Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero(github.com) |
Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero(github.com) |
I worked in retail many years, including doing store shelf tear downs and replacement and night shift stocking.
Back in the day we would get our planograms from HQ, then we’d print out all the labels on perforated paper, and walk the shelves moving product and updating the price tags, throwing out the old. The epaper tags are very clearly an improvement to that process in both time and waste. We would also check the prices using a Motorola price gun and do our fixes manually and then print out new tags or update the counts.
I’m surprised these tags are just IR blasted with no security. I would have expected they’d need some sort of code and you would simply save the code on your gun, pop a tag in front of a product, scan the product, then pair the tag all on your price gun in like 3 actions.
I also would have thought in these days we’d use Bluetooth beacons to triangulate the shelf slot too so that HQ could have a realtime map against their planos (it was not uncommon a product’s size would change and the layout would have holes or products that don’t fit on your real shelf).
Anyways, neat project! Triggered a walk down memory lane for me.
Previously, a criminal could just print their own shelf tags. They'd probably do this somewhere other than in the store to get the details right, but it was doable. (We've all probably seen rolls of blank shelf tags sitting around at the store, and thermal printers are inexpensive. So what if it's two crimes instead of one?)
And then, in the store, they could just switch out the shelf tag(s) and try to play their little scam.
Now with this new development, a criminal still needs to get the details right. Like a blank paper tag, the little screen is also a blank slate. It's just eraseable and rewritable in-situ.
The scam is the same. It's just shaped differently.
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I do understand why the tags are simple to write. Maintaining some kind of revolving, PKI, or multi-factor auth would be harder than doing nothing, and probably slow. Fixed, basic auth would just get leaked (probably first by Home Assistant tinkerers who find some discarded electronic shelf tags somewhere and want a new display for their house).
One-way jnfrared is cheap and low-power compared to anything with RF. And resets would be a pain in the ass if things were forever associated with a certain product, or a certain place in the store.
The way it's implemented now, on reset (yay new planogram!): All the tags get pulled and put in a pile.
And then: One by one, they're removed from that pile, put on a shelf, and programmed.
That's fast and flexible, and therefore inexpensive. Inexpensive is good. If there's one thing that all retail establishments hate most, it is their labor expense.
It does fail to prevent obvious-scam from happening. But it'd probably cost more to do it "right" than to eat the losses when the scam actually works.
You know what, that is a great idea for a project of mine, where I want to display outside temp and weather forecast in the hallway next to the wardrobe. I have been musing about it for a while now: how to make it small and not stand out, how to handle power delivery, etc.
I was already leaning towards eink, and if I can get one of these price tags cheap plus hide an IR blaster in a corner that would be ideal. All controlled by Home Assistant of course. I'm going to search the usual Chinese online marketplaces tomorrow.
Thank you!
Yes it does, unlike before, a shits-and-giggles attacker could change all the tags in an aisle into "you're gay" without showing anything on surveillance cameras.
He wouldn't gain anything but the store would lose.
> Previously, a criminal could just print their own shelf tags.
Between your 'previously' and now is a period of at least two or three decades, where shelf tags have only be for your information in the store, while the real price came from computerized POS-Terminals with attached barcode-readers. Which of the two has priority for the customer may depend on country, law, store policy & good will.
Furthermore stores are completely cam covered nowadays, so much luck with being seen fumbling with your gadget in front of that label, or being seen on 'tape' putting another one over it, or things like that :-)
On that note, I worked at a store where each department would borrow the store floppy and copy their weekly orders+sales onto it, then the store manager would read them on the office computer in one big excel file. This was in the late 2000s, so floppy was already pretty outdated, but it worked so it never changed.
I got called to the managers office one day. The store manager and assistant manager couldn't get the master spreadsheet to save and needed my computer skills. I spent like an hour fiddling with things before ejecting the disk and realizing they had hit the write lock switch on the floppy, so the spreadsheet wouldn't save.
I was the hero of the day and the manager bought a thumb drive from the photo department so this wouldn't happen again.
Yep. For the physical "hackers" among us, a price sticker gun (those little orange or white stickers with a number on them that mom and pop shops use) was one of our first tools to mess around with
I’ve worked retail on and off for a decade and been friends with AP in most places and no one has ever mentioned this happening. Never been told to watch for it, or heard a rumor about it from another store.
It’s just not something that happens.
Me neither. If it parallels the arc of those restaurant buzzers [USA perspective]:
-Big chains first (Olive Garden) with quality industrial systems
-Then, small businesses with dinky systems sold on Bezos site
What do you think, someone would have to be fired if e.g. Best Buy tags were super flaky and reset at random nationwide?
Maybe wifi6 location based on the gun when setting the tag?
It's typically in-store policy.
