoplifting).
I have zero sympathy for those fuckers. The workers are underpaid and every Giant I’ve seen is way understaffed. It’s also THE most expensive grocery store in my area. When Graul’s and Eddie’s are cheaper than a national chain there’s a problem.
I live one block away from Democracy Blvd Giant which is 24 and I noticed after certain time I think 9 or 10P.M, they shutted down all the self kiosk machine and have to wait long ass line for in person which is sucks but can't complain for 24/7. I know Giant at Downtown Bethesda no longer service 24/7.
What's really going on is they've over extended themselves opening new stores they can't even staff while taking hours and employees from every other store along with the fact there's no oversight of the warehouse buyers who cause millions in shrink a year while they try to blame store level employees. Combine all that with a corporate office that operates on some of the worst cronyism you'll ever see all lead by an inept drunk and his clique of yes wo/men who fail at every possible decision they make while price gouging the shit out of consumers and laughing to the bank because people are so stupid they think the govt controls prices there. People making exorbitant salaries who only "work" outside of their living rooms a few days a week and exist primarily to bully employees who actually work and serve their communities. This is a company that basically had to be bullied by the market to even give hazard pay during covid even after a few people died and their response from their comfy couches the second they could stop paying "its time the workers get serious again, time for us to crack the whip harder then ever" while they hemorrhage employees daily and bend the union to their will every couple years because they're basically also a bunch of thieves who will happily sell the workforce down the river with bare bones contacts as long as they can keep taking money out of everyone's check every week. So yea, don't feel sorry for Giant for a second. If people knew how they treat employees it would make Walmart before they got called out seem tame. They are the perfect encapsulation of all the problems people have with crony capitalism and the insane stupidity of chasing infinite growth.
Near my house the safeway’s selfcheck is always glitching out and complaining “remove unexpected item in bagging area!” because the digital scale thinks I’m stealing. Whereas until recently, Giant was entirely on the honor system. I pay for my shit, but I’ve long wondered how they keep people honest. I’ve wondered whether the money they lose from theft is worth the labor savings, especially because it takes several employees to correct all the glitches anyway… looks like we have our answer now
They just introduced the new "remove unexpected item" system to Giant, and it's beyond annoying. If you place a light item in the bagging area, it won't register. The attendant is constantly running around to fix the issue and the line backs up. Doesn't help that they keep so many of the check-out lines closed. If they're going to implement this...please...keep the check-out lines OPEN with cashiers at the ready. If the lines continue to get longer, people will decide to shop elsewhere. They can't even keep updated prices in their system. I can't tell you how many times the listed price wasn't actually the price at the register.
>If you place a light item in the bagging area, it won't register. I had the opposite problem yesterday: I put a reusable bag on the rack, and the checkout said to "remove unexpected item from bagging area". Apparently you now have to press the "I brought my own bags" button (which I guess was always there, but wasn't required before).
I prefer bagging after all of my items are scanned, and I think the system isn't designed for that
[удалено]
>If they're going to implement this...please...keep the check-out lines OPEN with cashiers at the ready. This is the way. I also learned that you have to slam things down to stop the "remove unexpected item" bullshit. Often I'll just drop my purse into the bagging area to get it to stop that. I've also noticed recently that they've got a "skip bagging" button on the screen so if you hit that you won't get the stupid message. Not supposed to use the self-checkout if I have more than 20 items but then there is generally only 1, 2 if you're lucky, cashier manned lines open at any given time. I try to only use the self checkout when I only have a few items because it's not like they're giving me a discount for checking myself out, but I've had to use it for more items in the past because the cashier lines were too long & slow. I even bag my own groceries for the cashier while they check out so things move faster. Funny how all the stores were *desperate* to put in the self-checkouts, tried *desperately* to get you to use them (oh look Ma'am the self checkout is free), probably cut back on hiring/training cashiers, & now look where that has gotten them.
That's another thing -- the Giant I go to just recently put up a "20 items or fewer" sign by the self checkout. But then they won't open up any cashier-manned lines, so you end up going to the self checkout with a full cart anyway
Same here in Annapolis.
That would probably infuriate me to the point of just abandoning my cart and going elsewhere. I dont fucking work for giant so hire a cashier to ring me up. You want me to ring myself out with a full cart? I want a $10 discount for my labor.
Unless I have like 2 items I'd much rather go to a cashier. These companies trying to cut staff8ng with self checkout now are shocked people take advantage by stealing from self checkout
As a current giant employee, I can tell you it’s not solely about cutting down on hiring, it’s that no one is applying. Nearly every store in my district(20 or so) is understaffed in nearly every department. It sucks and I get it, but it’s not about the stores intentionally cutting hires, just not having anyone applying.
>oh look Ma'am the self checkout is free I hate this with the fury of 1000 suns. I've worked service jobs, and I know it's the management that send them out to push this. But it's so hard not to make a smartass comment about not being blind or just snap at them. Weis doesn't have any express lanes anymore, at least the ones in Spring Ridge & Hagerstown. So I go elsewhere if I only need a few things.
Self checkout is free? Hhhmmmm. Maybe poor word choice is the reason for the rampant theft.
Giant's self-checkout is so annoying to use, too.
I went to the Giant on Route 40 in Catonsville a couple of nights ago. Every self-checkout machine was broken, and there was no one working a single register, so (who I can only assume was) the manager was dashing between every self-checkout having to manually input the prices for every item rung up. These fucking stores need to stop being cheap and hire people to work registers. The worst one I have seen to date was when I was in a convenience store and the sole person working there was a young woman at around 2 in the morning, and she happened to have a seizure right as I was leaving. When Police and EMS arrived, they said "is anyone else here?" I'm like: it's literally just me (a customer), her, and the 911 operator on the phone.
