Technology is great, isn’t it? Well, sometimes. other times, depending on the circumstance, it can be a very painful experience.Businesses especially have made use of various technologies to assist with the overall customer experience. For some of us, the most common experience is at the grocery store where innovation led to self-checkout registers to now including apps for the phone so that the customer may scan the item as they place it into their cart, totaling when they get to the register to pay. Convenient? Looks like it.

Some retailers are now saying that some of these conveniences make it easy for customers to steal and retailers are showing record losses in recent years. Some, like the grocery retailer in the article, have suspended use of its app even though their customer base has been very approving over time. It does, though, seem to be an easy way for someone to either accidentally not scan items or of course, purposefully. The register self checkout is probably the most secure for retailers as it involves an employee being in the area to help customers if necessary making ot less likely someone would leave without paying or “forget” to pay of an item or two.

Of course, this isn’t foolproof either because, in my experience, there are multiple self checkout registers and only a single employee stationed in the area. If someone with a lot of items “accidentally” doesn’t scan everything, it will still be difficult to catch.

This stealing hurts every customer because losses are eventually passed on. If the losses become too large to dydtsin or pass along, then its possible that the business will just close down, incurring lost jobs and inconvenience for customers (like Walgreens in San Francisco. – but those are government approved thefts, aren’t they?). I think there are already some working to improve these technologies without them becoming too expensive to implement. No one wants to revert to older, clumsy ways of shopping and the sooner some of these issues can be solved, the better it is for all.