Have you ever seen the security room at a Walmart? If you ever thought you weren't on camera in a Walmart, you were. It's like a casino.
That particular camera looks like it is in a locking case, usually for hight theft items. The bizarre thing here is why the extra security on Sugar in the Raw and what looks like maybe Stevia.
For many smaller towns, it's the store. And for larger towns, it's still a 1-shop stop. If you're busy and need to grab gym shorts, a hammer, groceries, and a new router you can do it all in one place on the way home from.work.
only by necessity for me. the next cheapest store is on the other side of town with at leat a couple dozen traffic lights and intersections between us.
The cost of AI to do all this will be higher than any profits they could possibly make, but the managers who came up with this shot already committed and in the end they can just put that cost on the consumers anyway
You vastly underestimate how cheap and prevalent that sort of AI stuff already is. The upfront costs are high, and there's usually some sort of ongoing support cost, but it's been much cheaper than people since ~2020 and it's only been getting more prevalent and miniaturized.
I'd encourage you to peruse https://everseen.com/solutions for some dystopian horrorshow. That is one of the companies that Kroger and Walmart 'leverage their capabilities from'.
There's also the b2b quid pro quo investment schemes already mentioned.
And also that retail insurers are one of the major ones helping to 'drive adoption of these innovative ermergent technologies' as both the retailers and insurance are constantly trying to scam each other for profit 'maximize the potential earnings from their synergistic, mutually beneficial, relationship'. For further reading
At some point, Walmart execs sitting on a pile of NVIDIA stock won't see this as a loss for them. It will just become an excuse to trim spending - on healthcare, on wages, on wholesale costs, on maintenance of their fleets and facilities - everywhere that isn't AI.
The closest store to my house is Walmart, so unfortunately I go there pretty regularly. They just rennovated. I'm going to have to see if they did this.
Wal-Mart caters to people who will buy cheaper things no matter what, whether that's because they're desperate or disinterested in how that impacts their world.
It's like saying NASCAR fans like seeing cars go fast; that's basically the whole point.
Mine has had these, but only on locked cabinets, for years.
I don't know if they review 'em tho. Got sick and fucking tired of needing an employee to open the cabinent with the dog treats (most of the time, nobody even comes no matter how long I wait or how many time I press the button for service) so I got my own universal barrel key that opens their cabinets and just take what I need. Sometimes, I even pay for it.
Something like a TSA key that fits the lock in addition to the owner’s key.
'TSA approved' locks have a seprate keyway specifically for TSA to open and inspect your bags.
There is something called 'Master Keying' (not talking about the master lock company), where you can setup the pins in a lock to open for multiple different keys. Commonly used in places like hotels and motels: one key only opens your door (this is the one given to you at check-in) and another key that opens all the motels locks, given to management/cleaning staff so they can get into each room without needing dozens or hundreds of keys.
This requires each lock to be explicitly setup with the correct pins to accept both keys. Not super common now, but you still find them now and again.
The TSA have 3-4 specific 'TSA keys' (which are easily purchased), and they demand you use a 'TSA approved' lock which has an extra keyway explicitly for them to use. If you don't use one of these locks, they'll cut yours off during inspection and give it back to you in pieces, with no compensation.
This response was always a bit flimsy on social media where the goal is to be social, but it lost all its venom when every search engine was intentionally gutted to drive traffic to llm-based products, and 90% of the internet was turned to slop.
Each of the little pins you see in the ring of that lock are equivalent to the pins in a typical pin-tumbler lock you'd find on a front door. The corresponding round cutouts in the edge of the key barrel set how far each one is pushed down when you insert the key.
Yes, there's just one little tooth that rotates the lock, but only after each of those pins are pushed down to the correct depth. These are almost always really cheap locks, so you've only got to be kind of close tbh, but you do still have to be close.
You've just got a copy of walmarts keys. (Or a near enough approximation) nothing 'universal' about it. I don't think you explicitly tried to get 'walmarts keys', but got lucky enough with whatever random key you bought that it happens to work.
There's no such thing as a literal 'universal key'. There's commonly used keys (like what a large international retailer might buy and use in bulk....), and there's lock picking tools.
Funny thing is, the regional grocer in my area has cameras up all over the entrances and parking lot. In my situation, there is less surveillance at Walmart than the “other guy”.
