As time goes by I read more and more articles about people gaming the self-service scanning lanes and stores. Recently I read an article about a school principal that used foam plates to hide more expensive items as he ran them through the scanner.
He would hold the plates up and then push bacon and fish and other things across as if he was scanning them but the foam plates were the ones blocking the scanner. Then he put everything in the bag and he got arrested for shoplifting for $37 worth of stuff.
This is a grown man stealing very basic items from a store but the attitude that seems more and more pervasive is if nobody's watching me I can do this.
I remember watching a video on YouTube a few years ago in that video they had a guy go and pretend to be taking a nap on a park bench in a major city. The guy had his mobile phone poking up out of a pocket on his backpack in front of him. The backpack was near his head and the gag was to see if anybody was so tempted that they would grab the mobile phone and try to just walk off with it. It was equipped with a shocker so that if the person got a certain distance away it would zap them and the people making the video had multiple people around to stop the person from walking off.
In the video they showed many people stopping and pausing and grabbing the phone and getting zapped. It's as if all they could think was "nobody's watching me so I should be able to get away with this". And they were going to steal a five hundred dollar device from a man that's not homeless and not dressed as a bum just napping.
I've read other articles about values in other countries. The Danish are Very trusting of each other to the point that they supposedly leave their children Sleeping in strollers parked outside of a restaurant while they are inside not in view eating. In America that would be a crime!
The whole skip scanning thing is sad though. It's one of the reasons that I shy away from using those self-service lanes. Especially when I have a lot of stuff to scan. If I have a very small order in the grocery store, I'll go ahead and go through that lane sometimes. But I've read about and heard about so many people just taking advantage of a moment where nobody's watching (or at least they think nobody's watching). And they get zapped with a criminal charge on their record with possible jail time and fines and a limit on what they can apply for job-wise in the future because now they're a branded criminal.
The thing people have to remember is we're so untrustworthy that they have cameras everywhere and now artificial intelligence is watching the video and pointing out what looks to the large language model things as a crime.
Just be honest and don't steal. And don't skip-scan.
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