Guilty confession: I will sometimes just grab my things and start over at another station. It may be rude, but I imagine it's not any more work to cancel the whole transaction rather than edit a single item.

Weight.

At some stores they have an overhead camera with a computer that watches for you to pick something up and move it to the bag without there being a scan. At my local grocery store, I stopped using the self checkout because of how overzealous that system was.

You'd be wrong. I had the great opportunity of figuring out one store I know sets the "removable scanned item without supervisor input" at 3. For a cashier-operated register, mind you. The limitis for the shift lead to override for the cashiers and not for the person standing around the self checkout isle for customers.

And you'd think this meant 3 items on the bill regardless of their amounts. Nope. 3 items.

You can imagine how the rest of the business's operations looked like. I have to say, I'm impressed they somehow just... chug along just fine. A multinational chain in Europe.

They do in Germany

In my local Lidl in Finland I was able to buy beer upto 2.5%abv without checkups, until about 18:00. The employee explained to me that during the day when they have more employees they let you buy it without checking, but in the evening they have less employees so less eyes on the self checkout.

Depends a lot on the country and sometimes even between the store chains within the country. At my local store you can't buy anything age limited at the self check-outs, they start flashing and beeping and you gotta get your stuff and walk to the closest real check-out. And alcohol free drinks, like beers wines ciders whatever, are treated the same as the original versions, limited to 18. Heck, even candy pipes (tobacco pipe shaped liquorice candy, quite delish!) is age limited as it kinda-looks like a pipe and you know, think-of-the-children.

They do here in UK. It's entirely stupid.

They do in the US, at least in Minnesota. (In some respects the US is 50+ countries in a trench coat... and probably not much else, ready to flash our flaccid little Florida at unsuspecting victims.)

one of my favorite "welcome to ____" experiences was when i moved to Utah. I went to the local grocer and bought some San Pellegrino. the cashier carded me. now i've worked retail, so [most likely] this was her first day (the POS tells you when to check someone's ID) or [i've learned not to overestimate Utahns, so also most likely] she somehow had no understanding of what i was buying. i somwhat bemusedly told her i'd show my ID to her manager. when the manager came over, i pointed to the bottles and told him the cashier wanted to see my ID.

i may have memory problems from time to time, but the look on the cashier's face when her manager told her I was buying water will remain with me til the day i die.

I guess we're not that friendly.

🥵

One of the many ways in which the world used to be better, indeed...

Nowadays if a store tried to be that lenient, they'd be robbed blind and bankrupted in short order. But that says more about people struggling and not having the resources they need to survive no matter how hard they work or how willing they are to work than it does about people being moral. It didn't take as many work-hours to afford rent or bills or food back then so people used to have the ability to not care if a little went missing every once in a while. Now there's no margin left and the squeeze only gets tighter and tighter.

You must not have very good reading comprehension.

An ultimatum doesn't have to be a threat on your life, you DO realize.

If you don't want the outcome that they threaten you with, then doing what they instructed you not to do is not a constructive or productive course of action and you may wish to reconsider your strategy.

Management in charge of these decisions wildly underestimated how mindless customers are almost all the time.

I work retail and can feel my IQ drop when I am shopping vs working.

I should have just started working there myself. Like fuck, what they gonna do, fire me?

😂 I appreciate the wisdom

The real protip is always in the comments

Yeah, that sometimes works.