->store sized vending machines

Which was literally the shopping experience before Selfridges "revolutionized" the department store experience by letting customers have direct access to goods for sale.[0]

Before that everything was behind a counter and you have to be served and monitored. Even the grocery store was a similar experience, whereby you would give the clerk your list and they would select everything for you.

Everything that is old is new again.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_store#Innovations_1...

People willing to pay a membership fee like Costco are probably less likely to be shoplifters, plus signing up for a membership means they have your info which further discouraged shoplifting, and then if they do catch you then it's easier to ban you from all their stores.

Or... just open up big warehouses, only do online sales, and then deliver to customer?

The truth is we have tried it and on a large scale: The Automat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat). Don't see to many of those around anymore, except maybe analogues in Japan.

With some perspective on the idea, would you invest in the retail real estate, the technology development, and later maintenance, and then still need to have staff to stop people from just breaking into the machine?

Welcome to iCostco, I love you

They want money and there's no reason not to do it. This isn't a matter of meeting peoples needs, most thefts are not of anything necessary. It's just a job to them.

You're saying it in sort of a condescending way, but there's still truth.

Desperation leads to crime, true.

But also true: a lack of societal norms leads to crime. Any time we advocate or demonstrate disrespect, cheating, injustice, cruelty, unwarranted rule-breaking, doxing, or any kind of mob mentality we are contributing to it.

And yes your favorite political villains are all guilty of this, but we need to start with ourselves and the people close to us.

OTOH there are four critera for a legal stop -- they need to see you enter without the merchandise, select it from the shelf, conceal it, then walk past the point of sale AND all merchandise. And you have to have an unobstructed view of the person, because if they discard the item you stop them for, you're in for a world of (legal) hurt.

Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.

If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.

So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.

Anyone can dress like rentacop or Walmart security. Pull out the pepper spray, say "back away," and leave.

> However, because nothing is ever profitable enough

This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.

If you think they just kept those new profits forever -- where did they go? Because grocery is an infamously low-margin business to be in, even now.

> and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows

Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.

I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt

>We could pass laws that allow and encourage security officers at grocery stores to get physical to stop shoplifting. Arm them too.

That's already the law in a huge part of the country.

> They want to see some dude who steal stuff get shot for their crime.

Places like Qt (gas station chain) in AZ have armed guys that are trained to shoot if lawful (armed robbery, etc).

I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that shoplifting should not be punished? Wouldn’t lack of enforcement or punishment for wrongdoing only lead to more wrongdoing? Isn’t the well-accepted viewpoint on this website that if the cost of violating a law is lower than the profit, that is what companies will do. What makes you think people won’t make the same calculation?

The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.

The rates in 2023 were 66% of what they were in 2010. That decline has not been driven by reduction in crack usage.

The falling shrinkage is a good indicator, although it’s imperfect for obvious reasons. Of course, there are anomalies like COVID, but otherwise the trend is clear. Also when some entity like supermarket chains or their advocacy groups tried to split up shrinkage by its causes in the past decades, even the shoplifting part fell. So there is no better statistics, and that tells that shoplifting is probably falling.

Of course, you cannot know, but statistics is quite clear that shoplifting decrease is way more probable than increase, and you need some other reasons to advocate for increasing shoplifting. So when somebody does that, it’s highly probable that not because shoplifting is actually increasing.

Wouldn't insurance rates go up if they reported all of the shoplifting? I suspect most large company's do some sort of self insurance setup though.

As part of lobbying for changes to laws, or for more police funding - stores accurately track "shrinkage", why are you so certain it's not being reported?

If the statement that actually enforcing law will lower crime is politically motivated, then I’m afraid to ask what statement isn’t. Is it OK to state that 2+2 = 4, or does that have political undertones too?

Do you really not see the difference between having to pay for a service and having to upload biometric data in a centralized database under someone else’s control?

For one, I don’t have to buy a ticket. Many theaters participate in programs where you can get a ticket as a reward for other activities (credit card points, eg). The ticket sale is determined by the theater, and is not part of a government supported scheme to prevent some people from ever seeing a movie in any theater, ever.

Finally, the sale of a ticket is necessary for the operation of many movie theaters. It is intrinsic to the business model. The nightclub could operate the service, and even work with ban lists without the centralized biometric database.

> activity unrelated to what you opted out of

Going to see a movie is obviously not unrelated to buying a movie ticket.

The difference is that buying a ticket isn't marketed as "opt-in".

This comment cannot be done in faith. Buying a ticket versus buying a ticket AND being profiled by all other venues are clearly two different things.

that distinction won't last more than a few more years

This is indiscriminate data collection. Some of the risk comes from the correlation with other sources of data by LEO with overly broad access to fine grained data.

