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Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

Really this whole business with tracking obsession is highly silly in my opinion. They gather this data with all of this overhead under the assumption that it will somehow boost sales instead of improving service or price margin. You know things that actually helped Amazon gain retail traction.

Shoplifting is an even worse excuse given that most retail theft is done by their employees and they seem to show no signs of trying to boost loyalty and engagement.

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> Shoplifting is an even worse excuse given that most retail theft is done by their employees

Sounds like a quite bad argument to me. Whether it makes sense to invest in this shoplifter-catcher technology is quite simple mathematics. If you prevent/catch enough shoplifters with it is worth the investment (doesn't matter if they are only the non-employee shoplifters). I'm pretty sure that shop owners can do that kind of investment decision pretty well, I highly doubt shop owners would be investing to these if it wasn't worth the hassle.

I'm not in retail, but what I've heard shoplifting can be huge hassle for shop owners. I also knew one kleptomaniac guy personally when I was younger and he stole shitloads of stuff and rarely got caught (according what he told me).

I used to shop at a supermarket here, spending upwards of 10K/yr there on my family grocery bill -- they got some AI startup camera bullshit and I've never been back. (Startup stuff both in store and parking lot, supposedly ties cars to customers and all kinds of shit, I won't say who so as not to promote them.) It's been half a year so far, and I'll never trust them again.

I considered contacting their CEO to say hey, for every guy like me who bothers to contact you, there may be others who just change stores and don't bother. In the end, I didn't bother either, I just shop somewhere else (its about 5 minutes further away but 15% or so cheaper overall... so I'm winning on two levels).

You'd have to be catching a hell of a lot of shoplifting to make up for even half a dozen lost regulars.

I bet they got sold it and aren't doing any kind of before and after analysis, not that I'd rise above the noise anyway.

Hopefully 99% of this stuff will die off when the bubble pops; I assume that even if it is profitable now, it won't be once retailers and other customers trim the fat during a recession.

I think things like this happen because managers need numbers to put into spreadsheets to show that they're ... doing something. But really, they are just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. The sad thing is they don't understand the tech well enough to know how bad the privacy violations are.

The control freaks are taking over the world! Let's collect data just in case it may be useful.

Interesting stat on employee theft being bigger than shoplifting, can you link to some support for that?

Huh apparently things shifted some that it managed to drop to number 2 despite it being the status quo for years.

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-sources-of-retail-shrinkag...

Thank you for still posting.

Employee shrink consists of all sorts of stuff... theft, pilferage, spoilage, fraudulent transactions, etc.

It can be as minor as giving an employee two cups for hot coffee or as serious as fraudulent receiving or running two cash tills.

I understand that. I wasn't asking for an explanation of what it was, just asking for data since I found it surprising.

Anecdotally I'd say that customer theft is the bigger culprit.

A lot of shops require that a manager checks the employees' bags before they leave at the end of their shift to ensure that they haven't pilfered anything.

Shoplifters take individual items out the front door. Employees can take cases out the back door.

If you're saying using visitor analytics won't boost sales, you're completely wrong. With facial recognition, you'll get the same type of stats as dropping a cookie on someone's browser. You can figure out your CAQ, LTV, frequency of visit, conversion rate and how that plays out with advertising spend and pricing strategy(coupons/discounts/sales). Loyalty cards have proved this but loyalty cards only capture sales and not missed sales.

Assuming it's accurate. What I've seen, it's more smoke & mirrors on the part of the vendor. I suppose the question is this: is extremely noisy/probabilistic information better, or worse, than none?

I work as an FR developer, supporting the in field deployments as well as application development. The key driver of FR in retail is organized theft gangs. All the larger retail chains have issues with organized crime, theft gangs, who have highly organized teams pull off significant crimes. Catching one of these gangs pays for the entire system.

Worst-case they can sell that data to major advertisers for better tracking of ads (especially if they know what the customer bought).

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