The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery

The thing that upsets me most about self checkouts is just how artificially slowed down they are<p>I used to be a cashier and bagger at a local supermarket. We were expected to be able to be able to keep up a pace from 20-30 scans per minute, including handling the money, counting change, etc, and baggers were expected to keep up, no matter the size of the order.<p>Meanwhile I struggle to get self checkouts to recognize more than one scan every ten seconds. I wish I could just log into one of the main, unused lanes and scan myself out. It would take significantly less time.<p>The banana trick shows that the security implemented in self checkout is simply a sham. Just open them up completely and let us go through them at a higher throughput. You can probably eliminate yet another cashier at that point.

&gt; <i>“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”</i><p>That&#x27;s the most entitled thing I&#x27;ve read all year, but I look forward to the next 11 months.

I find the pseudo-moralizing about law-abiding citizens to be rather grating.<p>If a stranger in front of me dropped a $20 bill I would certainly let them know. However, that doesn&#x27;t mean I am a law-abiding citizen. My empathy does not prevent me from stealing from grocery chains, whether faced with a human cashier or a machine. My morality is not based on law, nor should law equate to morality in all cases.

I was expecting the “banana trick” to be the case where dropping the leading 9 from the item code will ring up organic produce as the cheaper regular version (9nnnn vs nnnn).