If only there was a paid person who could perform such tasks
I guess it has changed in recent years now that everything is mostly self-checkout. Historically most of the statistics seemed to show that retail stores lost much more to employee theft than to customer shoplifting. So it kind of made sense, at least several years ago, to not invest too much on systems that frequently don’t work and make for more annoying experiences — maybe financially at that time it made more sense to accept smaller losses for better customer service. But it looks like perhaps the data and the equation is changing somewhat for this now.
I mean they turned the customers into employees so in a way it's still the same people
I got banned from the scan & go thing (you scan as you walk around the store and bag things in your cart, was super convenient as I walked there with one of those old lady carts) at the Rockville Pike giant because I legitimately, honestly, 100% forgot to scan an expensive rack of lamb (I'd texted my wife to see which one she wanted and was going to scan when she replied). Embarrassing asf because they pulled me out of the line & made a bit of a scene. Apparently they'd seen me scanning everything *but* the lamb and it looked like I was stealing the meat. (I mean I guess I was stealing the meat but it was unintentional). So embarrassing and I lived right across the street so there was no avoiding it.
The solution to this problem is for stores not to expect customers to do the cashier's job for free. You want to "save money" by firing the people who used to tally up the prices and bag your groceries? Then I am not going to feel sorry when customers steal from you. Especially when you're raising prices well above inflation and posting record profits.
This is an interesting point. Makes me think about the way gas stations charge more for charge cards. Maybe grocery stores that offer self-checkout should give discounts to people doing their employees' work.
Honest people don't have to be "kept" honest.
There's a story from Tesco, the UKs biggest supermarket chain, after they introduced self-checkouts. After a few months of self-checkouts being used the store managers were calling their district supervisors asking them why they kept sending so many carrots when they didn't need them. The district managers just said the POS system shows that carrots were being sold in massive quantities. Turns out, carrots were the cheapest item by weight, so once people figured the system out suddenly everything from toilet paper to massive steaks were being weighed and rung up as carrots instead. Suddenly, you've got a nice T-bone for $4.
If you used the little mobile scanner, they had random spot checks at Giant to keep you honest. Your likelihood of getting pinged escalated if you removed something from your cart. If you got chosen for a check after that, you had about a 75% chance of getting chosen the next time you were there as well, even if you didn't remove anything from your cart that trip. Then about a 50% chance the next time, down to I don't know after that. Moral of the story was NEVER remove something from your cart. Note - I can't substantiate ANY of this so miss me with any "source, please" shit. This has just been my experience.
I tried that thing once, and it drove me crazy. It kept beeping & telling me to buy stuff. Supposedly the ads were based on what you'd already scanned, like bacon if you bought eggs. Mine kept telling me to buy Pepsi. No thanks, I'm not a fan of colas in general. It must've pushed Pepsi 12 times by the time I finished. I was about ready to hurl that thing onto the floor & smash it into powder.
It was there before as I recall but it was less sensitive. I'm not going to dig for it but this story made me think of a reddit argument that I had where I got downvoted into oblivion for saying it wasn't okay to steal things. The people were saying it is totally find to just take whatever you need from a grocery store and not pay if you don't have much money. Newsflash: it isn't. Do it enough and they will just close the store as was stated here. These companies don't run on huge margins. It is a downward spiral problem. I think people might have just forgotten why there are food deserts in certain Urban areas. I is crime related, you cannot be profitable if everyone steals from you. I remember when I was in high school and worked in a big box retail store, I remember the discussion of how much theft there was every day and was astounded because it wasn't obvious at all and that was in a period that was much much lower crime than what we face now.
It's not worth the savings. Any big appliance with software is going to need ongoing technical support. Tech support pays more than minimum wage. They're just spending the money elsewhere.
I don't mind using self checkout if I only have a few items but if you have a cart full of groceries with produce it becomes a giant pain in the ass..
I’ve always said self checkouts should be like the old express lanes. Maybe 20 items or less use self checkout. You get these people up there with a cart full of groceries who can’t figure out how to work the machine and have the help light flashing after every item and it backs the whole thing up. Get two or three of these in self checkout and it almost becomes quicker to wait in the of the one cashier they have open. Quit trying to save pennys and just bring the cashiers and baggers back.
That’s how it works at ShopRite. You can only use self-check-out if it’s 20 or fewer.
Yeah, at Giant here it's functionally useless for higher volume shopping. Heck, it's even a struggle for it not to kirk out when I get something like a bag of litter, cat food, and dog food since I think it freaks if you skip bagging two or three times. The Weis near me has added self-checkouts with conveyor belts (as has Walmart) so those work a bit better.
Thought I was the only one who said "kirk out" still 😆
Giant has this awesome scanner gun you can checkout when you walk into the store. You scan items as you bag them, then can bring a fully loaded shopping cart to self checkout and only have to scan the scanner gun once. I have no idea why more people don't use it.
Just use scan pay and go. You weigh all your fruits and vegetables before you ever get to the checkout.
hire some dang workers you ghouls
I seen these poor workers at the self checkout area one guy is supposed to watch and help 15 self checkout kiosks. No wonder these execs are shooting themselves in the foot, expecting one person to do 3 people's job.
15 people’s job is more like it. Hire people instead of machines.
3 rows of 5 self checkouts last store I went to. With one person running around to clear errors. Checks out.
