It would appear that the Tesco strapline ‘Every little helps’ is being introduced into its loss prevention programme as the supermarket giant has adopted a new patented technology to prevent so-called ‘sweethearting’ at the checkouts.
The technology which analyses the checkout staff and customer body language at the point of sale is also being extended to self-scan epos systems to further reduce retail losses.
US-based StopLift Checkout Vision Systems has developed the software-based checkout vision system which automatically analyses regular CCTV video from existing cameras to detect various forms of theft, training error and operational analytics at the checkout.
Developed from a Harvard Business School study on retail loss prevention, the company has patented the first ever system capable of successfully detecting sweethearting between cashiers and customers and its website claims it detected 130,000 incidents in 2010.
One of the study’s major findings was that, while CCTV is the most widespread of all loss prevention technologies, it is often the most underutilised – it is just too expensive and time-consuming for humans to monitor or review video comprehensively.
With engineering talent and computer vision research insights from MIT, the Project StopLift Team realised that video recognition could be used to automate and, thus make possible the comprehensive examination of surveillance video.
As soon as a sweethearting incident occurs, the software, which monitors 100% of checkout traffic flags the transaction as suspicious and reports it. This not only reduces theft through collusion, but also highlights genuine process failure where re-training may be offered to staff.
Malay Kundi, CEO of Stoplift, said: “Using the incidents detected from their own stores, retailers are now able to train staff on the signals indicating when customers are having problems using the self checkout or are exhibiting suspicious behaviour.”
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