Some people use self-checkout hoping they can sneak a few items past the scanner to save themselves a little money. Other times, a customer simply makes an honest mistake, with no intention of stealing anything.
One Redditor realized her payment had never gone through long after she had left Walmart and unloaded everything at home. She was determined to pay back every cent she owed, but the store’s solution turned out to be far more complicated than she expected. So she resorted to malicious compliance instead.
A shopper realized after getting home that she had never actually paid for her groceries
Yunus Tuğ / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
She wanted to fix the mistake, but after the store made it more difficult than she expected, she turned to malicious compliance
Anna Tarazevich / Pexels (not the actual photo)
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Asthetic Slt / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
Vitaly Gariev / Pexels (not the actual photo)
Self-checkout makes shopping faster, but it also makes stealing a lot easier
When self-checkout machines started replacing cashiers at stores, not everyone was convinced it was an upgrade. Some folks saw no point in it at all and felt like it was extra work they had to do for no reason. For plenty of others, though, it turned out to be a pretty handy option, since you get to skip the long line and bag your stuff at your own pace.
An NCR Voyix survey cited by Axios found that 43% of consumers now prefer it to a traditional lane, and that number goes up to 53% among shoppers aged 18 to 44.
Of course, the setup comes with an obvious downside. Without a cashier carefully running every item across the scanner, the temptation to let something slide into the bag unscanned gets a lot stronger.
A 2025 LendingTree survey of more than 2,000 US adults found that 27% of self-checkout users admit to purposely taking an item without ringing it up, nearly double the 15% recorded in 2023.
That number says more about the economy than it does about shoppers suddenly turning dishonest. Nearly half of those surveyed said they did it because they could not afford basic necessities anymore. The items involved tend to be food, drinks, and basic health products rather than anything flashy.
As a result, self-checkout machines cost food retailers more than $10 billion in lost profits every year, according to research from Grabango. But what a lot of shoppers may not realize, despite those numbers, is that they are nowhere near as stealthy as they might think.
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Stores are fighting back with measures of their own, including AI
Stores have surveillance cameras pointed right at the kiosks, and many chains now use AI to detect when an item goes into the bag without getting scanned. The software watches the whole process in real time and pings an employee the second something looks off.
Everseen, one of the companies supplying AI to major retailers, says its system already recognizes more than 30 separate patterns of loss at the register. The list keeps growing every year, so the old tricks people swap online have a pretty short shelf life.
Other stores have decided the simplest fix is to use fewer of the machines in the first place. Target capped most of its self-checkout lanes at 10 items back in 2024 and opened up more staffed registers, while Dollar General pulled the kiosks out of thousands of locations over shrink concerns. Costco added extra employees to its self-checkout area after people started using membership cards that were not theirs.
But actually, not everyone who walks out of self-checkout without paying does it on purpose. A third of the people in that same LendingTree research said they had left with unpaid merchandise completely by accident. Machines glitch, cards decline, and items get missed by shoppers with their minds on five other things.
The woman in this story ran into the same thing. She only noticed the day after leaving the store that her payment had never actually gone through. Once she caught the error, she wanted to make it right as quickly as possible.
Still, the store’s policy led her to handle it in a way that turned out pretty inconvenient for the workers, which angered plenty of readers. They felt it was her responsibility to fix it since the mistake was hers in the first place, and putting Walmart employees through all of that was unfair to people who had no say in the policy.
What do you think? Was the woman’s reaction fair, or would another solution have worked better here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Readers had mixed reactions, with some finding the malicious compliance satisfying, while many others felt the whole mess was her fault to begin with
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