Big Brother is not watching you. Instead, thousands of Little Brothers are patiently watching their little corner of the world, recording license plates, logging phone locations, tracking credit card usage. Big Brother doesn’t need to see you, he just asks them to tell him what he wants to know.

if anything is stored, "we know you were at this night club at this time" is pretty sensitive information? depending on the kind of club.

…unless you have any bowel affecting disease/syndrome or you are travelling and you have neither regular eating schedule, nor full control of your diet…

fellas, did you know that women generally use toilet paper, even if they are regular?

this is the comment and reply chain that actually dispelled HN's charm for me.

Agree. My simple advice is: Don't be full of shit when leaving home.

I know what you mean but read this in context. You're less restricted in what you can collect compared to what you can do with it - any valid use case requiring video footage allows you to get video footage but that doesn't mean you can then do anything you want with it. The key is what are you using the data for.

And less restricted does not mean no restriction.

Having someone else pick up (IE buy) your prescription is legal and commonplace for obvious reasons. https://legalclarity.org/can-someone-else-pick-up-my-prescri...

Thus I’m regularly allowed to buy drugs I’m not legally allowed to use. “Using a prescription medication that was not prescribed to you is illegal under both federal and state laws.” https://legalclarity.org/is-it-illegal-to-use-someone-elses-...

Don't the industry-imposed rules for handling credit cards work that way (restricting use of data you already have) though?

Like, I thought a big part of why some stores do loyalty cards is because they enable tracking things that they'd get their credit card privileges revoked if they tracked that way.

>It's like allowing people to buy drugs, but not to use them.

Well, since you mention it: I have prescription drugs that I am allowed to buy, but I am NOT allowed to abuse them. I must take exactly 1 each day.

> 1) the selling of private, incidentally collected information by service providers, and 2) the accumulation, buying, and selling of dossiers on normal people whom one has no business relationship that is the problem.

But this is exactly what is covered - incidentally collected information cannot be used for other purposes. That's rather the point - you must collect things for a specific use case and you can't use it without permission for other cases.

> I don't think it does, because it is completely unverifiable.

It's no less verifiable than "don't collect the data", and hiding it requires increasingly larger conspiracies the larger organisation you are looking at. People are capable of committing crimes though, sure.

If you flag the dozen or so people that come in to your business once a week to steal, you don't have to have as much surveillance in the store otherwise. Just check them out when they enter, very simple.

For instance, Costco has a much lower theft rate (0.11–0.2% of sales) compared to other supermarkets (1-4%) simply because they manage to keep criminal out through membership fees. Control the entrance, target the known criminals and we can go back to a high trust society.

I don't really understand their reasoning behind the "technology of convenience" point.

Say I implement facial recognition anti-fraud via an army of super-recognizers sitting in an office, watching the camera feeds all day (collecting the sensitive information into their brains rather than into a computer system). It'd be more expensive and involve employing staff (both the "technology of convenience" criteria. From a consumer perspective the privacy impact is very similar, but somehow the privacy commissioner would interpret this differently?

Maybe that is the point the privacy commissioner is trying to make, that collecting this information through an automated computer system is fundamentally different than collecting this information through an analog/human system. But I'm not sure the line is really so clear...

Very well could be that I am misreading it.

In Australia we expect companies to follow the rule of law, which encodes the expectations of society.

The Australian Privacy Act falls well short of European standards, but it does encode some rights for people that businesses must abide by.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?

Unless you think a grocery store should be allowed to grab you and sell your organs then you agree that this private organisation should be subject to some limitations about what it can do on its own land. The question is then where the line should be between its interests and the interests of those who go on the land.

You can be absolutist about this, that’s certainly a position, but it’s extremely far from mainstream.

>Who doesn't expect to be recorded when entering a retail chain?

Me. Unless it's clearly stated outside. It's why I wear a covid mask when shopping.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide

It generally owns more weapons than your average deluded shop owner.

> How the hell does the government have the right to decide what this private company can do on their private land?

Because the world is bigger than just the wishes of private businesses. I don't think there is anywhere on this planet where you as a private business can do literally whatever you want, there are always regulations about what you can and cannot do. The first thing is usually "zoning" as one example, so regardless if you own the land, if it isn't zoned for industrial/commercial usage, then you cannot use it for industrial/commercial usage.

What libertarian utopia do you live in that would allow land owners to do whatever they want?

On a recent visit to the UK (from the US) I briefly thought I was in an alternate universe because their TJ Maxx stores are virtually identical but inexplicably called TK Maxx.

(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)

My other favorite example of this is the A&W Restaurants which in the states was a bit more of a fast food establishment. It was never that successful, but you'd see them every so often. Gone now in the states, but I believe its Canadian successor is still going strong.

Australia also still has E.B Games.

I was curious so read the Kmart wikipedia article over morning coffee. Seems like these (no longer) share any ownership with the original. Which I guess raises a philosophical question about names and existence that will require at least a second cup of coffee :-)

to be fair, Australia does kind of seem like a made up place with made up animals