The Moral Dilemma of Scamming the Supermarket Self-Checkout Machines

In the 1990s, when supermarkets began introducing self-checkout machines, nobody anticipated the havoc they would wreak. Sure, the automated tills made buying milk, Berocca, and some condoms significantly less embarrassing, but boy were they irritating. The bossy robot voice that instructs you to “please take your items,” even though you’re clearly fucking taking them, aren’t you? That time your one lemon kept registering as two lemons, despite you specifically typing into the machine that it was one, single lemon, and staff had to escort you out of the Old Street Sainsbury’s because you starting crying. Fun!

Despite the self-checkout machine's flaws, it did have one saving grace: the ol’ veg switcheroo. It goes something like this. First, bring your 60p avocado to the self-checkout till, then, when the screen asks what type of veg is being weighed, select the option for a carrot. Place your avo surreptitiously on the scale—like a Robin Hood of legumes. The machine weighs the avo, thinking it’s a few carrots, and thus charges you for the much cheaper carrot weight. Suck. It. Multinational. Conglomerate. Supermarket.

Indeed, Brits have gotten so good at this minor grocery theft that it’s starting to cost shops a bit of money. Earlier this week, The Times reported that over £3 million worth of food is stolen each year on Britain’s 50,000 self-service tills. While it’s easiest to sneak a posh tomato or organic broccoli floret in place of a cheap carrot or onion, people have reportedly stolen far bigger items, such as whole chickens or an entire supermarket shop.

Criminologist Emmeline Taylor, a senior lecturer at City University in London, told the newspaper that she first spotted self-checkout crime in Australia. “I was working with retailers to reduce shoplifting when one major supermarket discovered it had sold more carrots than it had ever had in stock,” she said. “Puzzled by this development, it looked into its inventories and found that in some cases customers were apparently purchasing 18 kilograms of carrots in one go. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a sudden switch to healthy eating, it was an early sign of a new type of shoplifter.”

But does it really count as shoplifting if you’re still paying for your item, albeit with an unauthorised discount? If you’re like me, and you’ve cheated on at least three boyfriends and never remember to text your mum back, then paying slightly less for a sweet potato is hardly a high-level offence. However, to some—Taylor included—this act is objectively, morally bad.

But it’s not up to me or a criminologist to decide whether scamming Tesco makes you a bad person. I reached out to some ethicists and moral philosophers to determine exactly how morally dubious self-checkout machine scams are. Should you really feel guilty about the 25p saving you made from scanning a chocolate croissant as a plain one?

Grace Lockrobin, a philosophy teaching fellow at the University of Leeds and founder of philosophy organisation Thinking Space, thinks that tricking your local ASDA says a lot about what you do when no one’s looking.

“The interesting thing about this carrot example is what it shows about the reasons behind our moral behaviour,” she tells me over email. “What adults rarely say (though children almost always do!) is that stealing can result in you getting caught, and that embarrassment, humiliation, or even punishment might ensue. Often this is the real reason that people don’t steal. The supermarket scanners provide an opportunity to steal with relative impunity.”

She continues: “Some might nick expensive veg because they think it’s not that bad; or that the supermarkets are rich enough; or that it's a victimless crime; or that they are paying something, so not really stealing at all. But some will simply do it because they can. We’re not quite as good as we think.”

Other philosophers say that The Self-Checkout Dilemma of 2018 challenges the idea that decisions enshrined in law—such as stealing—are always morally bad.

“It's intuitively powerful to say that [deliberately tricking a self-checkout machine] is an instance of stealing. Stealing is breaking the law, breaking the law is wrong, therefore it is wrong,” says Dr. Iain Brassington, senior lecturer at the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester. “But … Well, sometimes breaking the law is not wrong. Some laws are unjust.”

For Brassington, the issue of scamming self-checkout machines revolves around motivations and outcomes: “Firstly, do we embrace the idea that stealing is wrong, always and everywhere? Secondly, do we embrace the idea that the wrongness of stealing depends on the outcome? Do we embrace the idea that we ought to judge instances of theft according to the character or motivation of the thief?”

Pekka Vayrynen, a professor of moral philosophy from the University of Leeds, has a clearer line on the moral credibility of self-checkout scams. He says: “It's not socially beneficial in the way that, say, telling white lies can be. Most institutions, public and private, run best on mutual trust that most of us do the right thing most of the time.”

“Stealing expensive veg is one more thing that chips away at that general trust,” Vayrynen continues. “It’s not justified just because shops know that replacing cashiers with self-service machines means that some customers will cheat.”

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to debating the biggest moral quandary of human existence—how to determine right and wrong—there can be no clear answer. Where’s your chapter on undercutting supermarket prices on vegetables with an automated sales machine, huh, Kant????

In a final attempt to work out whether playing a self-checkout machine makes you a monster or not, I reached out to Big Brother itself: Morrisons, ASDA, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Waitrose. Despite the clear financial loss such scams cause for the companies, perhaps they could appreciate the ingenuity of utilising loopholes in self-service machines?

Unfortunately, none of the supermarkets had responded to my request for moral clarity by the time of publishing. We must, therefore, deduce that self-checkout machine scams are probably fine.

Just make sure you don’t get caught.