Is Best Buy going to let you walk with a $10 Sony FX3 camera? Probably not. Are they going to fight you over a $10 difference in posted vs look up? Probably not.
From what I remember Connecticut laws used to require retailers to charge the lowest advertised and/or physically labeled price.
my favorite that I have set up is a tag in my bathroom that shows me today’s weather and chance of rain when im brushing my teeth - I haven’t been caught by surprise in the rain since :)
No.
In most jurisdictions this is covered by Contract Law 101 that lawyers learn in year 1.
A contract only forms when you have an offer, acceptance, consideration
The price on the shelf (or shown on the website or in a catalogue) is known as an “Invitation To Treat”.
“Invitation To Treat” means you are inviting the customer to come to you and make you an Offer. There is no obligation on the business to sell.
In the case of a supermarket in the context of this discussion, the agent scans the barcode, and the "real" price is displayed on the screen and added to your bill. This is the "Offer", the business is saying "we are willing to sell you this Tomato at this price, take it or leave it".
If you don't say anything and pay and leave, then "Acceptance" has occured and the "Consideration" is the act of payment itself.
(N.B. IANAL, so my description might not be precicely textbook, but that's the broad concept).
I don't know whether "usually" is accurate though; it may be that common law prevails as you say in most transactions despite the states with regulations.
As already mentioned IANAL, but I would take an educated guess as follows:
The specific regulations to which you refer are in effect consumer protection regulations.
Ergo, they are there to protect the consumer against malicious behaviour by unscrupulous traders such as false or misleading information.
Any reasonable judge in a courtroom will likely agree that incorrect display of pricing on a shelf (or website or catalogue) is (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) likely to be an inadvertent error with no malicious intent. And therefore the common law would prevail.
We do not want a world full of hyper-dynamic pricing, we should destroy these.
Sure, at least the developer can say they did say so, but it doesn't matter. To me it seems more like avoiding responsibility. You published the tool, and by doing so you changed the world, even minutely, and in ways you cannot predict.
As hackers we bear the responsibility of tools we publish. Even if you believe knowledge is the most important and that everything _should_ be published, we should at least be well aware of the consequences. Great power, great responsibility.
Because as we all know, if something "bad" is possible, but no one has published a GitHub about it, no one will ever be able to do the bad thing! Society is saved at last!
People online will kick up a fuss about GPL and shit but in real life no one bothers. Shoplift. Close an OSS project. Who cares.
Sometimes I even ride without a ticket. In Europe/Asia especially if you act like clueless American they’ll let you off every time. Done it so many times haha. Some of these places even they will put fruits outside. You can just take extra and hide it. They can’t tell.
One time on drive to Bury St. Edmunds small town in the UK I saw a little farm shop with some sign saying to leave payment there. Zero enforcement. I just took the fruits. No flipper zero needed.
Good life hack. Social hacks like these are not so common but if you’re clever you can get a lot.
I'm sorry, but I'm so sick of seeing "omg hacker man" mystique surrounding flipper, which is exactly what they want because it drives sales. Ofc you can muck about with open and unsecured stuff...like duh.
But it annoys me to no end when I have reasonably intelligent friends parrot claims like "flipper can clone the nfc in your credit card and you can steal people's money wow much hack!"
Let's oversimplify dramatically and say that every single lost dollar is paid through cutting the workforce. You're ignoring the fact that people benefit from the theft: those who need food and are able to steal it rather than going hungry. How do you know that feeding those people is worth less than employing the workers lost to their theft?
The sellers don't know anything about how they work so it will take some digging to find the right ones, but having to dig a bit is normal for eBay (or Aliexpress, for that matter).
Lots of the tags I see though do have Bluetooth or maybe WiFi for updating as well.
I do really like eink things, I want to setup a nice 13 inch one which is now more like £160 so becoming more realistic for my to buy for fun.
I’m going to have to look more into these tags because if there’s cheap second hand ones they’d be awesome.
Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.
Back when I was a kid it was common to still just have simple price tag stickers on every single item. We’d pull off a cheap sticker and put it on an expensive item. If they noticed, we’d just shrug and say “oh Nevermind then” when they found the right price.
The only problem was most cashiers actually knew all the prices of stuff and paid attention, believe it or not they even knew how to make change back in those days /s. So you couldn’t always get super aggressive.
Depending on the value, the police probably aren't going to show up at your address, but use that card again at the store in the future and you might find the security guard coming over. Or, like many stores, they wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor, and then they bring felony charges...
The stores have cameras. Likely someone is well aware those weren't all bananas, and has it on video.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I was of the impression that, in our golden age of individualized surveillance, merely interacting with the kiosk was enough to leave a facial-geometry calling card these days.