I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the ceiling for a long time.
I'm a little annoyed by a local sandwich shop having their ordering kiosk --- which had a camera added --- recognize me and start recommending things based on my prior purchases there.
Now when I order at a kiosk, if I see something that looks like a camera, I put my hand over it.
To a point, but if you want it done more efficiently in multiple ways, you get cameras like this.
Seriously though, do you even know what you are arguing for here? What you are defending? Insecure people on the internet, trying to be right for the sake of it, even if it means casually normalizing the next indicator of our fascist takeover.
I'm not defending anything lol, I'm just saying this surveillance doesn't add a whole lot to the existing surveillance as far as I can tell, which is already pretty bad.
I might put on my goin out overalls and check these things out. Ain't my fault I'm a true american with pockets full of wet clay. Takes a pressure washer to get that kind out mud out from under my fingernails.
Part of it was illegal, part of it was that their way of doing business pushed people away. Suppliers didn't want to negotiate with Walmart and workers generally weren't desperate to work there.
I still have rather fond memories of shopping at Walmart in Germany. Tho I was a child and it always was more of an experience than a chore. Then Wexit happened and the world's gone to shit ever since
(likely) face identification and other surveillance of regular customers, if any data at all is created by that and analyzed or stored by anything that is a grave GDPR violation. Surveillance cameras for larger areas can be allowed but only to record for cases of legitimate control, no automated analysis nor data transfer to god knows where.
Personalised pricing is illegal as well in a supermarket. Digital price tags are allowed (and common) but there are clear rules how often prices are allowed to change. I'd have to research it myself but I think not more than once a day.
If it's only a couple, could be surveillance. If they're all over the place, they're probably doing stock checking or shopper heuristics. They're probably local AI just reporting back either where people are stopping, what they're picking or if the shelves need attn.
If you wanted surveillance you're better off with 4k zone cameras in the ceiling, cover the store with a couple dozen wide angle
Sometimes I pick up a shirt and then decide I don't want it, so I just leave it on any old shelf. I'm not very neat about it, and it might hang over the edge a bit. Oops.
Also facial recognition, eye tracking, body language analysis - creating the glass shopper, selling the data for peanuts while violating any decency. Legislation is so far behind the current reality that it isn't even funny anymore.
They could do it like Minority Report where it scans you as you grab the item and automatically withdraw the money from your bank account. Tho it's not gonna be reliable, so they're just gonna be stealing your money simply walking by the shelf sometimes.
Probably also a way to track items on the shelves for inventory and ordering. Potentially a way to make sure employees and straightened up the isles/products at the end of the day.
Probably not for surge pricing, they already do all the tracking with Bluetooth for the most part since everyone always has their phone and no longer turns off Bluetooth to save battery.
Please don't doubt that their Bluetooth database links your Mac address to a wide variety of socioeconomic data gathered from thousands of third-party providers. They don't need the cameras to know who's black or rich or a 4 year old on an old Wi-Fi only iPhone riding in a shopping cart. The cameras certainly help, but they're not required for surveillance pricing.
It will be impressive if they can surge price in a store. You could do it right now for delivery apps, but I don't know how you can do it in the store.
I honestly don't think that style of dystopia will require cameras at all. My best hunch here is that the self-checkout will migrate to the new "scan while you shop" model. Associating your personal scanning wand with, well, you is all it takes at that point.
Meanwhile what we're looking at here is Walmart solving the problem of not having a good look at a shoplifter's face, since there is no better place to stick a camera in their comically proportioned warehouse-sized stores.
The technology for scan while you shop is already a decade old. The problem is that you're still going to have to deal with publicly seen pricing signs which will make personalized pricing outside of coupons impossible.
Walmart is a deeply exploitative company that refuses to pay their workers a wage. Stealing from Walmart is ethically correct. Everyone should steal from Walmart. This is an actionable call to go out and shoplift from Walmart. Do it.
I set a walmart on fire once... ~12 years old, unsupervised, and playing with flamable liquids in the garden center...
Identified and spoken to by investigators, but still unpunished. I happened to be leaving the country with family in a few weeks, so they just let me go.
Walmart pays their employees better than most places do. And that's the unfortunate truth about that. That shows how shitty a lot of other companies actually are overall when Walmart is oftentimes a better example.