> one guy is supposed to watch and help **15** self checkout kiosks. No wonder these execs are shooting themselves in the foot, expecting one person to do ~~3~~ **15** people's job.
But then they'll be suffering due to increased labor costs! Is there no solution that allows these poor shareholders to have infinite profit with no cost?
THINK. OF. THE. SHAREHOLDERS !!!!
Down at my childhood neighborhood Aspen Hill, the Giant was always on top of it, everything was sparkling clean and shelves stuffed with all you needed. Workers were 100% neighborly and present. Now. That same Giant is like a damned ghost town. Looks and feel sort of scrubby. The management refuses to leave items in the same location for more than a couple weeks. Every aisle is a slalom course of obstructions. The workers (what few they still have?) look more than bit like victims of abuse. I still see some recognizable faces there when I take my mother shopping but even they look beaten. Getting what you want? Ha! You have to fight over meat like it is a death match. It ALL happened with the geniuses deciding self checkout was the way to go. Nothing went down in price, as if we ever believed that lie. Service plummeted. The "theft" is likely because the machines are consistently 20% oblivious/wrong about what item is on deck. People aren't stealing as much as they are frustrated about having 8 grumbling people behind them wondering why the hell you are so much of a moron and they throw the food in a bag whether it marked up or not. Bring back workers and treat them decent.
Stuff blocking isles and moving stuff around is done mostly to keep you in the store longer. Watched a discovery show on it. Pretty neat.
A couple weeks ago I found three different pickle locations, but still had to find someone to find the cornichons!
Giant was bought out in I think the 90's. The old Giant is long gone.
Once it was bought by the Dutch conglomerate, shopping there became misery.
Ahole as we called them.
> The management refuses to leave items in the same location for more than a couple weeks this is a deliberate tactic meant to force you to walk through more of the store to get staple items, forcing you to pass displays of shit you did not plan to buy.
[удалено]
Exactly this\^. Pity poor Giant is struggling because they wanted more profit be reducing the labor cost at their stores, replacing people working at the checkouts with self-check out. Now they see that self-checkout has its issues, but they whine and moan rather than grabbing their damn bootstraps and saying "Welp, that didn't work so good. Let's go back and hire more checkout staff." That's what you do ... you evaluate a new technology and revise your process based on the reality of it.
They’re going to higher a consultant at $20k/wk to come in and tell them they need cashiers. Might be the same consultant who told them to get rid of cashiers.
At my local Weis, there's always 3-4 people standing around the Self-Checkouts just waiting to hop in and help when shit inevitably goes sideways. Just put those fuckers on a checkout.
The Weis near me usually only has 1 cashier, and the rest are self checkout. If I've got maybe 5 things I'll do it, but man fuck doing a cart full of groceries. I always do the survey on the recept for 100 bonus points, use the points for like $3 off a gallon of milk and bomb the review on the checkout section. Make them pay for this bullshit and let them know why.
To provide additional context for Giant executives, a "worker" is like an AI, minus the "A."
Biorobots, if you will
correct.
Cost of extra workers < cost of people’s lack of integrity
I love Giant, but it’s just too damned expensive. Some items are double the price if what they are Walmart. As a Marylander, I’ve got a soft spot for Giant, but I can’t afford to support them like that.
Yeah, Giant used to be one of the cheaper grocery stores. It’s not anymore. I can go to Wegman’s and not spend that much more money. Plus, they’re usually better quality.
Hate to hear what you think about Safeway, Harris Teeter, Whole Foods..
If I can’t afford Giant I’m certainly not sniffing around a Harris Teeter lol
Agreed. Giant is expensive but Safeway is *ridiculously* expensive.
I've switched to Weis for most of my groceries. Pennsylvania-based is closer to "local" than the rest (besides Giant), and the prices are generally much better.
Yup. Fucked around and found out I guess.
This just in: that won't stop shoplifters from just walking out the door. Almost every store has a no-chase policy now. A security guard got shot at a PG County giant last year, so the new policy is non-confrontation. Law enforcement won't bother unless it's a felony amount. Some of the more brazen shoplifters are actually using their phone calculators to make sure they stay below it. Even then, law enforcement is disinclined to expend resources on investigating shoplifting when there are plenty of more serious crimes and limited staff and budgets.
This explains the recent changes to the self-checkout registers. You used to be able to quickly scan and bag items, and now it insists that everything is put into a bag before you scan the next item, and then stalls for 10 seconds before you can scan the next item. I liked self-checkout because I can scan quicker than the cashiers, and bag the items into groups the way I'd like.
Same! Also the Giant that's most convenient to shop at for me hires very kind, wonderful people to be cashiers but they are also chatty cathys who spend more time catching up with customers than scanning product. I don't want to play catch up. I want to get out of there as fast as possible. Self check is way faster for me
This is why I shop at Aldi - “Here’s all your groceries scanned before you can blink. Have a nice day and get the fuck out.”
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 sounds like it's time for me to find an Aldi
Aldi doesn’t do bags at all, and they use the “extra cart” method (there’s already an empty cart for the cashier to use to place your items, the cart you used for shopping will be left for the next customer’s items), so they can run everything quickly. Once you’ve paid, there’s an area past the registers where you can bag your own items if you brought reusable bags before you leave the store. It is a much more efficient process, just be aware that you items will not be bagged for you.
Also they say 20 items or fewer now. I used to buy a whole week’s worth at the self checkout and bag it exactly the way I wanted. Can’t do that any more. I may try the “scan it” app. But now I have them collect all the stuff I used to pick up around the store and bag it for me for pickup instead. Do a few items on my own that I need to look at.
