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A French teenager has been jailed after buying a PlayStation 4 for under £8 by weighing it as if the games console was a huge bag of fruit.
The 19-year-old man, named in the French media as Adel, picked the device off the shelf and took it to the fruit section and weighed it.
He then put a sticker with the heavily reduced price tag on the expensive console and went to the checkout.
Adel paid £7.86 (€9) for the 6lb bag of 'fruit' at a self-checkout at a supermarket in Montbeliard, eastern France, last September.
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Teenager Jailed After Buying PS4 for £8 by Weighing it and Paying for it as Food
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 06 2021, @01:53PM (8 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:34PM (7 children)
You're probably right, but I have seen one example of this going the other way. A grocery store in my neighborhood used to have 4 self check lanes. It is a fairly small, local chain. After a couple of years all the self check lanes were removed because there was too much theft. Maybe the little guys didn't implement it as well, but it sure looked like the same setup you see at the big box giants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:47PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @05:05PM (1 child)
I worked at Aldi for a while. They looked into it and decided it definitely wasn't worth it. Their checkout chicks are super fast, their products have a barcode on every side and they just push the products past the scanner. The customer puts them straight back in the trolley and then goes to pack them in their own bags on a bench out past the the checkouts.
The average cashier at Aldi scans about 1200 items an hour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 07 2021, @02:59AM
And apparently my double scan detection skills have faded a bit since then.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 06 2021, @06:48PM (2 children)
I held off using them as long as possible, but too many slow people use that store, I guess they're tourists, and eventually I just couldn't be bothered to wait for the human. The throughput is definitely higher, and the cost is definitely lower with this setup. Many of the other chains in town use the hand-held scanner, scan as you go, technique. No idea how that works and what their lossage is like. I presume the penalties for fucking up or cheating are just too high to be worth it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:02PM (1 child)
Where I lived back in the late 80's, early 90's some supermarket chains tried self checkout lanes. This was back before people were used to using "technology" beyond cable TV or a VCR in their daily lives. They ended up eliminating them as they went almost unused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @10:17PM
I remember years ago when one of the local chains installed self scan machines. I tried it a few times, but I always had to get help because it wouldn't register my touch. At which point, it was pretty obvious just how badly they were trying to avoid having to pay for cashiers.
(Score: 2) by rcamera on Wednesday October 06 2021, @07:31PM
they could just follow the example of my local cvs; 1 person working the checkout lane and 2 self-checkout machines that don't take cash. and the machines suck to the point that every item triggers an error so the 1 person actually working the checkout lane needs to go "fix" the machine(s) every 10 seconds. it's an additional 5 minutes each way to go to the supermarket instead, but ends up having a shorter total round-trip time
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