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Kroger's Panopticon: Making Criminals of Grocery Shoppers - What the Hell is Beeping?
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I worked as an armed guard for Kroger in my area for a little over a year and we were progressively relied upon to also act as loss prevention. Some Kroger do experience a high volume of theft, it was not uncommon for me to get three or four apprehensions a day when I was there. However Kroger has definitely gone down a path in which the customer bo longer comes first, imo. The shopping cart wheels that lock up were the bane of my existence when I worked there because 99% of the time they locked up on just regular shoppers. In the year I was there, there were only two times it locked up on actual shoplifters. On top of that, when the wheels lock up people tend to try to keep pushing them so they would wear down. A lot of the shopping carts wouldn’t roll right because they had lopsided wheels and had to be replaced frequently. I highly doubt Kroger is getting an ROI on that system when you factor in wheel replacements. The other measures they’ve taken, camera in your face and AI, definitely feel Orwellian and even though I worked there, I won’t shop at Kroger unless it’s one of the ones that doesn’t have these “features”.