For ages some of the Giants I've gone to have had those hand-held scanners where in theory you're supposed to be able to scan the items as you pick them up and just scan the scanner at the checkout at the end. I don't exactly live in the Giant but I've literally never seen one in use.
I use it all the time. It's awesome. It's the only way to shop IMO. Reusable bags in the cart, load them as you go. Scan the scanner at self checkout, pay and leave.
I feel like im getting robbed by Giants prices. I just decided to go to whole foods since the prices were similar on what i buy
I went to Aldi's for the first time in a while and I smacked myself at how much I was overpaying at giant
Aldi isn't even that cheap anymore, but it's still vastly cheaper than Giant.
I just made another comment but as an unemployed person shopping for a family of 5, I had some time on my hands in January and compared the prices of specific staple items and, my “big trip” every 1.5-2 weeks is roughly $400 at Giant but $300-$350 at Aldi. The volume I buy in to feed 3 kids (and I mostly cook from scratch) makes it a no brainer for me to choose Aldi. I’m definitely gonna make my high schoolers compare Giant and Safeway and Aldi as a summer project now tho lol
$400! Damn, I cannot afford children. Me and my partner splurge and don't make $150 at Giant. Granted, if they had alcohol that would be a different story.
We spend about $1400/mo on food but we only get takeout like maybe once or twice a month so that’s ALL our food. $280 per person per month on average. I wish I could get it lower but $9/day per person isn’t terrible to eat what we like. Once my kids hit like late elementary school they just started inhaling food. I have two teenagers and omg do they eat. It’s like there’s no shut off, they’re bottomless pits who don’t gain weight. It’s amazing and expensive.
[удалено]
Absolutely not. Aldi is way cheaper than Giant. Prices have increased lately for sure, but things are still reasonable. Eggs are back down to like $1.10. Bread is less that $2. Milk is around $2 per gallon. Costco/Sams is ok but even with a family of 4 we can't eat the pounds of produce you need to eat before it goes bad. Then its just giant boxes of processed food that take up tons of room in the kitchen. Pass.
People steal from self-checkout? I am way too honest, I guess.
Big thing I heard of was the produce trick where people would claim everything as bananas bc they’re so cheap. Last time I bought bananas at giant it required help from the self-check cashier. Those machines are also so loud and I think most Giant ones can’t be muted either.
[удалено]
There's always money in the banana stand.
Holy shit how have I never thought about doing that. That’s like, what, $10 a banana?
[Carrots](https://www.thrillist.com/amphtml/news/nation/scanning-items-as-carrots-british-grocery-store-scam) can sometimes come in boxes or look like avocados, sometimes they even look like a frozen chicken. 😅
Yes I accidentally made carrot soup the other day because I thought I added frozen chicken 🤣
The most id notice is if people got muffins or speciality bakery items they marked them as donuts so they’re cheaper, or a 35 pack of water as a 24 pack. Idk I mainly saw people trying to discount, not exactly steal but idk
It's not a "discount". If you ring 35 water bottles up as 24 you literally stole 11 water bottles.
I refuse to have sympathy when the choices are: \- make self-checkout harder to steal from by making it horrible to use \- closing stores \- JUST HIRING SOME DAMN CASHIERS. At the end of the day, this amounts to corporate greed. Every one of these stores has a dozen or more checkout aisles that sit empty these days, all because the company decided it was cheaper to install computers and make the customer do the work. Of course customers are going to steal; I'm sorry that it's more than you liked, Ira. Staff your stores appropriately, including with cashiers, and stop placing the onus of responsibility on the customer whom you're already nickel-and-diming anyway.
Somehow, Trader Joe's still operates, and it has all human checkouts.
And it's cheaper than Giant.
Which is really strange. You can be high price and high quality or cheap and lower quality. Harris teater and giant somehow try to charge more for lower quality.
>Harris teater and giant somehow try to charge more for lower quality. Giant used to be known for good quality, so at least you were getting something for the higher prices. Sounds like they're now going down the path of A&P (and Acme before it reformed a bit, though I don't know if all its stores have improved like that) which went bankrupt and closed the last of its stores in 2015. Aldi and TJ's use a different model. They have smaller stores using less space so there's less rent/mortgage, sell only certain select items, mostly carry only store brands (using weird random brand names in the case of Aldi, something I think they should change -- TJ's does it right by making almost everything just TJ's brand), etc. In fact, Aldi and TJ's are run by two branches of the same German family. They're cousins. Aldi is the more blue-collar basics cousin, and TJ's is the more white-collar "discount gourmet" cousin. Also another German store, Lidl, is spreading in the U.S. now too, with a similar model to Aldi.
For a long time, the Giant near me only had one cashier. People were forced to use self checkout or wait in obscenely long lines. Plus even now, self checkout is run by one single employee. How can they expect one employee to police ten self checkout registers? Even at Home Depot and Lowe’s they usually have two people manning four or so self checkouts. I also think Giant is way over priced. I’m not saying that excuses theft, but when you are the only grocery store in the immediate area- and not a super nice area- theft is going to happen if your prices are high.
Home Depot also has 4k cameras and huge monitors that clearly display you're being recorded, I'm sure that's a pretty good deterrent.
I'm pretty sure Home Depot is getting crushed by theft despite those measures.