I feel like I may have heard this from one of those Illinois BIPA class action suits [0], which reliably have a whiff of crackpot to them from a technical perspective. But it surely seems an obvious enough sort of application…
[0] https://www.law360.com/articles/2372764/home-depot-s-self-ch...
(Not a lawyer, I'd imagine you know better here than I do)
we do not have to accept this decision to reduce staff and raise prices as a matter of course. plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't.
Links:
> Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against Dollar General, claiming deceptive and unfair pricing at its more than 600 retail stores throughout the state. The lawsuit alleges that Dollar General violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws by advertising one price at the shelf and charging a higher price at the register upon checkout.
> The joint investigation revealed that “92 of the 147 locations where investigations were conducted failed inspection. Price discrepancies ranged up to as much as $6.50 per item, with an average overcharge of $2.71 for the over 5,000 items price-checked by investigators.”
https://progressivegrocer.com/dollar-general-accused-decepti...
> All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.
> The January 2023 inspection produced the store’s fourth consecutive failure, and Coffield’s agency, the state department of agriculture & consumer services, had fined Family Dollar after two previous visits. But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
What happens is that your identity is tied to these purchases and after a certain threshold you get flagged as a thief, essentially. At that point, you will get very increased attention (via checkout, purchases, and floor walkers), and after another threshold, will be trespassed and/or prosecuted.
But, you'll probably get away with a banana or few before you trigger the loss prevention threshold.
All this has done is train us to keep the carts out of the camera's viewing angle. It doesn't care if you keep pulling handfuls of groceries out of hammer space, as long as there's no cart in the frame.
I scanned a drink, heard the beep, put it in the bag. I scanned a loaf of bread, heard a beep, put it in the bag.
Now, instead of the typical "Unexpected item in the bagging area" it now shows the overhead replay and locks the system out until an employee comes over to review.
Combined with their exit gates that don't open if they think you've not paid for something, and cameras that track you through the store it's feeling very unfriendly.
So seems pretty good. Obviously erring on the side of having an employee double check makes sense when their profit margins are generally single digits. One missed tshirt means they lost money on your $300 cart.
I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…
When you see a TV being purchased, though, it wouldn't be hard to just watch that it in fact got checked in as such.
And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.
Then the receipt checker at the door checks his receipt and waves him on through.
Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.
Grocery stores in general consolidating, laying off workers, leaving them without pay/benefits, taking advantage of greedflation, etc., is a bigger drain on society.
On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.
I've had opportunity to hear many stories from people who have had largely unintended encounters with law enforcement. Many of these are for "shoplifting". That can be something as simple as forgetting something on the bottom of the cart. Walmart are super aggressive about this and rather than saying "sir, did you forget that thing or not want it anymore?" they prosecute.
Walmart is one of those publicly subsidized companies in the country. They don't pay employees enough so the government gives them food stamps. Those food stamps are largely spent at Walmart so Walmart is profiting on both ends. And then they displace checkout workers with self-checkout and pay for fraud detection systems and when people either intentionally or unintentionally didn't scan something correctly (or at all), they offload the costs of loss prevention onto the state by prosecuting. Walmart doesn't pay for that prosecution. TAxpayers do.
Walmart is a trillion dollar company. The stock has almost 3x'ed in less than 4 years. How long did it take to 3x to that level? About 23 years.
For prices displayed on the shelf-label inside the store the law is usually not that strict (YMMV), as a shop-owner can refuse sale on check-out (otherwise I could put a pricetag on e.g. a shopping-basket and the shop-owner would be legally required to sell me the basket...).
Besides, most shops I've seen (in Europe) already moved from Infrared communication to RF (NFC or proprietary), for centralized shelf-label management without handheld devices. So all this study (and the underlying reverse engineering of the IR-protocol) might do is probably accelerate the transition from IR to RF-based ESL...
This is not the case for groceries in Massachusetts at least. If there’s a discrepancy between the tag’s price and the scanned price the store must charge the customer the lowest of the two: https://www.mass.gov/price-accuracy-information
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
To me this is about having protocols that are suitable so not anybody can write to these labels without knowing a store secret or using replay attacks.
Stores hate giving the product away and pricing errors are much lower in my experience.
Supermarkets all throughout my country have these labels add "35% off" to any goods that they need to remove from shelves (either because they expire soon or because they want to replace the product with something different). That's done outside of normal advertising campaigns, just in the price tags on the shelves (and the digital systems, if they actually work).
Supermarkets here are already on thin ice because they frequently do not charge the price listed on shelves already, without malpractice.
Of course, if you happen to have a cart full of wrongly discounted stuff that someone needs to go out and correct, the store will probably look through security footage. If you play the game well and can make it look like a glitch in the system, a store would probably not bother, though.
We've been able to take a price sticker off one object and put it onto another for a very, very long time.