I have to say, accusing someone of stealing because they don't want to be recorded is probably more of an asshole move than asking you to not accuse someone of stealing
If you link it to flock you can even know who speak to who and get an amazing database of relationships.
It can even be used by weirdo cops to harass people.
I mean honestly food goods are the unfortunate aspect of being shoplifted quite a bit because of the way the economy is. And while I personally would never turn someone in for shoplifting and I personally think that shoplifting food is the one crime that should never be punished. Walmart unfortunately at the corporation and really any of the grocery stores anybody anywhere is going to look at loss and try to prevent it as much as possible.
Are you trying to shoplift and you have a harder time now?
Careful, my dude. Lemmy promotes an ends-means justification on some crime, mostly via demonification. There's no discussion on this particular ethical dilemma, despite a firm stance in other instances.
That's already being done by the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on your phone. They don't need cameras and cameras wouldn't do any good. Because it's not identifying you individually they don't give a shit what you look like. They just care what tech you have installed on your phone already.
137 replies
Have you ever seen the security room at a Walmart? If you ever thought you weren't on camera in a Walmart, you were. It's like a casino.
That particular camera looks like it is in a locking case, usually for hight theft items. The bizarre thing here is why the extra security on Sugar in the Raw and what looks like maybe Stevia.
Never really got the appeal of walmart, they have only had some I wanted maybe twice over the last 20 years.
Oh well, yet another reason to never go there.
For many smaller towns, it's the store. And for larger towns, it's still a 1-shop stop. If you're busy and need to grab gym shorts, a hammer, groceries, and a new router you can do it all in one place on the way home from.work.
I'm not sure how many shop there because it appeals to them
only by necessity for me. the next cheapest store is on the other side of town with at leat a couple dozen traffic lights and intersections between us.
For many people it's nearest grocery
Oops, my greasy hands just smeared over the lens!
... Whoops, this one too!
This is for dynamic pricing
Sharpies are just a few aisles over
Right next to the white-out
It must take a lot of compute to have AI review all those cameras and calculate surge pricing. I wonder where they will find it?
The cost of AI to do all this will be higher than any profits they could possibly make, but the managers who came up with this shot already committed and in the end they can just put that cost on the consumers anyway
You vastly underestimate how cheap and prevalent that sort of AI stuff already is. The upfront costs are high, and there's usually some sort of ongoing support cost, but it's been much cheaper than people since ~2020 and it's only been getting more prevalent and miniaturized.
I'd encourage you to peruse https://everseen.com/solutions for some dystopian horrorshow. That is one of the companies that Kroger and Walmart 'leverage their capabilities from'.
There's also the b2b quid pro quo investment schemes already mentioned.
And also that retail insurers are one of the major ones helping to 'drive adoption of these innovative ermergent technologies' as both the retailers and insurance are constantly trying to
scam each other for profit'maximize the potential earnings from their synergistic, mutually beneficial, relationship'. For further readingOne man's cost is another man's profit.
At some point, Walmart execs sitting on a pile of NVIDIA stock won't see this as a loss for them. It will just become an excuse to trim spending - on healthcare, on wages, on wholesale costs, on maintenance of their fleets and facilities - everywhere that isn't AI.
What the actual fuck
My first thoughts exactly word for word.
The closest store to my house is Walmart, so unfortunately I go there pretty regularly. They just rennovated. I'm going to have to see if they did this.
If I ever end up back in a Walmart and see these, I'm definitely setting something in front of them.
Pinch of thermite should do it
I was thinking a box of cereal, but I like the cut of your jib!
Walmart shoppers will put up with anything
Many are in food deserts and have no other choice.
I mean, yeah.
Wal-Mart caters to people who will buy cheaper things no matter what, whether that's because they're desperate or disinterested in how that impacts their world.
It's like saying NASCAR fans like seeing cars go fast; that's basically the whole point.
The cameras beep at you too
Why?
Perfect, draw my attention so I remember to fuck with it
Walk around with mask and reflective lenses.
People are stealing sugar?
I'm not a scientist or anything, but that seems like really bad news
I'm guessing the cameras track your gaze, and they use that to decide what people are most interested in.
Seems easier to just look at how many were rung up at the till...
Is for live dynamic pricing. Its why all the tagsaredigital now.