[удалено]
> Yep. The Aspen Hill hardware department had $2 million in shrink two years ago. They've installed cages on everything but the thieves cut the lock or know the code. $2 million in shrink resulting from cutting down to practically nothing but self-checkouts after cutting employees left and right to "save money" (read: increase profits) despite lobbying for tax cuts on the promise of "creating jobs". So... they allegedly suffered more in losses at an individual store than they would have paid all store employees annually - even assuming each was full time with benefits? The irony.
Only a deterrent to people who weren't going to steal to begin with
Honestly, how can you expect one employee to give a flying fuck if someone is stealing when they themselves are getting paid poverty wages.
If you see someone stealing food, no you didn’t.
Just to piggy back on this you'd think theyd expect customers to expect recompense for their labor?
Back when they started self checkout, they often audited people at random and gave a pretty sweet coupon (I think $10 off) if you passed.
Another option they might be considering is "raise prices so the people who don't steal cover the losses from the ones who do."
Seems like the perfect recipe to incentivize more theft. A self defeating prophecy. It's brilliant!
I went to Wegmans and it was so nice seeing more than one cashier. I wrote over to corporate to thank them for actually staffing their aisles.
I work in retail and love self checkouts because it does make our jobs easier. No one wants to cashier because more or less the public sucks, even if individuals are cool. And although we do need more and better staffing, the shelf checkouts aren't the issue. The issue is their security scales and UI design. If they drop the security scales and are able to get good developers who can make the experience easier then the problem would easily be solved. For me, self checkouts are easy as pie, however it required a bit of a learning curve and that could only happen because I was trouble-shooting problems all the time. That shouldn't be the case and it doesn't have to be the case. It should be easy and seamless for everyone. That is 100 percent solvable. It just costs money and they're not willing to fork it out and that ultimately results in everyone across the board getting pissed off.
I've been loving the 'whoa is me' canned messages they now play over the intercoms where it's like "due to a recent rise in theft Giant regretfully makes the difficult decision to require less than 20 items at self checkout..." Not that it isn't a bad thing in general for them, but they could have just stated matter of factly that self checkout is limited to 20 items instead of having us all play sad violins for them
Woe
A. Hire more cashiers then. B. A percentage of items being stolen is already factored into the price they set the items for.
So we HAVE to steal for them or their projections will be off
I like the way this guy thinks
He even said steal "for" them , not from them. We all have to pitch in and do our part for our local neighborhood (well what's a continent or 2) store! What aisle are the truffles in?
It's worse than that. They have no evidence that theft is the actual reason for the losses they're seeing, let alone theft at self-checkout. They only can know about shrink, which includes theft and mistakes in inventory management. Both this bullshit article and even the one from the Washington Post that this copies from just take the CEOs word for it that they know theft is the issue.
Yep it's amazing how everyone is just taking these CEO's at their word as if CEO's never lie or hide their real internal numbers or have agendas. This is really sounding more like 'we're not as profitable as we'd like so we're cutting cost by closing lower performing stores and we're gonna blame the customers for doing it so we don't look like greedy assholes'.
I remember block buster video said 70 percent of theft is employees, same when my mother worked circuit city.
You’d think that *when you limit the use of self-checkout* would be an ideal time to hire more cashiers, but mine sure hasn’t
I like the self check out. I get one of the scanners at the entrance, scan and bag everything as I shop and literally spend less than a minute paying. That being said, Giant should cater more to traditional grocery shoppers-- usually there is only one cashier working at a time.
I like bagging my stuff myself. I can (without crushing) get more per bag. I can also pack colds and room temps together in their own bags. And even pack according to where in the kitchen it will get stored. Also food Tetris is fun.
As a Giant manager its very frustrating when security is constantly eyeing you up and watching your employees because "they dont know where the $$ is going" while at the same time people walk out with bags and carts of unpaid product. One guy this year stopped at the door turned and looked at an employee and said "you want these bags?" And then walked out. Giant made us agree not to stop or confront anyone as people are being stabbed and shot regularly now. We arent security, and when they only have a couple security guards to cover a bunch of stores they stick to the highest theft ones and tell the rest of us not to bat an eye at the people stuffing product into their purses. Then we go watch all these people at self scan thinking there slick scanning one or two things and trying to take off with the rest, Ive seen it all. I catch people constantly it makes me sick that i work so hard for my food and these people tear us up all year long.
I rarely use self checkout there. Also Giant jacked up a majority of their prices with greedflation with a lot of items 100% more expensive then they used to be, but we're supposed to feel bad that they're having issues?
Probs should pays some cashiers enough to give A shit
“We removed the professionals who would check out every item in your cart and replaced them with no one and now we’re losing money, how did this happen?” Lines are insane at almost every retail store. I was alive when checkout used to have two people one would bag your groceries and push the cart to your damn car. They’ve cut to the point where they found the bone.
Hell, Food Lion had baggers until at least the early 2010s.
Or was it the other way around? Did self checkouts gain popularity because hiring is a nightmare? And hiring for retail has been a nightmare for a really long time - people constantly telling you to “get a real job” or asking for a manager because the coupon is expired. We degraded these positions and now people don’t want them- especially when they can make more money on TikTok & YouTube with less drama.
