A shopper pounced on Woolworths’ self-service checkouts after a technical glitch falsely alerted staff that she was ‘stealing’.
Noni Lyall, 68, was scanning and packing her groceries at her local supermarket in Vincentia on the NSW south coast on Friday when a red light at the top of the self-service checkout began flashing.
Artificially intelligent cameras tracking items being transported between the shopping cart and the scanner indicated Ms Lyall had failed to scan a juice bottle.
Ms Lyall explained to staff who interviewed her that she had scanned the item but it didn’t fit in the bags so she simply put it back in her shopping trolley.
Staff quickly realized the mistake and did not pose a further problem, but Ms Lyall says she felt very uncomfortable given the situation that played out in front of so many people.
“To put it bluntly, I was pissed, I just couldn’t believe it,” she said Yahoo News Australia. “I’m a 68-year-old woman, I don’t steal.”
A shopper pounced on the Woolworths self-service checkout after a technical glitch falsely alerted staff that she was “stealing”.
“I was just like, ‘Wow, you want us to do all of our own work now, scanning our groceries ourselves without having the wait staff and still blaming ourselves for not paying?’
She said the experience “upset her” and she vowed she would no longer shop at the city’s only Woolworths.
The new self-checkouts were launched in Seven Hills in western Sydney in 2022, with the AI-driven software undergoing extensive scrutiny.
Samantha Floreani of the Digital Rights Watch group said the technology can make shoppers feel like they’re “constantly being watched and recorded.”
“This kind of normalization of surveillance creates space for the increasing use of invasive technologies in everyday life to gain access to vital services,” she said.
The new self-checkouts were launched in Seven Hills in western Sydney in 2022, with the AI-driven software undergoing extensive scrutiny
The supermarket giant said it was forced to adopt the technology as the number of thieves not scanning items increased.
“While most customers do the right thing at our self-checkouts, we’re all busy and it’s easy to make mistakes,” a Woolworths spokesman told Daily Mail Australia earlier this year.
“It helps reduce misscans and is one of several initiatives we’ve rolled out at our checkouts to make shopping more convenient and smoother.”
The technology is now in use in 460 stores across Australia in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.
