Coles and Woolies have you on camera: Say 'cheese'!

Coles and Woolworths supermarkets have increased security technology in self-checkout areas, leaving many customers feeling undervalued and untrustworthy, writes Tom Tanuki.

THE SELF-SERVICE checkout at the local Coles was showing me a video of myself buying a lemon and a Lebanese cucumber. The video was a true and correct interpretation of events. I really did buy a lemon and a Lebanese cucumber.

While observing this footage made me aware my purchasing decision was being viewed, I wasn’t its intended audience. It was mostly being played for the Coles self-service machine attendant whose job it was to use it to assess my honesty.

Cameras at self-service checkouts were first introduced in 2019 to stop us Australians from stealing from our duopolistic supermarket giant overlords: Coles and Woolworths, the two-headed beast bleeding the life out of local competition, town by town, year by year.

We’re more broke than ever, with the consumer price index rising much faster than our wages. A lot of that increase comes in the form of food price bumps — with food prices at the supermarket giants alone increasing by 9.6 per cent in the past year. That primarily seems to be so that the two-headed beast can deliver record profits, though, with Woolworth's banking over $900 million net profit in 2022-2023.

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So if we're broke but want to eat the same amount as usual, we'll just have to steal more food. Right? The supermarket giants have realised this increased risk. And their solution is to start employing more workers to staff their stores again, reversing the self-service trend. Just joking! Their solution is to put heaps more cameras in.

First, they were unobtrusive black orbs watching you from afar. Then they started showing you your own face in a threatening little video that effectively communicated: “Look, we have you on camera. So, don’t take fancy cheese.”

Now they show you – and the attendant – every single action you take that the machine doesn’t understand. And that machine appears not to understand a lot of what you do while shopping. Either because it is very stupid or very suspicious.

While I’m just another pleb and harbour no delusions of grandeur, if I was a supermarket giant and I came in, I’d probably watch me too. I have caused some supermarket-related fuss before.

In 2018, I got mad about some gushing article celebrating the arrest of a child stealing a roast chicken. In a fit of pique, I organised "Steal A Roast Chook Day". I created a Facebook event for the occasion, which showed 5,000+ people attending before it was deleted.

It was a whole thing. People effectively "celebrated" it, too! Coles was forced to release this nationwide alert about 'potential protest action involving Hot Roast Chicken thefts'.

Alert notice from Coles (Image supplied)

I guess I’m just saying I have form. What’s a roast chook or ten in the grander scheme of these enormous entities, squeezing the blood out of the Australian working class as they do while railroading all independent competition and corralling the nation’s farmers into becoming indentured growers?

I suppose, really, my greatest market crime is one I contribute to in bulk with many of my fellow Australians: nicking a bit of fancy cheese. A little fib or two at the self-service.

I think many of us have had to do it now and then. Personally, I’ve figured: if you parasites insist on sacking all your customer-facing staff, then I insist on taking part in the increased profit margins in the form of one free lump of your finest Fromager d'Affinois.

But I admit my self-service Robin Hood campaign has stalled somewhat. How the hell would I even do it these days? Each kiosk is a surveillance panopticon. Every single product I scan — again and again checking my honesty. It’s made self-service shopping take considerably longer while we’re checked for potential thieveries over again.

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Did I really buy that lemon? Did I really get that cucumber? Perhaps I dressed up a smoked salmon to look like a cucumber. Or a fancy cheese disguised as a lemon. Perhaps I’m merely a thieving liar and reprobate.

The self-service attendant was here to check all that — thank god. She stared at the footage for roughly ten seconds (I timed it), comparing it closely with my haul — to assess. Then she stared into my eyes for another ten seconds to see if I would crack and confess my thievery. (Not really.)

Finally, she relented. But at the end of my shop, the machine called her back again!

This time, it was because I’d left my bags, which I’d brought from home, in the carry case. The 478th little camera trained on me detected them. It assumed they could have been evidence of me leaving some stolen goods in the carry case, like the thieving dog I am.

So, she came back to review my footage in painstaking detail — again. (15 seconds, this time.) She waved me through, greenlighting me to take up my bags and load up my shopping. Success! I passed without arrest.

It's hard to pass, isn’t it? Hundreds of cameras are now watching me. They use AI technology to check I haven’t lied with the items I’ve weighed up, just in case I’m smuggling fancy nuts or barramundi or something.

And they’re body-slamming you if they catch you now. You’ve got no right to privacy in their hands.

In fact, I thought as I left Coles, the only thing that enjoyed any privacy during that shop was the interior of the bag that I had brought from home with me. Because nobody – neither the self-service attendant nor the seven million overhead cameras – bothered to look inside them and check if anything was in there!

It’s nice to be trusted at least that much.

(The Fromager d'Affonois was lovely, by the way.)

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom does weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.