Find the peanut butter aisle. Then make all the aisles peanut butter aisles.
Mine has had these, but only on locked cabinets, for years.
I don't know if they review 'em tho. Got sick and fucking tired of needing an employee to open the cabinent with the dog treats (most of the time, nobody even comes no matter how long I wait or how many time I press the button for service) so I got my own universal barrel key that opens their cabinets and just take what I need. Sometimes, I even pay for it.
Tell me more about how one procures a universal barrel key.
https://covertinstruments.com/products/covert-tubular-lock-pick
That's a lock pick, not a key.
Also, Walmart doesn't use physical keys anymore. It's some sort of wireless thing like NFC.
A 'universal' key, IE a key that can be used to open multiple different locks. So yes, a lock pick. What were you expecting?
Not all walmarts are the same, many haven't 'upgraded' to digital locks. Still an interesting tool for the arsenal.
A “Master Key”
Something like a TSA key that fits the lock in addition to the owner’s key.
A lock pick requires an amount of skill to use and is definitely not a key.
'TSA approved' locks have a seprate keyway specifically for TSA to open and inspect your bags.
There is something called 'Master Keying' (not talking about the master lock company), where you can setup the pins in a lock to open for multiple different keys. Commonly used in places like hotels and motels: one key only opens your door (this is the one given to you at check-in) and another key that opens all the motels locks, given to management/cleaning staff so they can get into each room without needing dozens or hundreds of keys.
This requires each lock to be explicitly setup with the correct pins to accept both keys. Not super common now, but you still find them now and again.
There are universal luggage keys because luggage makers make locks that need to be opened by 3rd parties. Barrel locks aren’t designed that way.
Also the TSA has a set of universal keys, there isn’t a single key that works on all luggage.
The TSA have 3-4 specific 'TSA keys' (which are easily purchased), and they demand you use a 'TSA approved' lock which has an extra keyway explicitly for them to use. If you don't use one of these locks, they'll cut yours off during inspection and give it back to you in pieces, with no compensation.
yes, my friend would also like to have this information
You go to your favorite search engine and enter "universal barrel key."
This response was always a bit flimsy on social media where the goal is to be social, but it lost all its venom when every search engine was intentionally gutted to drive traffic to llm-based products, and 90% of the internet was turned to slop.
AliExpress or Amazon.
It looks kind of like a screwdriver. Ask The Lockpicking Lawyer.
They literally look like this:
That's just a key, presumably a copy of the specific key that your local walmart uses; there's nothing 'universal' about it.
These are some of the cheapest locks you can get and all just use a single tooth to turn the latch.
Each of the little pins you see in the ring of that lock are equivalent to the pins in a typical pin-tumbler lock you'd find on a front door. The corresponding round cutouts in the edge of the key barrel set how far each one is pushed down when you insert the key.
Yes, there's just one little tooth that rotates the lock, but only after each of those pins are pushed down to the correct depth. These are almost always really cheap locks, so you've only got to be kind of close tbh, but you do still have to be close.
You've just got a copy of walmarts keys. (Or a near enough approximation) nothing 'universal' about it. I don't think you explicitly tried to get 'walmarts keys', but got lucky enough with whatever random key you bought that it happens to work.
There's no such thing as a literal 'universal key'. There's commonly used keys (like what a large international retailer might buy and use in bulk....), and there's lock picking tools.
Ever hear of skeleton keys?
You could just find an associate. From my experience they will help right away
They still gotta find the ONE employee who has the friggin keys.
Thats where you talk to the lady who looks like she is a million years old
Funny thing is, the regional grocer in my area has cameras up all over the entrances and parking lot. In my situation, there is less surveillance at Walmart than the “other guy”.
Surge pricing, here we come!
Kroger stores are especially bad
I mean, that Walmart already is going to have had cameras all over the ceiling for a long time.
I'm a little annoyed by a local sandwich shop having their ordering kiosk --- which had a camera added --- recognize me and start recommending things based on my prior purchases there.
Now when I order at a kiosk, if I see something that looks like a camera, I put my hand over it.
Dude... Are you really oblivious to the difference? These are for facial recognition, eye tracking and surveillance pricing through RFID price tags.
The only part of that not really possible with ceiling cameras is eye tracking, you don't need eye-level cameras for the other two.