It's not really a new issue and current law should already cater for it.
The extreme lack of cybersecurity for something as essential as (often legally binding) price indicators should shock the entire industry, although I feel like it comes to no surprise to anyone actually working on integrating these things.
Its value is to provide a standardized hardware platform for (white hat) hackers for probing, prototyping, refining and sharing of security research in the fields its hardware supports (Sub-GHz RF, NFC, IR, and custom external boards via simple Input/Output pins).
Prior to that, everyone who wanted to research e.g. RF security had to either build/assemble something custom or buy much more expensive equipment. This created a barrier to collaborate on research, as everyone had to buy/build the same setup.
On top of that, Person A researching some RF topic selected an RF-transceiver from Company X, Person B used a component and a proprietary SDK of Company Y, so consolidating both work streams for a better foundation for all RF-related research required alot of time and effort from someone, breaking workflows of at least one group of researchers, etc.
In contrast, security research which utilizes Flipper Zero can be reproduced and built upon by everyone. All the work is harmonized on the same Hardware architecture, so it's easy for someone familiar with the platform to dive straight into a new idea without having to build a new breadboard, select a chipset, buy additional probing equipment etc.
The flipper is basically an Arduino pre built with a bunch of static antennas. It's fine and in a decent form factor, but I really haven't found it useful.
Do you have any links to actual research (not children playing "researcher") done with flipper hardware?
And they love the free advertising they get along the same lines by youtubers desperate for clicks.
Ultimately it just sells more devices. The flipper zero can't "hack" anything. It can only be used as a tool to perform hacking, by a skilled individual who is doing all the work/discovering an exploit.
I should not have to put up with children going "JUST SECURE YOUR NETWORKS BRO" because they spent $30 on some eBay "maurauder" dongle to be a pissant.
1. TOTP generator
2. As an extra garage door opener to let guests in from my desk
3. To avoid typing my long WiFi password in while setting stuff up (ducky or qr code)
4. Wrote a custom app that suggests meals/ restaurants so when the wife asks what we should eat this week I can just rattle off the random suggestions
Not to mention other random things on a less often basis
I've seen similar things posted on here before that had a binary build only and zero technical documentation. It was really hard to see any kind of research or education value in those.
But actually: It's not that broad. It's still mostly one at a time, ish. Changing a lot of them would stand out if anyone were paying attention.
Although it could certainly be broadened...but an IR emitter that's skookum enough to reliably hit all of the shelf tags in an aisle at once would probably show up as an intensely-bright purple floodlight on the cameras. That would stand out quite a lot. :)
I don't think anyone is paying attention anywhere near enough to pick that up. Additionally, one could read some barcodes and make quite cheap battery-powered narrow beam emitters to be placed in store aimed at particular tags that would only power up once a day at a random time.
If the lulz are the point, then: Just build hide the thing in the floor-cleaning robot. Include a decent camera (they're very cheap) to catch the barcodes.
If the comms last long enough as the machine passes by to program some tags every night, then some tags get programmed every night. Nobody will pay attention to the robot's new purple floodlight in the cameras.
> wait for you to do it repeatedly until it adds up to enough for a felony instead of just a misdemeanor
Isn't there a concept in the legal system where you have to mitigate damages even if you're the victim? I can't think of the example off the top of my head that Steve Lehto (consumer lawyer on YouTube gave).
I'm guessing people who steal from the stores aren't able to afford a decent lawyer, but I imagine a decent lawyer would ask the Target witness(es), why didn't you stop him after the first theft? Why did you keep letting him steal?
Enforcement goes to the police. Stores can't apprehend thieves. There is a lot of training for store employees to not try to engage the thieves because some can behave erratically and dangerously when they feel like they're caught.
You can tell someone they need to stop and pay for merchandise, but if they choose to keep walking there's nothing the store staff can do but document and report it.
The reason stores wait until it reaches felony level to report it is because police are too busy to try to pursue every small case that happens everywhere. There are fewer crimes that rise to the level of a felony, so they have to focus their efforts on the smaller number of more serious crimes instead of taking every report FIFO style
The stores can also make a police report after the first theft, but the stores are choosing not to.
The stores are choosing not to mitigate their damages, something that the courts frown upon in my limited knowledge.
I understand that might be a civil aspect (mitigation) versus a criminal aspect, but perhaps someone who has been to law school and studied the law, might be able shed some light.
I once got stopped at self checkout because I put two vegetables (peppers, IIRC) of different types in the same bag and weighed them together.
They were the same price so it's not like I was trying to pull a fast one one anyone, but "the system" noticed and flagged me for someone to come over.
This was pre-pandemic, and I'm sure they're not less capable now than before.
It was a difference of like $5 at most on a $400 bill. I suppose 1.25% is enough to pay someone in another country to monitor everything.