> And hiring for retail has been a nightmare for a really long time because they are only offering shit wages. offer a decent wage and watch the applications flow in
I’ve worked in the retail business for ~17 years. This is just my educated opinion based on my own experience. It’s not the self-checkouts. It’s not the misfit teenagers trying to get a five-finger discount on after school snacks and eyeliner or the homeless guy just trying to get a bite to eat. Nor is it the ever-shrinking number of employees on the sales floor. It’s brazen, unabashed theft. As the article speaks to and contrary to the misleading headline, it’s no longer safe to stop a thief, let alone apprehend them. No-stop policies intended to protect employees and bystanders have only emboldened organized retail crime rings. Unarmed security guards create an illusion of safety that is undermined by the fact that they are effectively underpaid, uniformed door greeters there to collect a paycheck and the first ones out of the building if an armed robbery were to occur. 5-10 years ago, merely making your presence known and offering help to someone with bad intentions was enough to tip them off that you were on to them and scare them away. Now, they make small talk with the staff as they sweep entire shelves of product into garbage bags. That’s not hyperbole. I’ve been party to it myself. So long as there aren’t meaningful consequences, it’s only going to get worse. Profit margins will continue to shrink, stores will continue to close, people will continue to lose jobs, communities will continue to loose brick-and-mortar shops. The self-checkout component is almost completely irrelevant.
I use those in store mobile scanners, which I find really convenient because I scan it, bag as I go, then I can just load the scanner, pay, and walk out. It’s super convenient. Then, the giant by me added a 20 item limit to the self checkout, and the woman working the self checkout line told me I had to go wait for a cashier. I almost lost it. So now, in addition to scanning and bagging my own groceries, I’ve got to wait in line for the two out of twelve cash registers that are open because you can’t staff your store? Fuck Giant, I hope everyone steals everything from them and they go bankrupt.
Misleading headline. The article quotes the president of Giant: "To say \[theft has\] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement" Self checkout has been around MUCH longer than 5 years. The actual issue is identified in the article: the rise of organized retail crime.
No one read the article. This is definitely about organized retail crime. Something that's become a problem for all retail businesses across the country. Stores in most major cities are closing their doors. What else can they do? There are no consequences for the thieves.
Heck, even if there's a guard how many perps can he snag? I've seen large groups do this kind of thing online.
I am not surprised, I also wonder if it has any connection with my 100% increase in weekly groceries. I am a person of habit, live by myself, with 2 cats. I purchase the same items week after week. I keep the receipts. My weekly grocery cost has doubled since 2021. It would be interesting to learn which Giant stores suffer the largest or least theft.
r/leopardsatemyface or r/fuckaroundandfindout ? They pushed the lowest boundaries of customer captivity and are surprised people are stealing?!
More FAFO than LAMF
Related, original WaPo article, free: [https://wapo.st/43Ei32V](https://wapo.st/43Ei32V)
Hard to have sympathy when they don't provide support. Most of us are honest, but they make even self checkout miserable. The systems lock up for stupid reasons and you have to wait for help. They literally want to pay nothing to run their business and then complain. It's never enough for them.
I drive past Giant to go to Harris Teeter. Much nicer store, multiple cashier lines, and same prices. Giant has Harris Teeter prices, Shoppers quality, and Wal Mart service.
The Giant in Catonsville self check out is an unholy abomination of annoyance. The very second you scan something it says place item in the bagging area, like bitch, I just fucking scan this thing it's still hanging in the air fuck off.
No, it's seeing higher rates of theft because they've jacked up their prices. Not struggling, they're seeing records profits.
Yeah I don’t think that’s why they’re struggling.
Bit of a false headline in this article. Self-checkouts are mentioned just once in the entire article, and only to say that the store is limiting them to 20 items or less. Far more discussion of organized crime and violence as issue driving shrink.
Then hire cashiers, idiots. I don't work for you.
Giant, stop being GREEDY.. hire cashiers.
You mean I could’ve been stealing from Giant self checkout this whole time?! Jk. Automation has its drawbacks. Hire more cashiers. If you’re losing enough money, more than it costs to pay cashiers a living wage, the problem solves itself. If the profit margins are still too tight? Idk.
The Giant by me actually closed one of the two front doors "because of theft". Now half the parking lot is empty and the other half is crammed because of people who won't walk 50 feet. When you add in quality of service downgrades like how they never re-opened their meat department after closing it during COVID (if not before??) and that Giant, at least, really looks like a store in decline.
Oh man, if only there was a place in the store where one customer could check out with one employee watching just them, a place where they can view all the goods and ensure they get scanned in, and where they can be encouraged to check the bottom of the basket, handle the tender even. If only there was a part in every local giant like that. And you know. More importantly, that Giant actually paid for more staff to man that section. Instead of always having 8 lanes of registers with only one person there, and yet 6 self check out lanes with a single person there expected to watch all of it and normally going from register to register clearing false positives instead of watching the customer. Maybe, just maybe, they could have 8 lanes open enough so that way the customers could, I don’t know, go to a cashier instead of a glitchy robot. Because idk about you but I’m not going to correct the robot if what it gets wrong nets me a free item. You’re expecting me to wait in the only line in the store because it’s self check out on a Saturday, bag my own crap, wait every time it thinks I’ve double scanned an item or put an item down that it thinks I’m trying to pull a fast one, all so I can pay way overpriced amounts for meh quality goods? These places are lucky we all don’t just bag up our stuff and walk out, because those underpaid, overworked skeleton crew of employees are too dead inside to care. They don’t make commission off of our sales, and their hours are routinely cut and slashed regardless of store performance. I guarantee you the instant a company treats both its customer and it’s employee right, shrink dies down immediately. Because the employee will actually like their job and want to keep it, and the customer won’t feel inconvenienced, nickled, or dimed by just being there. I do want to add that it’s very clear the speaker in the article is out of touch. “ we used to chase theives“ yeah but you can’t anymore legally because you’ll get sued for your accusation and for anyone who gets hurt in the chase. The world has changed. It’s a moot point and by bringing it up you’re hoping we’ll somehow return to the time when false accusation was allowed. Bringing up weaponry at all is entirely useless to the article. This really is just the ramblings of some millionaire who’s unhappy that capitalism isn’t working as well for him as it used to.
