Self-scan shoplifting at local tesco

[justcurious4]

Checked instore stock at local tesco for DDs soya milk and it said they had some. Went in and they didn't. Asked and the member of staff said 'its showing 25 in stock but theres none here and none in the back so these have been shoplifted during self scan'

aibu to think that self scan is causing more problems than fixing them?!

I but have a child with a dairy allergy and know how much I hate paying over ye odds for dairy free alternatives so I can quite understand why someone struggling would choose to shoplift toddler soya milk if they could.

Is this a 'baby milk?'

Is it in ambient or chilled?

The assistant is wrong, theft doesn't happen 'because' of self scan tills.

There are loads of different methods of stealing in shops. If it was the whole shelf that was nicked, it was highly unlikely to be taken through self scanning.

It could mean that 25 are coming on delivery for that day

I see a lot of undesirables stealing/trying to steal from my local Boots. Trust me they are not stealing a loaf of bread to feed their child. They steal high value items -perfume and the likes. I have a friend who lives near what I would call a professional shoplifter. She knocks on doors asking what people want her to steal. She has been banned from a few local shops. It’s partly due to people like her as to why small businesses close and shops remain boarded up or replaced by betting and vaping shops.
These people are not flat out working full time, why would they when they make a living stealing from others.

This. You are very naive if you think shoplifted food goes straight to starving kids.

Can I ask the same question, it would be really useful for me to know in advance if things I need are out of stock as I have a choice of supermarkets and I could save time by not wasting a trip to Tesco

Is it the new club card app that they've been emailing me about ?

I have just investigated this😁 as I couldn't see it on the Shopping and Clubcard app, you have to go to the home page, select shop in store and put in the store you want to use, mine had defaulted to the nearest Tesco express so I changed it the the larger store near me. It didn't appear to give the number in stock though, just said in stock but I did pick something quite common

Thank you, I'll get the app and have a look

25 is a lot to be stolen. It's more likely that someone put the wrong number into the system or they were damaged and they haven't been taken off stocks yet.

I agree with pp, why are you identifying self-scan as the problem?

Alternative hypotheses:

Why are so many more parents raising children who turn into adults who think it's acceptable to shoplift?

Or,

Why are so many people making political choices which increase poverty and drive people to shoplifting?

I suspect a combination of these two are far more relevant than whatever the latest checkout technology is.

Asked and the member of staff said 'its showing 25 in stock but theres none here and none in the back so these have been shoplifted during self scan'

How weird if the staff member to say. They have no idea why it's happened but it's more likely to be an admin or storage error than it is shoplifting.

Even if it was shoplifting why is that attributed to self scan? People steal all the time without using self scan.

@Stravaig

Alternative hypotheses:

Why are so many more parents raising children who turn into adults who think it's acceptable to shoplift?

Perhaps it might be better to address the question/s
Why are we paying so much of our hard earned money to supermarkets who seem to have a licence to print money?
Why are we paying so much of our hard earned wedge to energy companies who do not care if we live or die ?
Why are we allowing the water companies to pump sewage into our rivers ?

These and the answers to many other similarly posed questions will probably answer the first question you raise

It doesn't work like that
You can't just not scan it, the machine weighs what you put in it. You steal it by scanning an equivalent item, but putting the more expensive item on the platform where your bags are. Like wise, stocks would show less of the item that was scanned, but in reality there would be stock on the shelf

I work in a small supermarket - we are sitting ducks for shop lifters. Baby milk is stollen all the time so i can believe it. We are only allowed to have three each of the big tubs of powder on the shelf at any time to limit how much they can take. Some people do take things to the self service to make it look like they are paying, some will just pick it up and walk out. We don't have any security and are not really given any training on what to do so they do tend to get away with it. I assume it's absorbed by the company, it probably just makes things more expensive for everyone else

There was shoplifting before self-scan machines. Shoplifting would have increased due to cost of living whether the self scan machines were there or not. People can’t afford to feed their children and will be resorting to desperate measures, especially as food banks can’t meet demand. Some people will take any excuse and would have shoplifted anyway. There will be people who don’t scan all their items but there will still be people who slide stuff into their bag. In high theft areas they will actually do more checks that everything has been scanned. I would argue it actually gives people less confidence to shoplift by sliding it into the bag and so in high theft areas when the number of checks increases, shoplifting would actually decrease.

I think because if the machine didn’t exist, then the stuff would have been scanned by the cashier.

Shoplifting existed far before self-scans. People just walked out with things. Retail theft reports find far more theft is still conducted like that than processed through self-scan machines...

Someone I knew years ago picked up a sandwich, walked round the store eating it and then never paid for it. I did wonder if he always got his lunch like this.

Maybe supermarkets don't have scan and shop whwee you are, no weighing involved at all, it's all on trust and the possibility of a spot check

I'm a super honest person but inadvertently made a mistake last week when buying multiples of one item because I got distracted by bumping into a friend and chatted while scanning and missed one

Supermarkets (and most retailers) WANT higher footfall (people physically in shops.) Click and collect, and delivery, eliminates the possibility of impulse purchases. And often the impulse purchases are the highest margin items, which is why they're by the tills.

Those options are offered because they're better than not having a customer at all - they were originally intended to pick up the customers who have difficulty getting to stores. The delivery charge, as a PP said, does not cover the lower profit on this shopping method.

I don’t think adolescent boys are more poverty stricken than adolescent girls and yet they are the main group that shoplift. You also get shoplifters who do it as a business. Kleptomaniacs and thrill seekers. Apparently, baby formula is also used by drug dealers to dilute their drugs. I don’t think drug dealers are poverty stricken, judging by the cars they drive in our area.

He should be banned.

If the machine didn't exist, they would do it another way.

I caught a shoplifter going through my till once. I'm not going to explain how, but I'm confident it wasn't the first time he'd done it - but this time he was careless.

Local store has hidden the shopping baskets because they are being shoplifted. I asked why anyone would steal a basket and was told they are just filling the basket with groceries and walking out with the whole thing. Wtf?!? I think self scan is only part of the story - shoplifting is rife and clearly quite blatant in some places.

I've been worrying about this since the other day, I do scan as you shop every single week without fail (where you scan as you go around the shop, not the weight scan on exit ones) and got basket checked the first few times but never since. The other day it requested a basket check, after 5 minutes no one had come still so I abandoned the hand held scanner on the basket check needed screen and scanned and paid for my shopping normally. But I left a scanner, that had my clubcard details, on the basket check screen so when this was found will they assume I stole, or that I was going to and then scanned myself so that I didn't get caught once it mentioned basket check? Or will they not care?

Yes there are very much still shoplifters about, but 25 soy milk? Really? Hard to smuggle those through surely. Sounds like a stocking issue to me.