If you go to any Walmart today you’ll probably notice that most of the cash registers aren’t operated by human beings anymore. These days you wait in a line until a self-checkout register is free for you to use. Considering there aren’t people at these registers there are security measures in place such as software to ensure every item put in the bag is scanned or weighed, one person who is meant to monitor several of the self-checkout registers, and cameras at each station. However, still yet many people often walk away with free items due to flaws in the self checkout system, and now Wal-Mart is taking legal action even if it was a mistake.
Details on How Walmart is Taking Legal Action Against Self-Checkout Mistakes Made by Customers
Self-checkout shoplifting and mistakes costs Walmart millions of dollars each year since their inception. However, often times what looks like self-checkout shoplifting are just mistakes people made, because they had too many items to keep track of everything or have kids. Despite that Walmart is now issuing citations to anyone they feel walked away with too many items they didn’t purchase after using the self-checkout.
A sad example of this was an alleged case of woman who was arrested for theft after Walmart issued a citation for what she called a mistake. According to reports the woman walked out with $30 worth of goods she never scanned while she was at self-checkout register. The items she didn’t pay for weren’t mentioned in news reports, but $30 sounds like a lot of goods.
The woman was said to have a lot of items in her shopping cart, so she could have easily lost track of what was scanned and what wasn’t. Most likely the $30 involved some type fresh produce since you can’t actually scan those, and they have weighed or counted by hand at the self-checkout register.
You can’t really blame Walmart for taking legal action against self-checkout mistakes, because every store needs to protect their inventory somehow. The easiest way to avoid getting caught up in their new security measures is just to make sure everything your cart was in on your receipt before leaving the Walmart store.