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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: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 06 2021, @04:55PM (2 children)
Do you have any data to back that up? Because the numbers I've seen from shops don't show any increase in untracked inventory loss after rolling out self-service checkouts, including in Waitrose where their self-service machines don't weigh things (and so are a lot faster to use than the ones that do and often require human interaction).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @05:22PM
There are articles, but it's bad enough at the local grocery store that corporate had fancy cameras installed directly over the top of the terminals to see what customers were doing. The reality is that this isn't an easy thing to track in general. Yes, an uptick in things disappearing from the shelves could be due to self-scan, but it could also be due to regular shoplifting. In some respects, it's far easier to go through the self check line and just scam the computer than other methods. It's one of the reasons why some stores require a manager override if a cashier wants to suspend payment on a transaction. It looks like a legitimate transaction at the time, but no payment was made and the store wouldn't know until later on during the audit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/stealing-from-self-checkout/550940/ [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06 2021, @09:10PM
Why would the regular customers want to steal from Waitrose? If you've chosen to shop there despite their perceived (but not necessarily so) higher prices, and you know they are a workers' cooperative, why would you want to steal when you know you're stealing from the employees and not from some faceless rich owner?