Police may not care about stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks one time by entering a PLU of 4011 and declaring them to be bananas. It's hard to prove, and even if everyone takes the time to prove it: Then what? A misdemeanor?

But at some point, they do start to care.

Stealing fifty dollars worth of steaks on 20 different occasions (every couple of weeks, say), with video and transaction evidence of the acts happening over and over again? That's a lot easier to prove, and in many states adds up to a nice juicy felony.

There will be video either way though. They'll either have security footage of you walking out the door without paying or they'll have security footage of you "paying". The only important variables here (AFAICT) are the likelihood of getting noticed coupled with the frequency of the act.

They're different risk profiles.

When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks out the door, they don't know who that person is. And while they may have video of parts of this, they don't necessarily see enough to prosecute. (Acting like you're stealing a steak but not actually doing it isn't a crime. Shoplifting can be hard to prove; part of that proof means demonstrating that they didn't change their mind and just drop off the steak somewhere else in the store.)

When a thief takes a steak from the cooler and walks it up to self-checkout and pays for it as if it is a bunch of bananas with their credit card, they have identified that person. They have them on video at the self-checkout committing this crime.

It actually doesn't matter much if they leave the store with their bounty or not in this second case. The crime is already done by converting the steak into bananas.

In principle I agree with you but in practice I feel like this really misses the reality of the situation. If it was an isolated incident at an isolated store in the mid 90s I think you'd be right. But presumably the thief makes a habit of this (otherwise why worry), it's likely a major chain with centrally coordinated loss prevention, the thief has presumably made a legitimate purchase from this chain at some point in the past and will again at some point in the future, and facial recognition is a thing.

In that scenario it seems to me that the best the thief can do is to "accidentally" ring up a steak as bananas occasionally and hope that if someone ever takes note that the past events will remain undetected.

That said, I'm pretty sure all of the self checkouts I've interacted with over the past several years would automatically flag such a "mistake". There are some things they're still bad at and they generate plenty of false positives but they seem to be reasonably good at identifying obvious "errors".

The best a thief can do is just not ring up the steak at all and if confronted just act like it’s an honest mistake.

Anyone just buying bananas and steaks is going to look suspicious fast. So rotating the banana for other things is key. Having a mixed bag of purchases where the steaks are always just accidentally unscanned or misscanned.

The facial recognition thing isn’t really in the picture for this minor type of crime. Law enforcement doesn’t have easy access to it as Hollywood would lead you to believe. Its use is reserved for higher profile crimes. You’d have to really be running a steak stealing criminal syndicate for this to happen. Before that, retailers would have already started forcing different procedures for the steaks. Like locking them up or pay at the butcher stand.

One thing facial recognition can do, if used properly by the retailer, is flag you and alert the store to put extra eyes on you every time you enter the store. There’s an increased chance they’ll confront you in the act or otherwise scare you off of it.

I mean, eventually the people working there would take notice. "Oh, look. Banana Man is doing it again." :)

That said: I've never, ever weighed meat at self checkout. In fact, I've never had a cashier any weigh meat, either.

I've bought plenty of steaks in regular grocery stores, but each of those steaks (even the ones that they wrapped in butcher paper just for me after I selected them from the glass case at the back of the store) had the weight coded into the UPC that was printed at the time it was wrapped up (and weighed by the meat cutter).

There has no further weighing required for the register to know the price, so weighing a steak at the checkout is pretty bizarro-world behavior to begin with -- at least in my experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code#Number_...

That's why you peel off the UPC and then ring it up as however many cucumbers would approximately correspond to its weight. Fooling the overhead camera and associated ML algorithm is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well since you put it that way:

There's already an scale that prints UPCs in the produce department for customers to use. I'll just put the package of steak on there, punch in 4011, and scan out my "bananas" at the self-checkout. ;)

(But they'll still know who I am. Walking out is cleaner, and has fewer steps.)

The man in the sky can see what is being scanned in real time, it’s on his video display just like the cash register except overlayed on the video of you. If they see a ribeye in your hand and it says bananas on the screen, good chance they’re going to stop you before you exit (assuming they can mobilize to do so).

Honestly if you’re a thief this is just a dumb idea. Probably works for the original commenter a few times fine. But it’s way too obviously and intentionally theft. You need to come up with something you can claim was an honest mistake.

Find another item that sounds similar but is cheaper and use that upc. If you’re keying in the upc, on a scale or something, then find one that’s cheaper but off my 1 digit or something where you can say it was a typo and you didn’t notice. Those kinds of things are more defensible. None of us have been trained to be a cashier so honest mistakes are a strong defense to any claim of misconduct.

Police know which side their bread is buttered on. Target is famous for being to get local cops to do exactly what they need post-facto (now prosecutor is another story).

I.E. just because police don’t “waste” time investigating a crime with $1000 of damage to your personal property does not mean they won’t dedicate the time to pursue $200 in losses for the local mega mart.

What Target is famous for is doing their own investigations rather than expecting the police to do the grunt work. They operate such a sophisticated forensics lab that they actually do contract work for LE agencies across the country.

If you funded your own private investigation which unambiguously identified the culprit and demonstrated damages sufficient for a felony I imagine the local police would readily act on your behalf as well.

Breaking and entering into a home is more serious of a crime than $1000 of property damage. But regardless of that, it’s a point just to highlight how little policing resources exists and tells a broader story. At least in my city, cops don’t do anything for minor crimes. On my local Reddit, I see people mentioning that you have to mention that you have a gun in your hand if you ever want them to actually show up. I think our police force has half the personnel they’re supposed to have given our city size. I think this is becoming more common in the US.

There’s plenty of documented cases where local police are the basically henchmen for large corporations, but I’ve seen no evidence of this and believe it’s kind of a fear mongering meme to think they have enough power over them to dictate them to do roundups after the fact. They may however give all the evidence they collect on you to the police with a bow on it and the cops may decide to take it seriously. Where I am, I do not see this happening. The police will have expected the retailer to have protected their inventory. Off duty police officers make a lot of money working private security and they don’t want to disturb that dynamic.