Supermarkets actually factor breakage, theft, and spoilage into their books as "shrink", which averages between 2-3% of sales. There's no detective building a case, biding their time to bring down the banana bandit.
Although, modern self-checkouts have cameras on the scanner with ML-powered item detection, and they will alert the attendant if you incorrectly scan something that's sold by weight. (I've done this before on accident, fat-fingering the wrong PLU.)
Pre-paid gift cards would fall into the part where almost always doesn't cover. There's a reason scammers love gift cards
It goes without saying however, that the customer himself is of course not allowed to alter the price on the shelf (like the Flipper Zero program in the featured link facilitates) and then pay the altered amount :P
For the most part, when it's happened to me, they've always taken the loss on the chin and then the next time I come in the prices have been updated, but I have also once encountered a grouchy old bastard manager who, when I asked to pay the price that was listed on the shelf, immediately launched into a tirade about how people are so ungrateful and how he's not making any money, blah blah blah.
I immediately put my intended purchases on the counter and left while he berated me the entire time I was walking out of the store.
But, crazy people aside, if you're not a dick about it then most of the time they'll do right by you.
So - if the state didn't have any blabbermouths on staff, and spent some time training, how many "inspections" could they speedrun in an hour?
Their Loss Prevention is so advanced that FBI has collaborated with them for case help
https://thehorizonsun.com/features/2024/04/11/the-target-for...
I also worked there briefly in my teens, they are a great employer.
Before the rightwing boycotted Target for it's lgbtq+ merch and before the liberals boycotted Target for its rollback of DEI initiatives, many of us had been boyoctting Target for decades because its advancement of surveillance technology and cooperation with companies like Palantir
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/san-francisco-gets-inv...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-25/how-targe...
Can confirm - my wife called in a complaint about some graffiti / vandalism or something that was obscene in a target, and when she got a call back from a rep they were able to pinpoint everywhere she went in the store to determine which sign she was talking about...
of course, without any real data, how would anyone know?
That's far from my experience. Usually they're overworked with a backlog of customers having some kind of issue needing attention. It usually takes a few minutes to flag one down when I need them to take a coupon or check and ID, because they're already busy doing something for another customer.
But every terminal also has a spycam hanging above it to either "give the appearance" of a big-brother overlord watching to encourage honesty, or is recording everything so that someone can review footage later if some issue is discovered.
Personally, I always just say “no thank you!” and walk past the receipt checker at non members stores. They know me at Walmart and know I’ll refuse the receipt check and stopped bothering me.
Some places will detect a fly farting on the damn scale, others can take three or four kids climbing on it before it complains.
The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.
And yes, the grocery ones all seem to be tuned really high.
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Cha...
(i) ...if there is a discrepancy between the advertised price, the sticker price, the scanner price or the display price and the checkout price on any grocery item, a food store or a food department shall charge a consumer the lowest price. If the checkout price or scanner price is not the lowest price or does not reflect any qualifying discount, the seller: (i) shall not charge the consumer for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is $10 or less; (ii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price less $10 for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is more than $10; and (iii) shall charge the consumer the lowest price for any additional units of the grocery item. For the purposes of this subsection and unless the deputy director determines otherwise, individual items that differ only by color, flavor or scent shall be counted as the same item if they are identical in all other aspects, including price, brand, and may only vary in random weight. This subsection shall not apply if: (1) there is evidence of willful tampering; or (2) the discrepancy is a gross error, in that the lowest price is less than half of the checkout price and the seller, in the previous 30 days, did not intend to sell the grocery item at the lowest price.
The law probably doesn’t apply to fraud, but then the cashier only notices the really obvious cases.
Source - worked at a grocery store in Massachusetts as a teen
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
That seems shocking to me, but I guess I live in a country where the prices on the shelves are "final" (with no need to add taxes) and I think it would be immediately obvious if I'd been charged the wrong price for goods.
it's mostly about efficiency. IR based, an employee needs to physically walk around. RF based, place a transmitter or two in the building and the system now works fully automated.
With the same vulnerable protocol the RF system is as easy to attack with bigger consequences then it seems....
The early shelf-label systems were IR-based, sold in bulk and were programmed manually using handheld devices held against them.
Most shelf-label solutions of today are part of a service-model, where gateways are mounted in the store to wirelessly update any label on price-change, often orchestrated remotely so store-chains can update all shops simultaneously.
Has nobody hooked one up to an agent loop yet?
Same goes for other tools. If Mythos can find vulnerabilities (through smarts or just extensive combinatorial testing who knows) what's to say it can't help find physical vulnerabilities as well.
Source: Early interest in wifi security, including in other people's networks, lead me down an education and career in security
I'm pretty tired of being the network guy in the field playing remote hands having to be on the front lines of all of this bullshit having to explain to decision makers that a bunch of shitty kids are running around and there's no real solution that we can just "fix" this with.
