It is 1866. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 1940. Stores are making record profits while complaining.
It is 2026. You get the picture.1920s - Corporation Genius idea: “self service groceries” - put the product out so people have to fetch the items themselves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
2000s - Corporate Genius idea: “self service checkout” - People scan their own products that they went and got from the shelves. Less employees, record profit! But no fairsies, stop stealing!
Solution? Tax the employees more to pay for police to protect our record profits!
“Record profits” in nominal currency will be made year after year. Profit margins (on supermarkets in my country) remains low, and is lower than it was 10 years ago.
EDIT: if you don’t believe me, ask for evidence instead of just downvoting because you don’t like facts. Lemmy has a narrative about grocery profits that (at least in my country) is not supported by evidence.
I recognize the impact inflation has on the term, but it varies from store to store and country to country whether it outpaces inflation. Walmart, which this meme is about and a load bearing parasite on the US, maintains growth slightly above inflation. This doesn’t indemnify everyone, or really anyone in particular. It’s pointing out that money is going somewhere in this current era of force-fed infinite growth, but seemingly not to the people who need it most.
To phrase my comment another way, the wealth gap is widening and businesses will do anything but address it, instead complaining about their own impropriety as if it were your fault.
This meme is about self service checkouts which are ubiquitous in my country.
Walmart had an operating profit margin of 4.2% in their last statement, and a net profit margin of 3%.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for widening wealth inequality, profit margins under 5% are not where you’ll find it. Check the facts instead of going on pure vibes - company accounts are public and subject to audit (on pain of huge punishments if wrong - they got Al Capone on tax fraud remember)
Walmart’s gross profit rate was 24.1% of net sales in fiscal 2025, and operating income was $29.348 billion, or 4.4% of net sales.
So for every $100 Walmart keeps $4.40 after paying everything including corporate staff but before taxes.
For Walmart, the “3%” is basically net profit margin for fiscal 2025, Walmart reported $680.985 billion in total revenue and $19.436 billion in net income attributable to Walmart, which is about 2.85%.
3% sounds like nothing but 19.5 billion in profit definitely is but nothing.
Wording it like this is a struggling company is a really…special way to go about this.
I’m getting my numbers from here: https://stock.walmart.com/financial-information/income-statement I believe the difference in figures is between US and Worldwide, and aren’t different enough to affect the conclusion.
I’m not “wording it like” Walmart is struggling; I’m saying that Walmart (and the grocery sector in general) works on razor-thin margins, and trying to ignore that fact by talking about “record profits” is misleading and either stupid or dishonest. I’d encourage you to re-read my comment and try to decide which words made you interpret it that way - I think you’ll find that they aren’t there, that I was just reporting facts in neutral language, and you’ve made that interpretation because I’m going against the narrative.
What a low profit margin means is that if an average shopper buying a $100 basket of goods decides to swipe a $2 chocolate bar, their profits are nearly halved. Problems that seem small have large effects to a company operating like this.
The narrative Lemmy commenters tend to believe is that the cost of groceries went up in the 2020s due to corporate greed and lay the blame for their current struggles at the foot of retailers like Walmart. The actual facts don’t bear that out. They then mock complaints about theft from shops attributed to self-service checkouts as price-gouging fat cats whining that their cost-saving measure isn’t saving them costs, ignoring that, with profit margins relatively steady/down since before the pandemic, those cost savings are being passed on to them, the consumer.
Are the companies in your country currently complaining about theft in massive PR campaigns? Because Walmart is.
And Walmart’s outpaced inflation. Not all of our companies have, but some certainly. Your argument is like asserting that a car couldn’t have run out of gas because it has 90 km/l.
And of course I’m going to blame a company that underpays and abuses its employees as severely as Walmart, while siphoning half of its personnel budget from local taxes.
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
https://wallstreetnumbers.com/stocks/wmt/operating-expenses
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/revenue
Not in a massive PR campaign, but yes they are complaining publicly. Retail theft has gone up significantly, with 360k offences in the last year before the pandemic, having fallen for a couple of years from a peak of about 380k, and the most recent year stands at 530k offences.
And by all means, criticise Walmart for their abuses of staff and exploitative practices. But their profit levels are just not part of it. If Walmart were nationalised and stopped making profit and stopped paying its execs as much your $100 grocery bill would still be over $95. Hoo-fuckin-ray.
I can tell you that Dillons (subdivision of Kroger) is on genuinely razor thin margins, and they at least pay half way decent for the area im in
Then it sounds like I wasn’t referring to Dillons. Do they even have self checkout?
Yes, most have two separate checkouts on both sides. And also this weird self checkout/belt lane thing. Was just trying to add to the conversation, geez.
I didn’t mean any offense, but I exclusively found dillons in low population cities, which made me question whether they’d have any need for a self checkout.
