Self-service check-outs at supermarkets save time for customers and wages for the business but they also provide opportunities for the dishonest.
Expensive fruit and vegetables are keyed in as cheaper ones; the inexpensive bottle of wine is scanned, the dearer one put in the bag and the cheaper one scanned again.
These are just a couple of the tricks a supermarket owner told me his staff had caught customers trying.
One or two items is bad enough. Some opportunistic shoppers took advantage of an electronic glitch which opened a Hamilton Pak and Save supermarket with no staff and turned it into Pak and Steal:
“I actually believe a lot of these people just came in today innocently to shop,” says security guard Basil Way.
He’s been reviewing the footage of the confused shoppers.
“People have the opportunity to be honest, or be dishonest. Or just run for the hills,” he says.
Management says it’s highly embarrassed by what’s happened and says thanks to a quick police response – they didn’t lose too much.
The management says if any of the thieves come in and pay for what they took, the money will be donated to the Red Cross for Christchurch.
And it warns that it already knows who some of them are, because they’re regular customers.
What saddened me more was that some people who were asked what they’d have done had they found the shop unstaffed appeared to find nothing wrong in the thefts and said they’d have taken the groceries too.
That makes them not only dishonest but unashamed to admit it on national television.
Is it too much to hope they are a tiny minority or is honesty no longer the norm?
Is it too much to hope……….or is honesty no longer the norm?
A sign of the ‘progress’ our society is making, Hp. Sadly.
We are becoming the victims of our ‘success’ at improving our living standards – but without the ability to adjust to these rapid advances we are all exposed to.
Consequently we are losing ‘responsibility’ for our actions.
Happy Easter everyone!
But what is honesty?
For some,it comes from their religion, the fear of god watching their every action keeps their baser instincts in check. Or is that simply the fear of being watched?
In a test, candidates were given a list of moral questions, some had a pair of eyes printed on the paper, some a butterfly. Overall, those with the eyes on the paper gave a more moral answer tha those with the butterfflies.
WhatPak n Save showed was, quite clearly, a lot of theft is iopportunistic, a lot of amoral or anti- social behaviour is predicated on the risk of beeing seen or caught, not the risk of being punished.
A snot on the nose to the Garth McVicar’s. It isn’t harsher sentences, it is increasing the liklihood of being caught that counts.
Well some of the customers scanned their stuff and paid – about half of them if you glean through all of the reports of this incident.
Its bad but not all bad.
Yes andrei, and I did mean to conclude my post above with -And some people just do the right thing, regardless of being watched or not, simply because they know it is the right thing to do.
http://www.economist.com/node/18584074