I'm tired. If they're not deauthing our networks they're breaking into rooms with the goddamn card copying and fuzzing functionality and stealing shit.
Sometimes the deviant act will get a nod of appreciation from me, but not if an AI did all the heavy lifting. I keep a labor-of-love website up and am increasingly swatting away scrapers in an attempt not to get slammed with a bankruptcy-tier cloud bill.
Shop floor cleaning robots seem to be rather clean on the outside, hard to imagine tampering with one in the field and making it inconspicuous.
So scan everything, then put it in the cart and walk off without putting in the credit card. Again, both are stealing but paying some fake, reduced rate is leaving your calling card at the scene of a crime.
Anything that risks an employee might confront you in the store is a greater risk IMO. And, usually they light on the register is green (or a similar indicator) so they do know right then if you don’t pay.
But at some point, they do start to care.
Stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks on 20 different occasions (every couple of weeks, say), with video and transaction evidence of the acts happening over and over again? That's a lot easier to prove, and in many states adds up to a nice juicy felony.
I.E. just because police don’t “waste” time investigating a crime with $1000 of damage to your personal property does not mean they won’t dedicate the time to pursue $200 in losses for the local mega mart.
Yup. I was in a local super market and saw Tomahawk steaks priced at $4-6 each. It had to be a mistake but I figured I would give it shot and see if they noticed. Cashier looked at the price, did a confused double take and immediately called over the manager. Turns out the decimal point was off by one so my $4.50 tomahawk was really $45. I bought it anyway and it came out great in the oven.
Over here in Poland we have a law that the store must sell you the good for the price it advertised, so in that case they'd be forced to accept $4.50 because of their mistake. May sound too biased in favor of the customer, but before that, the "errors" in price tags were more common.
Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for stealing low price items.
Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.
I hope they’re losing money over it.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.
Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.
Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.
I've sometimes toyed with the idea of an "open sourced" grocery store that's extremely transparent about every detail. Think electronic price tags that give you a complete breakdown of the cost of an item, cost of labor, cost to account for "loss", over/under-supply, etc.
I feel like there's a niche out there for hyperinformed consumers
One of the reasons I like costco actually 10% or so is a fine margin to pay.
I guess I'm thinking of something like dynamic pricing, except instead of it being used to manipulate consumers into paying the most they can possibly pay, it's used to give you really transparent, real-time information about what goes into that final pricetag
There are coop grocery stores where members get to see the financials at a high level and make price changes that make the market sustainable. This is usually some form of shared ownership but I think this is a better way to achieve similar goals.
The reason I used the word "open sourced" is because I think a good goal to shoot for would be to allow anyone else to learn and copy the structure/data/model. It'd be more of an experiment than anything else. Like a "let's teach everyone how a grocery store actually works" thing. Maybe even a non-profit
People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.
So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s
Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck.
Living in low trust societies sucks.
I've had friends bring people over to my house who just randomly stole things. I've dated women who stole money out of my wallet or if it'd leave $10 on the table they'd just take it.
Casual theft is just gross as is the need to constantly feel like you need to defend yourself from everyone you meet, but moreso the casual attitude people have towards it.
It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?
That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?
If I see someone stealing food, yes, I did. It's immoral for you to do otherwise.
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
They just cut worker hours and raise prices. The owners don't see a difference.
The richest person they're hurting is the store manager earning $200k missing some of their bonus.
F off
But no, most people in the US aren't stealing from grocery stores to feed their kids, they're stealing from stores to resell on black markets.
These are not the people bragging about scamming the self checkouts.
That is your thought process?
And since when is stealing a prank?
I'm like 50/50 on that. If I've got a lot of stuff it's nice having the space of a full lane for bagging along with another set of hands helping (even more if they still have dedicated baggers!). But if I'm just getting a handful of items a self checkout is faster than waiting in a queue for a full service lane. But if there's a long queue for the self checkout then forget it. If I have to wait I'll wait for service.
I still just prefer the scan and go stuff the most though. Scan with my phone as I shop, check out with a confirmation on the phone, roll on through to the car. I wish all my shopping was that smooth.
In some places walking out with a MacBook Neo is a misdemeanor-but putting a barcode for bananas on it and checking out would be one or two felonies.
I noticed this straightaway and my mother informed me how bad people would try and swap price tags on items and this was a countermeasure.
Later on, when I owned my own vehicle, it was the common lore that, after applying a new annual registration tag to the license plate, we should go over it with a razor blade, and slice up about six sections on the little sticker, because there were criminals out there who would lift off the registration sticker because it was quite valuable to fraudulently "register" license plates that way and bypass the DMV. Although I never saw this crime actually perpetrated or met anyone who was a victim, I guess I did it myself a few times. Better safe than sorry!