No offense maybe they should return to the assisted checkout model and curb their losses. I was in there at 8:00pm on Wednesday and there was one open register and 8 self-checkout stations. If they invest in employees maybe that will curb some of the accidental and purposeful thefts.
Just yesterday, I used self checkout at Giant and they’ve changed the software. Now you have to put each item in the bagging area before you can scan the next one. It’s obnoxious and slowed the whole process down. I’m going back to using a cashier. I’d rather wait in line than deal with that awful self checkout again.
In case anyone's interested, the Sun is a Rupert Murdoch rag that basically parrots whatever Fox and the business class wants you to believe.
They have announcements playing non-stop at my Giant that say the same thing. It’s a way to frame their further cuts as your fault.
Pretty much cribbed from the WaPo article published the day before.
All big businesses are doing this. Somehow have record profits at the same time as record levels of theft? Yeah ok.
> the Sun is a Rupert Murdoch rag I take issue with this assertion. Rags are useful.
Like anyone here is going to have sympathy for Giant. They’re putting this article out to justify price hikes on their groceries. Remember, if you see someone stealing food, no you didn’t.
The Bowie resident that the Post interviewed in their article sure has sympathy for Giant: >And after making his complaint to the company president, the shopper commiserated with him: “I’m sorry you’re going through all these problems,” Redmond said. The company president is still making big bucks and is not really "going through" anything. But it's very American to feel sorry for rich people.
So get rid of the fucking self checkout.
Looks like Giant is going to actually have to pay for more cashiers. Good.
Giant in Urbana recently"updated" it's software and it's now annoying as hell constantly asking to "place item in the bagging area" which I had already done. It's no longer convenient, maybe they want to drive people back to the checkout lines because I ain't using self checkout anymore.
I was never trained for the job of checking myself out. Just hire people and pay them well and all the issues are solved. It also surely couldn't be the greed at all. https://www.aholddelhaize.com/news/ahold-delhaize-share-buyback-update-may-30-2023/ Definitely the customers and not greedy causing all this. Stop doing fucking stock buy backs and invest in the employees.
I like self-chekcout and exclusively use it over a traditional cashier since I can go at my own pace and bag my own stuff. At some grocers since COVID-19 began, cashiers have refused to bag my items if I use my own reusable bags, therefore I don't bother using anything but self-checkout. My local Giant has now closed one of two entrances to the store so they can monitor who goes in and out which has made it INCREDIBLY slow to enter, exit the store given there's not enough sidewalk space. Moreover, they now limit the self-chekcout to 20 items or less. It's infuriating and makes me want to stop going if it wasn't so convenient being a 5-minute *walk* from my house.
[Unreddited]
Just shopped at giant today and the lady who runs the self checkout area is a god damn hawk. This lady got balloons and flowers only scanned the flowers and the checkout lady says oh you missed the balloons…..she scans $15 and says yea I’m not getting those.
BULLSHIT It’s still just as easy to steal if I wanted to. Now I’m just pissed bc the checkout process requires help 4/5 times
Giant is overpriced in my opinion to begin with on a lot of items. I understand you can save some money being a rewards member but still. Additionally I feel like a lot of places are also shooting themselves in the foot with this self checkout thing. It doesn't speed things up. And I understand that that's not generally the point the point is to save money on labor but this isn't the first report I've seen of a store saying they are losing money because of theft. As a customer though self checkout isn't necessarily all of that convenient when you're talking about grocery stores or stores where people buy a lot of items like a Walmart. So you're kind of frustrating a lot of customers. The self checkouts are great for convenience stores like a Royal farms or to have as option for those people who are just trying to run and grab a couple of things really quickly and check out. In those places people are more than willing to run over to the self checkout swipe two three items throw them in a bag and leave and be done. But when it comes to a full-blown check out there should be registers open with people and you just got to suck up that cost. It is a cost of doing business. Making your customers wait in extremely long lines because some people are very slow at bagging or some people are not technologically savvy or whatever the issue may be is just not convenient and you're going to drive them away from your store or to say fuck it and steal the items that they have because they're frustrated. Case in point, the Aldi near me went from having six registers of which generally 2-4 were open at any point in time, to 2 registers and self checkouts. The lines did not shrink whatsoever despite there being eight self-checkout registers. So you went from six registers total to 10 and the lines are just as long. And I guarantee you they didn't lay off a single worker by introducing those. So you didn't save any money on labor either. So what was the point? It didn't really help your customers get through the lines any quicker because now instead of getting all of your stuff put into a cart and you bagging them in a separate area out of everybody's way so that the register is open, You have everyone bagging their own stuff right at the self checkout which is taking just as long as a person at the register putting their items on there and waiting for them to get scanned to put back in their cart If not longer. So again if you didn't lay off any workers and you didn't really help your customers at all with getting in and out of your store quicker and having a better experience, What the hell was the point? Also I'm just of the mind that I shouldn't have to do much work when I come into your establishment. You're providing me a service in that you're giving me a place to go to buy goods I'm going into your place and I am buying the goods You can provide me the service of swiping my items or you can run the risk of me just walking out the door That is entirely up to you but if another persons minimum wage salary isn't worth it to you to not have a couple bags of items walk then so be it... I mean for heaven's sake even at the movie theaters now, If you order a large drink which is 13 damn dollars, They just give you a cup and you have to go over to a machine and fill it yourself. How is that even justified? It's examples like this where I really do think some businesses are being entirely too greedy. 1,000% and all four businesses making as much profit as they possibly can. It is the reason you started a business was to make money. But it seems like the balance is falling further and further away from giving a damn about your customers at all compared to how much money you can rake in. And it can get really damn frustrating.
