Facial Recognition Firm Announces Way To Punish Retail Workers, Shoppers For Forming Relationships

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.

That’s when you start considering your options. Do you take the slightly shorter line manned by yet another interchangeable teen who is only working a register because the manager scrambled help to the front — one who would otherwise just be at the back of the store milking the clock while pretending to stock the milk? Do you head towards a more reliable cashier of a much more advanced age, but one you know will ultimately annoy you with a blend of weather and politics small talk during what you hoped would be a quick in-out to restock a few consumables? Or do you go to the cashier you know can handle it all — someone who not only values your business but your time, and can infer from context whether you’re up for a bit of chatting during the transaction or just want to get out and go on with what’s left of your day?

Well, the bad news is that some tech firm wants to convert the relationship you’ve built with your favorite cashiers into something inherently suspicious. And it wants to do this because retailers are claiming people engaged in theft generally head towards employees willing to help them engage in theft. And while the latter is undoubtedly true, the suspicification (yes, it’s now a word) of normal interactions between long-term employees and regular customers will undoubtedly result in customers finding somewhere else to shop and great employees finding somewhere else to work. Of course, facial recognition tech is involved, because it always is.

Here’s Todd Feathers with the details (what there are of them at this point) for Gizmodo:

About a month ago, Israel-based Corsight AI began offering its global clients access to a new service aimed at rooting out what the retail industry calls “sweethearting,”—instances of store employees giving people they know discounts or free items.

Traditional facial recognition systems, which have proliferated in the retail industry thanks to companies like Corsight, flag people entering stores who are on designated blacklists of shoplifters. The new sweethearting detection system takes the monitoring a step further by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over long periods of time.

I don’t doubt that “sweethearting” is a problem. Whether it’s a problem worth dumping money into unproven tech and even more specious assumptions about whose spending too much time with which employees is far more speculative. And there’s no better way to tell the CEO of Corsight (Shai Toren) doesn’t do that much shopping of his own than by reading the statement he provided to Gizmodo.

“If you go into a shop and you pick up a few groceries, usually you would pick any of the cashiers that is around and you go scan your goods,” he said. “When someone is planning a sweethearting theft, they will always go to the same cashier, which is most of the time a relative of theirs, and this is an anomaly in the behavior compared to the other customers. Our system is able to identify this anomaly and alert on that.”

But that’s not what actually happens, especially when someone is a frequent customer. Frequent shoppers know which employees are fast and efficient and which ones will just slow things down for them. Someone going to the same cashier may indicate theft is in the offing. But just as often, it may only indicate regular shoppers know where to go first for the best service.

On top of that, there’s no evidence this is something that can’t be handled by existing technology. It has been decades since I’ve been in a store that doesn’t have a camera aimed directly at each and every register. If that tech can’t stop “sweethearting,” it’s unlikely that expanding surveillance to treat each and every shopper as equally suspicious is going to improve anything. And it’s guaranteed to chase away frequent shoppers, who are bound to be pulled aside by loss prevention staff at some point and questioned about their “suspicious” desire to interact only with certain employees. It’s also going to result in the loss of these companies’ best front-line employees, who won’t like being treated like criminals just because so many regulars seek them out during their shopping trips.

A union representing lots of retail workers also raises another good point: when commissions are part of the pay structure, maintaining nearly-exclusive relationships with repeat customers is essential to these workers’ income. Shoving this tech where it’s not needed will just punish retail workers for being good at their jobs.

“We have a lot of concerns about this type of technology given that a lot of our members work on commission so the idea is that you are building a book of business based on relationships with customers,” said Chelsea Connor, communications director for the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “Whether or not they work on commission, [stores] push sales people to develop those relationships because that’s what brings people back to brick and mortar as opposed to buying online.”

All of these are compelling points that make it clear shoehorning even more surveillance into the retail “experience” will mostly produce negative outcomes. Then there’s the tech itself, which is still terrible at capably identifying people who aren’t white and male and now is being expected to make assumptions about human behavior based on little more than their preference in cashiers.

Any retailer that decides to buy into Corsight’s bullshit deserves every hit to the bottom line it takes because of this. It’s not going to stop the theft it claims it will stop — at least not to the extent that it will offset losses caused by people deciding to take their business elsewhere because they don’t feel like being treated as presumptive criminals just because they patronize the same businesses and employees repeatedly. Worse, they’re going to lose their best employees — the ones capable of building relationships with long-term customers — and replace them with a revolving door of disinterested replacements overseen by tech that says it can recognize faces while pretending it can also generate meaningful information about human relationships in a retail environment.

Not only is Corsight misleading its potential customers with its overstatements, it’s deluding itself into believing this is a service retailers consider so essential they’ll continue to spend money on it even after it fails to justify its ongoing existence.