I mean, you need to prepare having that printer on you, but it's not all that difficult to print on demand while in the store.
When do these people that glorify their stealing interact with actual low-trust-society events from corporates? Almost never. They just hear about it on the news and social media influencers sharing stories.
These are people who have no idea what being shaken down for a bribe is like, have always benefitted from strong consumer protection laws, generous refund policies, and all around honesty in most every corporate interaction and the complaints they have are minor compared to their proud theft.
How often are you short changed at the store? Lied to about the weight of something you were sold? Received an adulterated or diluted product?
A major supermarket chain in Australia (Coles) is literally a client of Palantir.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Palantir-Pa...
Of course, the smart thieves would just take whatever into a bathroom, open it up, then stuff it somewhere in a coat and walk out the door. Those were really tricky, since we couldn’t “prove” it since we didn’t have full video coverage (for obvious reasons) so we’d just trespass those people. We had a lot of off duty cops because our location was particularly bad, making $30 an hour to mostly sit around and play games on their phones and look intimidating standing at the front door and walking around the store.
I'm not sure it's the super system it's sold as.
I hate self checkout.
At my grocery store, it very often complains about something when I'm checking out. The person comes over, reviews the video and said you aren't doing anything wrong.
The answer is don't go to places where you self-checkout, and don't go to places with surveillance. There are still a couple of grocery stores in my town like that.
If you funded your own private investigation which unambiguously identified the culprit and demonstrated damages sufficient for a felony I imagine the local police would readily act on your behalf as well.
There’s plenty of documented cases where local police are the basically henchmen for large corporations, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and believe it’s kind of a fear mongering meme to think they have enough power over them to dictate them to do roundups after the fact. They may however give all the evidence they collect on you to the police with a bow on it and the cops may decide to take it seriously. Where I am, I do not see this happening. The police will have expected the retailer to have protected their inventory. Off duty police officers make a lot of money working private security and they don’t want to disturb that dynamic.
Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit?
This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the increased oil prices. The same as the overheated graphics cards.
To make a poor analogy to physics: if you measure something which changes when you change unit/frame of reference -- it's not a well-defined thing.
The best policies have the same effect regardless of the legal structure (within the policy) superimposed on the actual action.
Medium policies can be optimized/gamed (perspective) -- but are designed to be adversarial, in that the gamed outcome is at least OK but potentially in fact the desired one (for example -- if you tax land, then not paying the tax means not using up land, which may be a desired policy goal). These can cause issues, though -- common law is an adversarial system, and "justice" can usually be translated to "access to lawyers," imo.
The connection with the above is that while the solution used is probably not universal -- sometimes, the optimal solution is, so the adversarial policy is just an approximation of "good policy".
Bad policies not only don't compose -- but then bureaucrats go on and insert discretion to try to make them compose. On the surface, this often looks like common sense -- but the result is insiders can keep doing the Bad Thing, but you can't do anything which isn't the Way Things Are Done -- because you need approval, and it Looks Bad.
/rant
More heavily tax profit above a certain level? Allows for funnelling back some of the excessive profits. Suffers from the same tax evasion as we currently have where profits are skewed on the books with all kinds of accounting tricks.
Demanding sales prices cannot exceed cost + 10% of cost? In aggregate or per unit?
The drug industry is like this; the profits on a single drug sale are insane, even counting the R&D costs for that particular drug. However, those profits are offset by the losses incurred on all the other drug ideas that hadn't panned out despite the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in them.
The record and publishing industries are similar. As Steve Jobs once said, the main job of a music label isn't selling records, it's not even marketing or promotion, it's identifying artists with potential to be great hits amongst the thousands of wannabes. The revenue that labels get, and it's a lot of revenue, mostly goes towards recouping the costs of failed bets.
There are non-coop but organic and "fancy" grocery stores in the area as well that decimate them on prices.
Admittedly, these items are all very high quality, organic, small batch, hand crafted, local, minority-owned, protecting the rainforest etc. type products, but as a single man living alone, my grocery bill would be probably $800 a month if I bought all of my food from them.
There is something to be said for the power of group purchasing power though. For instance, you can buy a cow for much less than the cost of the individual cuts and have it butchered and split for like, $2-$4/lb of meat you receive.
When I watched movies and TV shows I had this idea that thieves were all clever people who built smart systems to evade detection and steal right out from under big corporations. Some of those people might be out there operating undetected, but the average thief who gets caught is someone trying to abuse something as much as they can until they get caught. Some of them are so brazen (like the scan everything as bananas post above) that they must believe that nobody will ever check and if they do get caught nothing bad will happen.
