I started using grocery self-checkouts during COVID, but I’ve kept using them because there’s rarely a line (and I’m a misanthrope). I’d probably go back to using regular human checkouts if I had to dig through all my crap to prove what I bought.
Having said that, I’ve noticed myself making mistakes. I’ve accidentally failed to scan an item, and I’ve accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I’ve probably missed a few.
I guess the easiest answer is for grocery chains to reinvest some of those windfall profits and hire more cashiers.
This isn’t true for everything across the board however, and the number of .001% is a bit of hyperbole. The driving force behind theft is multifaceted but the biggest ones are probably a mix of resell value, time to flip, and ease of access. Most items not from grocery stores are fenced through oh say Offer Up.
I worked for a major retailer as a mix of boots on the ground and investigative loss prevention and I will say theft is far more common than people give it credit and that mostly stems from how damn easy it is. Pre-Covid theft only loss were probably about .8-1.5% depending on the location and during/after was around 2-4% these numbers are for my state only though.
Now of course this is still a drop in bucket and corporation are still horribly, horrifically greedy which is why I had to get out and now get to relax working from home. I just wanted to frame the numbers a little better since I had to live and breathe this shit for years.
Even this corporate shill website lists ‘high’ amounts of theft with “According to some industry data” as “an average-sized food retail store in Canada can have between $2,000 and $5,000 worth of groceries stolen per week”
So not only are those inflated numbers, that’s still a tiny number. There are about 15,000-16,000 grocery stores in Canada. Even if every single one of those lost 5000 per week, that’s 3,900,000,000 per year. They make over 9,000,000,000 per month - or 108,000,000,000 per year.
Even at their highest possible (and likely lying) numbers, that’s 0.0361111111111111 % lost to theft.
Sure, some hyberbole, but barely. (And I worked at Costco and saw their theft numbers, and even they have laughably low ones.)