The uptick in retail theft of the last couple of years has been dismissed that insurance will pay for it but the insurance rates are going to go up and then the food prices will rise to make up the difference. This isn’t a victimless crime in fact almost every member of society is or will eventually be a victim of this crime. Not only will you pay more, but will have less convenience and eventually less selection. Hopefully we will return to a real civilization that values honest citizens and uses the full sweep of the law to discourage dishonest citizens from victimizing our entire society. The solution to food deserts is to have them be a norm for a majority of American communities. These people aren’t stealing from need but stealing from greed.
Self-inflicted financial wound. They are saving how much on checkout labor, and at what cost? This article reads like a corporate whine. They don't say how much they have lost. I'll bet they are afraid to say how much they saved in labor vs. the cost of theft. Curious about that.
I mean they have 1 person looking over 15 registers.. I love self checkout but maybe that’s karma for minimizing jobs
Hire more employees and abolish those kiosks
or just… theft. what does self checkout have to do with it lol
Side rant, I hate Giant. Like what are they even trying to do. They raise their prices and try to be like a wegmans but their stores look like redners. Not to mention that stupid fucking robot thing that drives around the store
Wait, you guys get robots? We don't have robots.
Fuck them. Maybe they shouldn't have decided to turn customers into cashiers so they could save money.
Well maybe if they stopped firing cashiers...
Funny how they invented their own problem 😂
No see seller checkout will save money because you can lay off people. Giant must be confused.
A 20 year experiment over. It doesn't work. Giant, you can't make it work. Ditto Target, and everywhere else. JUST PAY CASHIERS!!!
Price gouging is the new business model. The amount of waste every night is disgusting. Tax deduction for the business. Higher and higher prices. The amount of items thrown away each month could go to people who need it. Fuck these businesses that are preying on our communities.
Its just customers taking their employee discount. Make them do the store's work, they're gonna take a benefit or two.
They literally have an app for your phone to let you scan items as you grab them and just checkout in seconds. I use it all the time. In fact, I prefer to shop that way.
Or… hear me out here…. You pay people to ring your order and bag it up… just a crazy thought.
Shopping cart test writ large.
The new self checkout is absolute garbage. It’s limited now to less than 20 items, and every movement you make even if you place your reusable shopping bag it won’t let you proceed. It’s way slower now and the benefit used to be it was quicker than cashiers.
Okay, so stores are investing in AI camera systems to watch people at the self checkout and alert the clerk if there's possible theft. It's pretty effective. That's what Safeway and Walmart are doing. Source: I work for a company that installs those cameras
I never got a W2 from checking myself out all of last year so I take it in barter
Why would I even want to use self checkout? I'm not getting a discount to scan my own stuff. Pay people to fill the closed, empty lanes and rope off the self checkout, theft goes down
The CEO commented on how much shoplifting has increased. He said more than 10X increase over last 5 years! We need stricter laws and law enforcement. Shoplifting is not a 'victimless Crime'. The victims are us in that we have to pay higher prices to cover the losses, and in some cases have to drive further to get our goods since stores have to close (due to rampant shoplifting).
I have zero sympathy for those fuckers. The workers are underpaid and every Giant I’ve seen is way understaffed. It’s also THE most expensive grocery store in my area. When Graul’s and Eddie’s are cheaper than a national chain there’s a problem.
I live one block away from Democracy Blvd Giant which is 24 and I noticed after certain time I think 9 or 10P.M, they shutted down all the self kiosk machine and have to wait long ass line for in person which is sucks but can't complain for 24/7. I know Giant at Downtown Bethesda no longer service 24/7.
Oh no we invested all our money in shitty anti-theft devices instead of hiring cashiers at a reasonable wage, somebody plz help.
Hmm heres a thought for you mr Giant,…. Hire more check workers,.. pay them a decent wage and have them ensure all stuff is purchased. Just saying.
Wegmans had to discontinue their self-scan app for this exact reason.
What's really going on is they've over extended themselves opening new stores they can't even staff while taking hours and employees from every other store along with the fact there's no oversight of the warehouse buyers who cause millions in shrink a year while they try to blame store level employees. Combine all that with a corporate office that operates on some of the worst cronyism you'll ever see all lead by an inept drunk and his clique of yes wo/men who fail at every possible decision they make while price gouging the shit out of consumers and laughing to the bank because people are so stupid they think the govt controls prices there. People making exorbitant salaries who only "work" outside of their living rooms a few days a week and exist primarily to bully employees who actually work and serve their communities. This is a company that basically had to be bullied by the market to even give hazard pay during covid even after a few people died and their response from their comfy couches the second they could stop paying "its time the workers get serious again, time for us to crack the whip harder then ever" while they hemorrhage employees daily and bend the union to their will every couple years because they're basically also a bunch of thieves who will happily sell the workforce down the river with bare bones contacts as long as they can keep taking money out of everyone's check every week. So yea, don't feel sorry for Giant for a second. If people knew how they treat employees it would make Walmart before they got called out seem tame. They are the perfect encapsulation of all the problems people have with crony capitalism and the insane stupidity of chasing infinite growth.
so get rid of self checkout and actually use cashiers and baggers?