I have to get this off my shoulders without further delay. I was momentarily perplexed this morning when my supermarket cart ‘slammed its brakes on’. Then, I remembered: my go-to food source has instituted those cart-jammers…
The innards of a locking grocery cart wheel – a high-tech approach to stopping food theft…
We told you about the cart-jammers some time ago. They’re designed to a.) keep people from exiting the store with un-paid-for goods and, b.) keep idiots with nothing better to do from taking carts off the property.
My ‘indisposition’…
I was still in the cart lobby at the store entrance when my car stopped. And I want to assure you, I had a receipt – right there in my hot little hand – listing every one of the three items I had purchased.
While I waited for a store employee to attend the scene of the non-crime, I started composing the tongue lashing I was going to give them.
But instead of a proper security officer or management-level representative, a sad-looking cart retrieval guy came, dragging himself up to my side. He just stared at me. I had to initiate the con-versation…
Facing my accuser – not!
“Here’s my receipt!” I said, sternly, if not a little too loudly. “What on Earth gave you the idea I was STEALING something?”
“I don’t know,” the kid said. Then, “It wasn’t my idea…”
I begged his pardon, formally. And perhaps a little too forcefully.
“The computer read something in your cart that wasn’t paid for…” he mumbled.
I was flabbergasted! A computer? Really?
“So, I don’t get to face my accuser? That’s my fundamental right under the law!”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Cart Guy said, inspecting my receipt for about the third time. “Um… Looks like you’re good to go.”
He pulled out a thing that looked like a garage door opener remote and pushed the single big red button on it. Nothing happened. He pushed again. Again, nothing. But third time was the charm, and I was on my way. Not, however, without apologising for having confused Cart Guy with a computer.
My take
First, I have to express my disappointment with store management for dumping the customer-contact role on the cart wrangler. Obviously, nobody else in the responsibility tree wanted to be stuck with it, and Cart Guy was last in line, at the bottom, maybe even among the roots.
Cart Guy told me they get ‘false alarms’ all the time. Whatever that actually means. But it suggests that a lot of other shoppers are routinely humiliated there, at the choke point of the operation, the cart lobby – through which everyone who visits the store must enter and exit. I guess I was lucky only two other people were in that space when I was accosted by the store’s less-than-perfect AI.
On the other hand…
For the sake of fairplay and journalistic balance, I hasten to point out that supermarkets have been struggling to quell a tsunami of shoplifting – and outright snatch-and-grab robberies, in broad day-light. It’s all because food prices have risen to stratospheric heights over the past few years. Average folks are desperate for a financial break. And crooks are only too happy to take the risks involved to harvest top prices for goods at the high end of the luxury scale. Like steaks and alcoholic beverages.
But my ‘run-in’ with store ‘security’ just highlighted the fact that no solution to the food-theft prob-lem has yet been found which is anywhere near adequate to the task.
And the supermarkets?
They’re still, somehow, rolling in dough. The Big-5 chains – the grocery cartel – continue to report double-digit profits while ordinary folks in such unlikely places as London, Ontario starve, and food banks fall farther and farther behind the demand for their services.
It’s a good thing the federal government has finally got off its collective duff and opened an investi-gation into anti-competitive behaviour in the Canadian food sector…
~ Maggie J.