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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If you've ever visited a small grocery/convenience/pharmacy type store in a developing nation environment where law enforcement is almost nonexistant, the standard system is that there's a counter and you have to ask the staff for each item. Customers are not allowed in the area where the stock is kept.

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In the US, it's not uncommon for certain items, especially small, high-value items, to be kept in locked glasses cases. Customers have to get an employee to unlock the cabinet to purchase those items.

And in places like Costco, if you want to buy a gift card you bring a cardboard token from the aisle up to the register. They ring you up and instruct you to take your receipt to a special room where they fetch the real gift cards after verifying your receipt.

I've always wondered: what's the point of the gift card system at Costco? Don't most stores solve this nicely by making the gift cards valueless until "activated" by the cash register system?

As I understand it, the gift card scam goes like this:

1. Perp steals the inactivated gift card, takes it home

2. At home, they scratch off the activation code, record it, and re-apply some scratch off coating

3. They reverse shoplift the gift card and return it to the store

4. They then set up some script to continuously try the gift card activation code

5. Legitimate customer buys and activates the gift card

6. Perp now gets access, and drains the funds before the legit customer can use them

It seems to me that two simple steps would go a long way to reducing the effectiveness of this:

1. Require a CAPTCHA when attempting to redeem a gift card's code

2. If someone has tried to redeem an unactivated gift card's code before, the point-of-sale system should refuse to let that gift card ever be activated, instead telling the cashier to throw it away and get the customer a different one

Isn't the activation code scratch off area covered with a very hard to counterfeit zigzag/special material moire pattern?

Sure, but now you have to train your checkout staff to be experts in scratch off coating design. Retailers are definitely adding training material to help, but it still happens.

You can easily buy a roll of them as stickers for a few cents each, no special machinery needed to apply.

Sounds trivial to catch them if there's shop camera recording + logs of scripts...

Someone trying inactive code repeatedly is a huge red flag.

You vastly overestimate the competence and initiative of US law enforcement.

Lots of things that are trivial simply do not occur.

That is how most grocery stores do it, but Costco offers GCs to local restaurants that I've never seen elsewhere (Armadillo Willy's!). It's quite possible that the GCs from these restaurants are not capable of being secured/activated in this way.

Or it could just be that they want to have a big display with cardboard logos that will catch the attention of shoppers.

I assume it’s because they also do things like “movie ticket vouchers” (which are just paper). That way there’s one dedicated-ish room for all the gift card exchanges.

costco also does this with lots of higher value things, like a gopro or a laptop, if you want to buy it you take the cardboard tag to the checkout and then they give it to you after payment.

for those who don't know. Here's some pics of colmados (convenience stores) in the Domincan Republic:

- https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GSXubTkd6ak/UxxWpzd4E8I/AAAAAAAAI...

- https://jetsettlersmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dr1.jp...

- https://www.colonialzone-dr.com/images/Colmado-Pilona-Colmad...

There are stores like this in Connecticut, USA.

The West coast is lacking in small independent convenience stores. Something like the land got parceled out and ballooned in value before the thrifty shop owner types were able to set up at a cost accessible to a private citizen. Thats my guess at least.

Connecticut was established before the industrial revolution, so most towns are pedestrian friendly and can support small stores.

You also get armed guards in bigger malls in DR where shoplifting might be possible.

That is exactly the same layout as many small convenience stores in Pakistan.

This is how grocers used to work in the US too.

Ironically that wasn’t to prevent theft; it was just considered to be better customer service.

It probably saves a ton of space and tidying, but at the expense of needing more staff to serve.

It would be beneficial in total labor today, especially in a store with employees picking for curbside exists. Stocking is a big effort overnight. Restocking is problematic during the day, and costs sales. These normal processes (busy people doing stocking and ordering, and inventory existing in 2 places) makes ordering harder. If customers would accept the change it might happen. The rub is studies show customers don't like it, and no browsing means lower sales.

In El Salvador all groceries and pharmacies have a tiny window with metal bars. You ask what you need from the street and they give it to you through the bars.

Al Jazeera English recently showed a documentary about street gangsters in Port Moresby, New Guinea (apparently a very dangerous place), all the grocery stores looked like that.

It might have to go back that way, or I'm thinking that US chains might look at the staffing costs and figure out something like how to deploy the largest versions of the vending machines seen in Japan.

This was how Redbox started. It was a joint venture of Coinstar and McDonald's.

https://www.deseret.com/2003/11/13/19795398/redbox-kiosks-cl...

The pivot to only renting DVDs came shortly afterward.

Or they will close their CA stores and continue to operate in the rest of the country.

Or just everything via Amazon.

Why don't they hire private security? Surely he's hourly rate would be less than what's being stolen?

There are stores like this on the east coast. Items stocked in littke shelves up against plexiglass and you ask the clerk for each one.

In the case of Portland, there is a problem where there are virtually no independent mom & pop corner stores and rightfully no one really cares if the earth's 20th most profitable corporation gets looted.

There might be more independent mom & pop corner stores if looters didn't always get away with their crimes.

Now that I think about it, I've never been there or seen one in person, but some of these stores are shown in The Wire, in a particularly troubled part of Baltimore. Sort of like an armored bodega.

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