To a point, but if you want it done more efficiently in multiple ways, you get cameras like this.
Seriously though, do you even know what you are arguing for here? What you are defending? Insecure people on the internet, trying to be right for the sake of it, even if it means casually normalizing the next indicator of our fascist takeover.
What are you doing?
I'm not defending anything lol, I'm just saying this surveillance doesn't add a whole lot to the existing surveillance as far as I can tell, which is already pretty bad.
I might put on my goin out overalls and check these things out. Ain't my fault I'm a true american with pockets full of wet clay. Takes a pressure washer to get that kind out mud out from under my fingernails.
Let those among us who haven’t accidentally packed our pockets with wet clay cast the first clod
Do we have a "boringdystopia" instance on Lemmy yet?
/c/[email protected]
Thoroughly illegal in the EU. Luckily Walmart doesn't operate there.
It wasn't luck. They tried and failed, on account of how many of their normal practices are illegal in the EU.
Part of it was illegal, part of it was that their way of doing business pushed people away. Suppliers didn't want to negotiate with Walmart and workers generally weren't desperate to work there.
Sounds like two sides of the same coin.
I still have rather fond memories of shopping at Walmart in Germany. Tho I was a child and it always was more of an experience than a chore. Then Wexit happened and the world's gone to shit ever since
I'm interested, what makes it illegal?
(likely) face identification and other surveillance of regular customers, if any data at all is created by that and analyzed or stored by anything that is a grave GDPR violation. Surveillance cameras for larger areas can be allowed but only to record for cases of legitimate control, no automated analysis nor data transfer to god knows where.
Personalised pricing is illegal as well in a supermarket. Digital price tags are allowed (and common) but there are clear rules how often prices are allowed to change. I'd have to research it myself but I think not more than once a day.
Not yet, at least. It seems that they operate almost everywhere else though
They actually tried it in the EU but failed hard.
Oh, these Cheerios are too bulky! I guess I'll just place them here, right in front of this electronic eyeball. Pure coincidence.
Oh I got nail polish on my finger accidentally. Good place to wipe it off.
Accidentally.
Cut pieces of paper with a 90 degree fold.
Place them on the shelf with the fold in front of the camera.
Bonus pts if you buy a cheap box of lil (low power to avoid accusations of attempted property damage) magnets to keep em there.
I know someone directly involved with this work/these changes and Walmart absolutely shares this stuff with law enforcement basically freely
This is why they're losing to Amazon.
No it's because their website sucks
I stopped going to the major grocery chain here because they got rid of their 50% off stickers for food about to go past the sell by date.
If they did this I wouldnt just stop going there, Id fucking nuke it.
Looks like a used gum disposal unit to me
Interesting.
If it's only a couple, could be surveillance. If they're all over the place, they're probably doing stock checking or shopper heuristics. They're probably local AI just reporting back either where people are stopping, what they're picking or if the shelves need attn.
If you wanted surveillance you're better off with 4k zone cameras in the ceiling, cover the store with a couple dozen wide angle
Porque no los dos?
bandwidth on hundreds of wireless cameras.
hell bandwith on hundreds of wired cameras for that matter :)
updoot for tacobell tho
I suddenly feel the need to grab my largest tipped sharpie and a mask and walk around Walmart for the first time in years
pro-tip: use paint pen.
sharpie comes of with alcohol.
paint comes off with scraping and scratching cheap plastic camera lenses.
Sometimes I pick up a shirt and then decide I don't want it, so I just leave it on any old shelf. I'm not very neat about it, and it might hang over the edge a bit. Oops.
My God that camera is way too easy to "accidentally" tamper with, lol. At the very least, my kids greese covered finger tips while I stroll by.
I'm sure that camera could accidentally be damaged or rendered non-functional.
I drop heavy hammers into shelves all the time.
How many different scenarios can you put together for a company putting cameras on shelves in a store?
What's to guess about, here?
Probably billed as anti theft. Likely some form of surge pricing
Also facial recognition, eye tracking, body language analysis - creating the glass shopper, selling the data for peanuts while violating any decency. Legislation is so far behind the current reality that it isn't even funny anymore.
The last federally-passed privacy law concerned video store workers not sharing what VHS tapes you rent. Because it was the 80's...
