Around a third of all customers 'cheat' the supermarket self-service checkout machines in some way.
David Glance, University of Western Australia
Despite some technological safeguards, self-service checkout machines in supermarkets rely heavily on customer honesty to scan, and pay for, their shopping. It turns out however, that around a third of all customers cheat the machines in some way.
Although self-service checkouts can do some technological checking by having scales in the bagging area, these measures are very easy to circumvent. Shoppers will swap barcodes on items, scan more expensive vegetables or fruit as lower cost varieties, avoid scanning an item and just placing it on the floor or in an already packed bag and sometimes go to more elaborate lengths by creating their own barcodes to scan.
Consumers who cheat the system tend not to consider what they are doing as stealing and do not see themselves as thieves. Criminologist Emmeline Taylor has summarised the many excuses that people use to justify their cheating the supermarkets that use self-service checkouts. Some say it is because they are hitting back at supermarkets that are essentially bad corporations. Others justify their actions because they are being forced to do the work of a checkout person, or they have had to put up with problems in the checkout process or even that the mis-scanning of an item was a mistake or accident.
The classification however assumes that people actually cheated as a consequence of this motivation rather than just conveniently excusing something that they, along with a large number of other people were doing.
Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker has proposed the Simple Model of Rational Crime to explain this type of behaviour. He put forward the view that people do a simple cost-benefit analysis of every given situation to decide whether they are going to be dishonest. In deciding whether to park illegally for example, they will weigh the benefits of free parking against the risk of getting caught and the consequences of a fine if that does, in fact, happen.
How to reduce cheating at self-service checkouts?
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