The staff who watch these things have a good sense of what dollar thresholds the customer must cross before getting law enforcement involved.
Having been a long-haired holey jeans-wearing guy in my past, I was naively surprised when I cut my hair and noticed that people treated me very differently in business settings. When I started wearing nicer clothes on top of that, it was night and day - the kind of reception you get in banks, anything like that. It sucks that humans are built to judge and filter on appearances, but it's just the reality. You can use it to your advantage.
Ironically, some of the store security look exactly like you. They come in all shapes, sizes, grooming standards, styles, and tattoo levels. I've seen some in full-on Juggalo outfits and neck/face tattoos.
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks out the door, they don't know who that person is. And while they may have video of parts of this, they don't necessarily see enough to prosecute. (Acting like you're stealing a steak but not actually doing it isn't a crime. Shoplifting can be hard to prove; part of that proof means demonstrating that they didn't change their mind and just drop off the steak somewhere else in the store.)
When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks it up to self-checkout and pays for it as if it is a bunch of bananas with their credit card, they have identified that person. They have them on video at the self-checkout committing this crime.
It actually doesn't matter much if they leave the store with their bounty or not in this second case. The crime is already done by converting the steak into bananas.
In that scenario it seems to me that the best the thief can do is to "accidentally" ring up a steak as bananas occasionally and hope that if someone ever takes note that the past events will remain undetected.
That said, I'm pretty sure all of the self checkouts I've interacted with over the past several years would automatically flag such a "mistake". There are some things they're still bad at and they generate plenty of false positives but they seem to be reasonably good at identifying obvious "errors".
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
That makes it okay?
"It is not considered wrong"
By WHOM? I go out of my way to avoid self-checkout when I can, because I consider it 'wrong.'
But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.
I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.
And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.
GuinansEyebrows's opinion was that businesses are wrong for implementing self checkouts. Presumably, ryandrake agreed with GuinansEyebrows.
I do not think that a business's decision to use self checkouts is wrong, and in fact the business is consistent with all of us, as we all choose to use automation/technology how we see fit.
Maybe it is suboptimal for some people, but why would a business be wrong for trying something that reduces their costs? I try to reduce my costs all the time. For example, I like restaurants where you order at the counter or on a device and self bus. I don't like waiting for a waiter. Is that business wrong?
These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.
When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.
Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.
Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.
Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.
Anyone just buying bananas and steaks is going to look suspicious fast. So rotating the banana for other things is key. Having a mixed bag of purchases where the steaks are always just accidentally unscanned or misscanned.
The facial recognition thing isn’t really in the picture for this minor type of crime. Law enforcement doesn’t have easy access to it as Hollywood would lead you to believe. Its use is reserved for higher profile crimes. You’d have to really be running a steak stealing criminal syndicate for this to happen. Before that, retailers would have already started forcing different procedures for the steaks. Like locking them up or pay at the butcher stand.
One thing facial recognition can do, if used properly by the retailer, is flag you and alert the store to put extra eyes on you every time you enter the store. There’s an increased chance they’ll confront you in the act or otherwise scare you off of it.
That said: I've never, ever weighed meat at self checkout. In fact, I've never had a cashier any weigh meat, either.
I've bought plenty of steaks in regular grocery stores, but each of those steaks (even the ones that they wrapped in butcher paper just for me after I selected them from the glass case at the back of the store) had the weight coded into the UPC that was printed at the time it was wrapped up (and weighed by the meat cutter).
There has no further weighing required for the register to know the price, so weighing a steak at the checkout is pretty bizarro-world behavior to begin with -- at least in my experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code#Number_...
Look what happened recently in new york. $30/hour to shovel snow got them a lineup out the door of people wanting to work.
Those companies made the choice to prioritize profit margins above staffing.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/profit-m...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/profit...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/profit...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/profit-...
And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
> More staff can only mean higher prices.
When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.
> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.
There's already an scale that prints UPCs in the produce department for customers to use. I'll just put the package of steak on there, punch in 4011, and scan out my "bananas" at the self-checkout. ;)
(But they'll still know who I am. Walking out is cleaner, and has fewer steps.)
Honestly if you’re a thief this is just a dumb idea. Probably works for the original commenter a few times fine. But it’s way too obviously and intentionally theft. You need to come up with something you can claim was an honest mistake.
Find another item that sounds similar but is cheaper and use that upc. If you’re keying in the upc, on a scale or something, then find one that’s cheaper but off my 1 digit or something where you can say it was a typo and you didn’t notice. Those kinds of things are more defensible. None of us have been trained to be a cashier so honest mistakes are a strong defense to any claim of misconduct.
Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.
Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.
> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.
Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.
There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.
Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.
Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?
At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.
Just that there's not so much difference between tipping a gas station attendant and paying the employer of a grocery checker.
I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.