Out after lunch today I found myself shopping at Acme for shampoo and sticky-backed hooks. One thing I noticed when walking through their front doors was that they have changed their security camera displays. It got me thinking about camera security in stores.
It seems the premise is that theives don’t read the “Closed Circuit Cameras In-Use” warning signs as they are entereing the premesis, and that a better method of prevention is to show them the feed from the camera. I wonder if this really pays out.
In the case of this particular Acme, the change that I noticed was that they had replaced their single CRT display with two LCD monitors. Doesn’t that seem extreme?
These LCD monitors cost around $300 a pop. Even at a bulk discount (there were about six of these things hanging in total; at both exits and in the self-checkout aisle) they’re going to pay a chunk of change for them. Assuming that they replace them with the frequency that one would expect monitors to need replacing in a high-traffic grocery store, they’re probably going to churn through them pretty regularly.
So were they losing so much business to shoplifting that the cost of these monitors was justified?
And that’s just the monitors. I would hope that the new monitoring system would include better cameras. After all, the video isn’t useful to anyone if you can’t irrefutably say, “Yes, that’s a video of the guy who stole the can of peas.” So there’s some more expense on top of the way-hi-tech-for-surveillance monitors.
This led me to another thought: Are people actually watching these video feeds, or do they expect that simply showing them to potential theives will avert all losses?
I would guess that monitors showing you video of yourself at a store will become so commonplace that people will start to ignore it just like they have ignored the signs saying, “Video surveilance in use.”
And I wonder how long it wil be before everyone becomes so complacent that the payout on the surveilance equipment is nil. Hopefully that’s after it’s paid for itself at least once.
