Computer Opens Unmanned Store For Holiday 333
tomhudson writes "The Walkato Times in New Zealand is reporting that someone forgot to tell the computer not to unlock the supermarket on the Friday holiday. 'About half of the 24 people who came into the supermarket paid for their groceries using the self-scan service. The service stopped working after alcohol was scanned, requiring a staff member to check a customer's age before the system is unlocked.' The owner, Mr Miller, was quoted as saying 'I can certainly see the funny side of it... but I'd rather not have the publicity to be honest. It makes me look a bit of a dickhead.' Rather than take legal action, Mr Miller is hoping that the people who didn't pay will do the right thing."
Smart (Score:0, Insightful)
Be careful to not misinterpret (Score:5, Insightful)
About half of the 24 people who came into the supermarket paid for their groceries using the self-scan service
Note that this doesn't say that all 24 people who came into the supermarket took anything in the first place. I can easily see some going in and filling the shopping cart, but then noticing that registers are unmanned and leaving the cart in the shop (if e.g. the person doesn't feel like using self-checkout, or doesn't know how).
It would be interesting to know how many actually didn't pay for something that they took.
Eheh, managers (Score:5, Insightful)
And what about the people who stole groceries? What are they? 1 manager, how many thieving customers?
This is actually a useful social study and most liberals will NOT like the result. This "experiment" shows that a large number of people will ONLY obey the rules of society if somebody is standing behind them with a heavy stick.
Yes, a lot of people will behave. For the rest, we need armed police and guard dogs. Pity. If only there was some method of getting rid of the assholes. But we can't and so to counter 1 asshole, we need the entire justice system. (Because while not everyone paid, a few will also simply have left without taking anything)
If you ever handle an event or social place, you will know just how annoying the dickheads are, managers or otherwise. You can do so many things in a world without dickheads. For instance, you hate 3g coverage and price? No problem just use my Wifi. I don't mind you downloading email or browsing on it. Oh wait, I got to use a password because 1 dickhead in thousands will use it to break the law. No easy free roaming wifi for everyone else.
Brillant (Score:5, Insightful)
So let me get this straight... Somebody designed and built a computer-controlled lock system (that apparently also turns on the self-checkouts), and didn't think something like this would happen?
Would it be that hard to have an "unlock" button to pair with the computer's instructions? When the store's supposed to be locked, the button would do nothing. Between zero and five minutes after the scheduled opening, it unlocks the doors. Five minutes after opening time, a nice reminder sounds. After ten minutes, the computer could assume human error, and stop trying to unlock the doors.
Developing and installing the system would likely cost a trivial amount compared to the risk of leaving a store unlocked and unattended all day.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
In Related News... (Score:5, Insightful)
In related news, grocery supermarket chain Pack-N-Save has announced they will be laying off 75% of their workforce. After a one-day experiment to test customer honesty and self-checkout systems, the chain discovered it would be cheaper to fire all of their checkout employees and let customers do it themselves.
Other retail chains are expected to follow suit sometime later this year.
Re:Video (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks! This has the missing bit - specifically, there is a mention that "over 50 people" visited the store. So then 24 is likely to be the number of those who actually took something.
Another interesting thing in the report is that store owner agreed to release CCTV footage to the TV network only on the condition that they blur the faces of all customers - even those who can be seen not paying in the video. It's a good thing to see such respectful attitude towards privacy, especially when the owner has all reasons to not be polite towards those people.
Re:Half Honest (Score:3, Insightful)
I expect that means a lot of them were too oblivious to even notice anything was off. Perhaps the normal staff tends to be 'away' from their post as a matter of course. :)
Re:I'm honest (Score:4, Insightful)
Eww, replacing people with machines is desirable. It frees up the people to do something more important, instead of a tedious job of threshing grain, carrying buckets of water, digging trenches with shovels, or adding up columns of numbers. (Or writing variations of the same subroutine over and over -- yep, part of the job of a programmer is to replace himself.) The point of technological progress is to make things cheaper (which also often leads to making it practical to make things better) and ultimately, making things cheaper always comes down to not wasting peoples' time on tedious things that could be automated.
And yet, your conclusion is correct anyway. What's fucked up about self-checkout is that it isn't technological progress, because it doesn't replace a person with a machine; it just replaces a person with another person. And the new person (the customer) is less well practiced/skilled at the activity than the old person (checkout clerk). If anything, the expert is so good at the job that they're mentally on auto-pilot anyway, so you could even argue it replaces a (semi-) machine with a person, making it a technological regression. (Ah, the joys of externalizing costs.) It's sort of like they're un-invented the assembly line by selling assemble-it-yourself kits.
Re:I'm honest (Score:4, Insightful)
While I like the sentiment, I think you might be contributing to the problem in a way.
If we had systems such that we could routinely and easily replace some jobs with machines, and we actually deployed those systems as much as possible, we'd ultimately wind up hurrying along the day where we finally change our underlying systems to reflect the massive increases in productivity we have achieved.
I work a 40 hour week (usually more) as my mother did. Yet, because of advances in tech, I am vastly more productive than she was at her job. Even worse, proportionately to executive wages, I'm paid less than my mom was despite doing vastly more work and contributing more to the bottom line.
Once we hit a point where we have permanently high (25% or so) unemployment there will have to be a change to the way things run or there will be armed revolt. I say hurry that day along rather than artificially delaying it.
Also, I always get stuck behind someone who causes trouble and a delay when I don't use self checkout.