The Energon Pub

william-james88 wrote:

carytheone wrote:If you had the courage and no one sees you and you have a warped sense of morality, you could walk right out with a TF.

Fixed that for you there. I know you are talking practical/factual sense but I do want to remind people that this conversation is not about tips about how to get away with any of this. It should go without saying that theft is not condoned.

Thanks and good call.

I am absolutely not giving tips nor do I encourage or condone theft in any way or form

red lasers, blue lasers

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:All of my local walmarts now employ people up front to scan your receipt and check some of your items. It's annoying and not really helpful

Not only is it annoying, it is inconsistent, and technically you can just walk out, a scan is not required. I always play along though, sometimes they scan my items, sometimes they don't, sometimes in between sitters, nobody will be there. Sometimes people just walk around them as others are being scanned.

Those of you may remember my rants about a certain Walmart that took anti-theft devices to a ridiculous levels as they literally chained reissue Original Optimus Primes to the shelves. Well that same Walmart is getting even more ridiculous. Over the counter medications, batteries, all shaving supplies, and Mens underwear are among the newest items to be locked up.

In fact the last time I was in there I must have heard customer service calls to various different *lock up* locations over a dozen times.

Yeah i want to be the guy with all the keys that does nothing more than go from station-to-station unlocking things all-day .

I understand they want to mitigate theft, but when I go shopping for my mom once a week I want it done as fast as possible, (we do grocery pick-up now for ourselves, but my mom is not tech savvy) I don't want to wait 15 minutes just for some punk kid to look at me sideways why I'm asking for Senior Woman's vitamins.

william-james88 wrote:

carytheone wrote:If you had the courage and no one sees you and you have a warped sense of morality, you could walk right out with a TF.

Fixed that for you there. I know you are talking practical/factual sense but I do want to remind people that this conversation is not about tips about how to get away with any of this. It should go without saying that theft is not condoned.

I'd also like to point out that there's nothing more shameful than getting caught with a shoplifted item when you have a pile of dollars bills in your wallet...

I'm not proud of young me.

Some times safety measures are required at the self service checkouts. My store i work at always has a 1 person monitoring the 7 registers. We don't sell toys (only retailer food and stuff like that) but our registers are mostly accurate about weight scan and even detect if unregistered weight such as a cellphone is accidently put onto the weight area.

This makes for a good deterrent if we had not toys not registering as correct weight and price in the system.
How that crook got through, that was shady business.

william-james88 wrote:

carytheone wrote:Theft is a constant battle at retail and a sizable chunk is internal.

I have a good story about that, and Walmart. One person I bought Transformers from told me to meet him at a Walmart since he would be working there that day. Turns out he was in charge of internal theft and would set up hidden cameras in stores but just to monitor employees and then offer evidence when they'd get fired over it. He had just finished firing 3 employees before meeting me.

But back to what you were saying Cary, I just had a hard time believing how in all our modern tech world, it seems someone can still just take a boxed tf from the shelf and just walk out the door with no alarm going off.

I knew a couple of people in my high school in Calgary who got away with stealing things from places like Walmart from time to time.

They only took smaller things like trading cards and such but what they would do is they would go to the stores in groups of I think 5 and have two people watching on guard on either side of the aisle, then the others would kinda stand over the "main guy" who would use a knife to scratch off bar codes and such before putting the items in his backpack.

One of them actually gave me a birthday gift they had acquired from this uh method, a Deluxe class Prime Dead End, I only figured out after the matter weeks later when I noticed the back of the figures packaging had the knife scratches. (I keep the packaging such as card backs, I don't throw them out)

I don't know if they were ever caught since I moved from the city in the middle of grade 11.

carytheone wrote:I work in the cash register side of POS and this is very interesting to me. Mostly I wonder what tools (on the retail side) the police used to link all this together.

Self check out usually has a weight check verification to verify what was scanned versus what it should weigh. Seems a barcode swap would rule that out real quick unless someone went to a cashier. Going to a cashier seems pretty ballsy, and requires the cashier to not care or be paying attention.

Some retailers use AI software via their camera systems to tag suspicious transactions/scans (or non scans). The software uses image recognition to match up what was scanned with what the camera sees. It can also recognize items not being scanned or left in the shopping cart.

I'd have to assume the retailers noticed a pattern and reported it to the authorities first? I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into this investigation. Well, good job

I'm not sure what the hourly wage is for a retail cashier is in Alberta Canada, but if it's close to what it is here in the USA, then it's understandable (not excusable) why the cashier didn't pay any attention to what was being scanned. Especially if the thief checked out when it was busy and it was a long line behind him. If that's the case, the cashier was in a hurry to check the thief out before other customers start complaining. "Scan everything, take their money, and get them out the door" is the standard policy.