I'll be honest, this thread reminds me why I'm leaning towards leaving Bluemoon. It is a constant stream of the unhappy little news stories that don't mean shit, but people love to moan and moralise about. Let's have another thousand pointless arguments, and hear someone saying 'society is imploding' every single day.
So what? Boards like this, and social media, attract people with time on their hands. We come to exercise our ego. Plump it up, parade it around for a bit. Achieves nothing
I mean, compared to a year ago, I've noticed every single supermarket has a security guard every single minute they are open. They can wander around the store and check the cameras on their phones. Stores now have gates where you have to enter through. Gates through which you leave. Often they only open if you scan your receipt. Every till has multiple cameras trained on you. AI and face recognition is very widely used. They can tell who you are and follow every single person in the store. The systems can often guess when people are likely to shoplift or conceal goods.
It feels like we're being herded like cattle. We know that shoplifting levels are blamed on the financial crisis. Amazing how the shops profiteered and manipulated people by manufacturing rumours and the perception of essentials being in short supply through lockdown. And then, ohh, prices have risen 20%, but it's the manufacturers, not us. Amazing how prices of stuff in short supply due to covid etc went up, then started to come down, but now.. none of them have. The shops will keep the prices high, thanks.
Still, this big uplift in shoplifting is astonishing. I mean, it's an astonishing thing that it's been made into a huge news story. Because the 30% uplift year on year sounds impressive. But really, it just means we're almost back to pre-lockdown levels. Shoplifting levels, in other words, are same as they've always been. And the latest figures seem to miss the last 6-9 months when the security has really been beefed up.
The shops didn't do that because levels were historically high. They did it, because the technology is good value for them. Not only does it help prevent shoplifting, it gives them the other thing they want apart from money in the till. They want DATA. They want to track people so they can study them. Seriously. Same as club cards. Now you can see how different people move around the store, what they look at, what they touch. That is what a lot of this is about. This stuff will train AI's. This stuff can be translated to profit in two ways. One, getting higher prices and bigger spends out of people in the shop. Two, selling their AI's, the models of human behaviour. It's a boon time to be a big retailer. It really is. They are just spinning the story that all this stuff is there because of this shoplifting 'epidemic'. Fucking lol!
People are reet succeptible to estimating the reality of the world through the number of news stories they are confronted with. And that is what's gone up - the number of stories. Shoplifting itself is very much at a normal level, year on year. And as any one in the biz knows, no one talks about shoplifting. It's shrinkage, which includes all the stuff 'lost' otherwise. We also know every bit as much walks out the back of the store, or the warehouse, as out the front door.
What's happening is that the big stores are getting an advantage over all other retailers. They can afford this expensive high tech stuff, and the gates, etc. It's the smaller stores who will now be targets for shoplifters. That suits the supermarkets just fine, because their idea of the future is that there won't be any stores not run by the 4 chains.