Even the little corner shop in my town of a couple thousand people has one now. There’s no way that a second full checkout would fit in the space, nor is hiring another staff member to work it likely to be realistic, so it’s a straight upgrade in capacity
I fucking hate that belt fed one! They put it in my go to store shortly before I moved close to an aldi and how exactly is it supposed to be helpful? You scan, and it belts it all into a pile at the other end that you then have to walk over and organize. At least the lazy Susan designed ones can let you organise it all into the bags.
Also, I don’t know how their “unexpected item in the bagging area” sensor works but I literally set them off by getting within 10 inches of the bags. When I worked at one years back we literally measured the distance. No contact, no previous errors, tested on two different machines, apparently I produce an aura that makes Dillons bags gain mass.
Gotta be careful giving dissenting opinions in the black and white world of the internet.
I have no idea what the belt lane thing is and I’m interested. My self checkouts are just the scanner thing, and then you put the items on the scale. The inclusion of a belt is intriguing.
So, its a self checkout screen, then you place your scanned items on a belt that carries it to a bagging area. I think the idea is for the self checkout attendant to then bag the items for you
And according to Hollywood accounting not a single movie has ever made a profit…
I would be surprised if supermarket’s profit margins are actually as low as they all claim.
They are “low” but it’s on purpose. When you make 19.5 billion in profit that’s the number that needs to be spread around. 3% sounds like Walmart might go under with one bad move. 19.5 billion in profit after they paid taxes in 2025 is a powerful company with plenty of profit.
People don’t really understand how these companies profit from their scale. They expect the regular person to be empathetic over 3% profit while hiding 20 billion dollars year over year.
Not true, Hollywood can shift profits from one film to another, but not hide them in such a way that no-one of them break even. You could have checked what the major studios are making (it was about $6bn net in 2025).
This is what audits are for, and in any functioning country (indeed even a half-functioning one like the US) the internal revenue department makes it very difficult to hide profits at a large scale. There’s an easy way to sniff check this claim: if it were possible to hide profits so thoroughly, why does any company at all pay any corporation tax at all?
What Hollywood does is shuffle its real costs around so that films which would have to pay the largest royalties appear to make no money. They can also shuffle some things around so that subsidiaries operating in high tax countries appear to make a loss. Supermarkets selling physical goods in physical shops can’t do this.
There’s also no reason to think that companies have got better at hiding profits over the last few years, even if you think their profits are wrong.
i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
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Well, the main point is that for some demographics a situation like this is a simple mistake with no consequences while for others it’s a direct way to talk to the police.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for Criminal charges sticking. The Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
I don’t think I’m making that argument at all. I’m just relaying what I witnessed when I worked first hand in that industry ~26 years ago.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
often, yes
Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.
When a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…The more likely scenario is that you just neglect to scan that case of beer, or those ribeye steaks.
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
They even call the security and police. Yes, they call it thief.
Fair, you may be pulled to a court for no reason.
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The letter of the law is the letter of the law afaik
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
I almost exclusively use self checkout because it is quicker, and I felt rushed exactly once because a line was forming. Funny thing is, because I felt rushed I literally forgot to pay and just walked out with a free load of groceries. I did come back the next day and told them, and asked to pay because I didn’t want to risk getting banned from that store, as it is the closest one to me. They said nobody ever comes back to do that lmao
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
That’s a staffing problem…if they paid another cashier they wouldn’t have as many thefts
The complaining is an important part of the theatrics.
I used to work with a very wealthy man. He owned a very successful side business and had some very good customers. He would tell me about how he would exaggerate all of his complaints about how much money he’s going to lose when something or other happens. And I saw him do it to people at work. One of his major skills was playing the victim. I lost all hope of feeling bad for business owners once I realized that was a thing. Meanwhile, he has a huge house on the palisades outside of New York City and all his kids went to private schools from preschool to college.
When he left, he tried to give me his bill oRiley CD collection.
They’ve been experimenting with self-checkouts for decades. When I was a kid, I remember being in a store with my grandma, waiting in line to pay, and an employee kept trying to entice those in the line to come over and try the self-checkouts.
She asked my grandma a few times before my grandma, a proud union supporter, snapped “I want a person to ring me up. I’m trying to save your JOB, young lady!”
And the young woman stopped asking my grandma.
your grandma sounds like an awesome person
trying to save you are job
I’m a grammar proponent as well, but I’m not seeing the benefit of your comment. Do you think autocorrect errors are fun for anyone?
I’m a grammar opponent as well
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
4011 is the new 411.
This is indeed 4011
Whoops! It seems that my finger has slipped and picked the cheapest variety of banana, out of the 11 varieties of bananas.
One time, i scanned all of my items and had to wait for someone to check id because it included alcohol. After they unlocked the machine, I paid and left. Turned out that none of the scans registered after the first alcohol item, so i got a bunch of freebies. I’d normally give a shit, but this is how well they trained me and how well their system worked.
The process is perfectly designed to give you the results you got.
-Demming, or someone like himMany moons ago, I stopped by the art supply store with my stepmom to get some colored twine. We picked up 2 rolls, and were basically forced to do self checkout. I watched her scan each one, but only one actually registered. The price for a single roll was also more than double the cost if she had bought it on Amazon, so the total when checking out was within a reasonable ballpark. Once we got to the car, I pointed it out, and she apparently had no clue, but was annoyed enough not to go back and pay for the second.
