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While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night, I decided to do a little research into the company who produces the duck sauce packets. Hidden businesses like this are always interesting to me, even if I find the quality of soy sauce in these packets to be so far below par I can't stand to use them. The NY Times had a great little article from 1994 on the same corporation. Interesting to see single serve packaging as a somewhat recent innovation instead of so ubiquitous as to be background noise.
As any article would, the footer was packed with items to read next, which led to an expose on the hustlers "gamifying" the load balancing algorithms for Citi bikes. That's a bit too polite of a way to put it. The TL;DR: is that some folks have figured out the precise algorithm used to pay volunteers, including timing intervals and calculations behind the scenes. Volunteers of a high status get unlimited bike unlocks, and have formed gangs that empty whole racks, move them a trivial distance, then move them back, to pull down up to $6,000 a month.
A small group of people purposefully wiping out whole bike racks for commuters, all day every day for their gain is about what you'd expect in 2024. I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.
The comment section is perhaps even more enlightening than the article. The "journalist" spent quite a bit of time running interference for the gang, with the classic playbook of repeating how much money Lyft makes and bitching about the downsides of the gig economy. To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.
I think what you're getting out of this is less, they don't care, and more that they make more money off of honest people than they would spend on labor to fix the problem and so they pursue a profitable path. They have no problem paying dishonest people, as long as they keep making money they don't care who is getting paid.
I'm of the schizo opinion that things like self-checkout are a form of psychological warfare against trust in society. Every time I self-checkout, I scan everything correctly, but I'm aware of how easy it would be not to. To tuck a couple small items in the corner of my tote bag and never scan them, to scan the $2 switch five times instead of scanning the four $10 switches, to ring up the organic carrots as ordinary carrots. And in my head I'm aware there is nothing the store will do to stop me, and that their profit margin is such to account out of the money they make on me for the person who doesn't scan it all. And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.
We've already seen this happen with "free" media, where internet commenters will act as if it is a personal affront that Youtube has advertisements, while ignoring that they can pay a pittance each month to remove all ads. Once people get used to free stuff, they can't stand the idea of paying for it.
I don't experience this feeling myself, but I kind of agree that Self-Checkouts exist in an unusual 'middle-trust' zone where they are giving you some benefit of the doubt and yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything and in theory if they find out that you took something without paying they could drag you back in and prove that you knowingly failed to scan an item with the intent to steal it. They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.
The real 'high trust' option is Honesty Boxes and that's surely not an option for any large corporation.
And it isn't like they're watching you to reward honest behavior! You don't get a prize for "100 items scanned at self-checkout without incident" or a badge that says "Certified Honest Customer". They just expect to make more money off you than they lose over the course of your patronage, and they are trying to zero in on the minimum level of surveillance needed to get you to follow the rules.
Me, I like the option of self-checkout because most of the time I'm picking up very few things at one time and if the self-checkout can shave 2-5 minutes off waiting in line I'm happy to do the work myself.
As opposed to what? Tallying everything in my head? "Oh, how much was this carrot again? Let me go back to the carrots to check."
Barcodes are a labor saving device, not a compliance mechanism. It's absolutely trivial to circumvent.
Yes, and if YOU have to scan everything, rather than a cashier, that is also a labor-saving device... for the store that doesn't have to pay the cashier.
They're adding in an extra step for YOU, the customer to undertake mostly for the store's convenience. And they expect you to be honest while you do it, while still implementing anti-theft measures.
If you want an alternative, Sam's Club does Scan and Go where you can use your phone to scan your stuff as you shop, pay online, then mosy on past the checkout counter to the friendly staffer at the door who briefly checks if you've paid for all the items you said you bought.
Yes, we live in an era where every single person has a bar-code reader in their possession at all times.
THAT would be one hell of an alternative. Scan everything you're buying, and pay digitally (or pay at some automated kiosk), and then walk out the door.
We can quibble about who benefits the most from self checkout. The point I'm making is that the reason you scan stuff at self checkout is not to prove that you are honest, it's because that's the simplest way to implement self checkout.
Now, the guy at Sam's club who checks your cart and your receipt - that's obviously a compliance mechanism. It's probably not feasible to stop and frisk every shopper in a normal store, especially since in normal stores you bag your groceries and at Sam's club you don't.
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