Thank fuck that killed Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, fucker was talking about political exceptions to the first amendment.
They could do it like Minority Report where it scans you as you grab the item and automatically withdraw the money from your bank account. Tho it's not gonna be reliable, so they're just gonna be stealing your money simply walking by the shelf sometimes.
Probably also a way to track items on the shelves for inventory and ordering. Potentially a way to make sure employees and straightened up the isles/products at the end of the day.
Probably not for surge pricing, they already do all the tracking with Bluetooth for the most part since everyone always has their phone and no longer turns off Bluetooth to save battery.
Yeah but Bluetooth cant tell walmart black shoppers are coming to raise the prices
Please don't doubt that their Bluetooth database links your Mac address to a wide variety of socioeconomic data gathered from thousands of third-party providers. They don't need the cameras to know who's black or rich or a 4 year old on an old Wi-Fi only iPhone riding in a shopping cart. The cameras certainly help, but they're not required for surveillance pricing.
Yeah, that's unfortunately the case, there is no such thing as privacy anymore
Walmart secures two AI pricing patents, raising dynamic pricing concerns
Loss (shoplifting) prevention
I have a feeling there have been cameras for a while. They just want you to see them
Why is that infuriating. Are you trying to shoplift and you have a harder time now?
If you look too long at granola you take a 10% increase on Coca-Cola.
It will be impressive if they can surge price in a store. You could do it right now for delivery apps, but I don't know how you can do it in the store.
I honestly don't think that style of dystopia will require cameras at all. My best hunch here is that the self-checkout will migrate to the new "scan while you shop" model. Associating your personal scanning wand with, well, you is all it takes at that point.
Meanwhile what we're looking at here is Walmart solving the problem of not having a good look at a shoplifter's face, since there is no better place to stick a camera in their comically proportioned warehouse-sized stores.
The technology for scan while you shop is already a decade old. The problem is that you're still going to have to deal with publicly seen pricing signs which will make personalized pricing outside of coupons impossible.
So SCAN AND BUY NOW FOR 15% off offer expires in 4 minutes bullshit
Walmart is a deeply exploitative company that refuses to pay their workers a wage. Stealing from Walmart is ethically correct. Everyone should steal from Walmart. This is an actionable call to go out and shoplift from Walmart. Do it.
I set a walmart on fire once... ~12 years old, unsupervised, and playing with flamable liquids in the garden center...
Identified and spoken to by investigators, but still unpunished. I happened to be leaving the country with family in a few weeks, so they just let me go.
Nice
My second thought after "what the actual fuck" is "I wonder if I could steal one of these cameras."
You are thinking too small.
I'm going to steal all the Walmart stores.
Seize the means of consumption!
Walmart pays their employees better than most places do. And that's the unfortunate truth about that. That shows how shitty a lot of other companies actually are overall when Walmart is oftentimes a better example.
Good thought process, have you considered not being a troll online?
I mean it is a good thought process have you tried not being an asshole?
I have to say, accusing someone of stealing because they don't want to be recorded is probably more of an asshole move than asking you to not accuse someone of stealing
Something something pot something kettle
Nope. What I said was their visceral response to this was unneeded unless they were planning on doing something.
If you link it to flock you can even know who speak to who and get an amazing database of relationships. It can even be used by weirdo cops to harass people.
Yes you caught us trying to shop lift sugar.
I mean honestly food goods are the unfortunate aspect of being shoplifted quite a bit because of the way the economy is. And while I personally would never turn someone in for shoplifting and I personally think that shoplifting food is the one crime that should never be punished. Walmart unfortunately at the corporation and really any of the grocery stores anybody anywhere is going to look at loss and try to prevent it as much as possible.
Careful, my dude. Lemmy promotes an ends-means justification on some crime, mostly via demonification. There's no discussion on this particular ethical dilemma, despite a firm stance in other instances.
Or you can see that people are in group and send them coupon on their Walmart app.
That's already being done by the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on your phone. They don't need cameras and cameras wouldn't do any good. Because it's not identifying you individually they don't give a shit what you look like. They just care what tech you have installed on your phone already.
you don't need cameras for that, the app could just broadcast some kind of wireless beacon and it would be far cheaper.
And you can easily watch face of customer to get information on what their emotions in front of products and sell the data as product review.