I don’t get why anybody complains about self checkout. I think we’ve had them for a decade in Poland. Everything works and is much faster than a normal checkout. At this point I’m actually avoiding the few stores that don’t have them yet.
Where I live there is always a line for the self checkout. The self checkout machines are slower than the manned checkout machines, you can only pick up one item at a time, scan it, place it in the bagging area and pause for a second before touching anything else or else the whole system has a meltdown and then you need a person to come fix it. A checker at a normal scanner is at least 5x faster than even the best person at the self checkout. And as an added bonus, you also get a camera in your face and monitor showing the recording so you can see unflattering videos of yourself while working to appease the fussy machine. Also, the ergonomics are shit if you have more than a small basket of stuff.
I think they all deliberately manufactured consent for this bullshit by dramatically understaffing the regular checkouts for at least a year before installing the self checkouts. But that part may be a bit conspiratorial given the ultra slim margins on groceries.
I have an issue with telling fancy mushrooms from the cheap brown mushrooms that are coincidentally 1/5 of the price. Its a known problem and it should probably disqualify me from a job checking out produce. Oh well, I guess I’ll just do my best.
Wait til you find out about the expensive apples!
All apples are the least expensive apples.
My man.
Hell yeah. Honeycrisp flavor at Gala price. How am I supposed to know what apples I got? I’m colorblind and they all look the same.
A cold honeycrisp on a hot day is one of the simple pleasures in life.
I couldn’t agree more.
My grocery store definitely did this on purpose: They sell Broccoli (organic) and Broccoli crowns. The self checkout menu lists the former at the end of a page, without showing the latter until you hit Next page. Organic turns out to be 2.5x the price by pound of crowns.
Dear Walmart, You owe me 4 weeks Vacation pay, and my annual raise. And where is my staff discount???
Sincerely, Customer
You are responsible for applying the staff discount directly
I’m going to make official-looking stickers to say something like “Customer appreciation discount code: 4011.” I’ll put them on all the terminals.
Here is the 4011… Everything is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S
Zero training and zero pay. Hmm I wonder if anything could possibly go wrong…
And for some reason they were expected to tip the machine.
Would you like to round up for charity?
You could pay yourself with free groceries. Or at least leave yourself a tip.
Yeah, “scanning errors”, like when it’s charging me full price instead of the discount that it was supposed to be on, which would not be as obvious if a cashier scanned it?
For an almost expired product none the less
I still don’t get why you wouldn’t get a discount for checking yourself out. No wonder all those high-falutin’ CEO’s think consumers are a bunch of dumb schmucks. The real heroes are the clerks who “miss” scanning something from time to time.
I get a five finger discount now and then. Small things usually. I will NOT pay the bag fee if I self checkout, you took away a job for a computer, you can absolutely eat the 25-50 cents worth of bags.
Same reason they don’t pay you for using an atm instead of an expensive teller at an expensive branch
It’s easier To add a fee To a new service even if it’s to save them money, Than it is to start charging for an existing service that used to be central to their business
I am not paid, i dont do the work.
Also, if the cashier makes a mistake, it is their peoblem. If you make it, they call you thief. Fuck them, i aint no cashier.
A bunch of smaller places around me just totally shut down the self checkout. It’s actually incredibly frustrating because there will be a line and I could just do it myself and be done. But no, everyone has to wait for a single cashier now because people were stealing. Just make up your mind. Get rid of it entirely or use it.
I know some people think that self-checkout is making the customer do the cashier work for free, but honestly, having experienced it both ways, I’d much rather do it myself. It’s not like I am doing anything else at the time, and shopping already involves something very similar, regardless.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves and pushed the cart around, then if some stores started making people push their carts around themselves, you’d hear the same complaints.
But I am already picking up each item, one by one, when I put them into the cart. To me, it’s really not that different to pick up the items one by one, scan them, and put them into the bag.
DIY makes sure nobody puts the cans on top of the bread or bags raw meat in with the lettuce, too.
Back in the olden days baggers were properly trained, too. They had competitions and everything.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves
They basically did. They had a counter and you asked the shopkeeper at the counter to get stuff for you. So there were no trolleys being pushed around, but someone was still getting stuff for you. And you had to wait while they did it.
Nowadays I order my groceries online and go pick them up. There are two parts that take time: waiting for the guy to come out with everything after parking, and taking everything out of the crates they come in and putting them in the reusable bags in my car. Back when I cycled to the supermarket, I’d pause on the way and announce I was already there when I was 2 minutes away to cut down on the first time, too…
My local grocer did a scan as you go before COVID and it was so fantastic. Everything just got bagged as we went and all you had to do was scan the self checkout till and weigh your produce at the end. So nice.
No idea. This just feels like an old person thing. Never met someone young who complains about self checkout as long as it’s working.
