Woolies customer erupts at frustrating self-checkout glitch wrongly accusing her of stealing
Woolies customer erupts over frustrating self-checkout glitch, falsely accusing her of theft
- Woolworths customer frustrated with self-service checkout
- It felt like she had stolen groceries
A customer has let go of Woolworths self-service checkouts after a glitch in the technology falsely alerted staff that she was ‘stealing’.
Noni Lyall, 68, was scanning and packing her groceries at her local supermarket in Vincentia, on the south coast of New South Wales, on Friday when a red light started flashing on top of the cash register.
Artificially intelligent cameras that track the items passing between the trolley and the scanner indicated that Ms. Lyall had not scanned a bottle of juice.
Ms Lyall explained to the staff who questioned her that she had scanned the item but it didn’t fit in the bags so she simply put it back in her shopping cart.
Staff quickly realized the mistake and there was no further problem, but Ms Lyall says she felt very uncomfortable given the situation unfolding for so many people.
“To put it bluntly, I was devastated, I just couldn’t believe it,” she said Yahoo News Australia. “I’m a 68-year-old lady, I don’t steal.”
A customer has let go of the Woolworths self-service checkout after a technology glitch falsely warned staff that she was ‘putting’
“I just thought, wow, you want us to do all our own work now by scanning our own groceries, with no waitstaff, and yet you’re going to accuse us of not paying?”
She said the experience “annoyed” her and vowed to stop shopping at the city’s only Woolworths.
The new self-service checkouts were rolled out in Seven Hills in Western Sydney in 2022 with a strong focus on the AI-powered software.
Samantha Floreani of the Digital Rights Watch group said the technology could make shoppers feel “that they are constantly being watched and recorded.”
“This kind of normalization of surveillance makes room for the increasing use of invasive technologies in everyday life to access everyday essential services,” she said.
The new self-service checkouts were rolled out in Western Sydney’s Seven Hills in 2022, with a strong focus on the AI-powered software
The supermarket giant says it had to introduce the technology because of an increase in thieves not scanning items.
“While most customers do the right thing at our self-service checkouts, we are all busy and mistakes can easily happen,” a Woolworths spokesperson told the Daily Mail Australia earlier this year.
“It helps reduce misscans and is one of a number of initiatives we’ve implemented at our checkouts to make shopping easier and seamless.”
The technology is now installed in 460 stores across Australia in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.