Caroline Cooper contributing editor
• 20 Jul 2009

Self-checkout machines have been a mainstay in America’s grocery stores and supermarkets for some time, but there is growing concern that some shoppers may take advantage of the technology to illegally purchase alcohol.
 
A study published in June by a UCLA Law School clinic and the advocacy group Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, or LAANE, has highlighted that very issue. The report, “Self-Checkout: Is it Reliable for Selling Alcohol,” presents data that has troubled some readers, particularly in the state of California.
 
In conducting the study, the groups encountered several factors that, either alone or in combination, might allow the illegal purchase of alcohol at a self-checkout machine more easily than at a traditional checkout lane, either by minors or customers who are already intoxicated.
 
According to the research, in two-thirds of their visits to specific grocery chains, participants saw only one employee working at the self-checkout area, and in five instances, they saw no self-checkout attendant at all. Additionally, though it is the industry standard for clerks to check the ID of anyone who appears under the age of 30, one-third of the participants reported that they were not asked for their ID, and only one participant was ever asked to give her date of birth.
 
“In combination,” the study said, “low numbers of employees supervising self-checkout machines, obstructed views and long wait times enhance the risk of error in monitoring alcohol purchases and may make it easier for customers to purchase alcohol illegally, either through deception or theft. These results suggest the absence of careful scrutiny that would allow employees to judge either age or level of inebriation.”
 
The study’s results also indicate that in eight instances, the self-checkout system didn’t lock when alcohol was scanned, and that in 11 cases, participants were able to “override” the system, either by scanning another item, swiping a credit card or both. In total, the study says participants were able to override a locked self-checkout machine or bypass the employee-override process 19 times out of 97, or in 20 percent of the visits.
 
According to the report, more than 2 million Americans under the age of 21 drink alcohol each year.
 
“The results of this study strongly suggest that the use of self-checkout machines can increase the ease with which minors and those who are inebriated are able to purchase alcohol,” it said.
 
Is the technology to blame?
 
The self-checkout/alcohol topic has become a high-stakes issue for some California retailers.
 
Last week, the state’s Senate heard testimony regarding a bill that would prohibit “off-sale licensees from selling alcoholic beverages using a point-of-sale system with limited or no assistance from an employee of the licensee.”
 
In other words, bill AB 1060, authored by Democratic Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, would require the sale of alcohol to be routed only through a traditional checkout lane.

But does self-checkout technology really facilitate the illegal purchase of alcohol, as the groups and the bill’s authors claim? While the study attributes a great deal of the problem to a lack of employee oversight, it also very clearly places blame on the technology itself, and some in the self-service industry aren’t sure that’s fair.
 
“We’re aware of no malfunction that would allow the system to operate as the study’s authors claim,” said Dusty Lutz, director of NCR Corp’s SelfServ Checkout efforts. “We believe that they had a misunderstanding of how the technology is performing the alcohol age-check.”
 
Lutz says NCR self-checkout machines, which are deployed by some of the chains surveyed, allow retailers a configuration option whereby the scanning of alcohol would not necessarily prevent the shopper from scanning more items before her age is verified. However, this configuration feature may be mistakenly referred to as a “computer failure” in the UCLA/LAANE study.
 
“In many cases, retailers have the system configured to allow the age check to be occurring in the background, so the shopper is not interrupted while they’re scanning other items,” he said. “Operationally, we rely on the retailers to make sure that the training is in place to watch over the lanes and to provide the appropriate regulatory oversight.”
 
Fresh & Easy, a Tesco chain with an all assisted-checkout business model that LAANE has criticized in the past, says it’s holding up its end of the bargain. The chain uses NCR’s SelfServ Checkout technology.
 
“We take our commitment to be a good neighbor and a responsible retailer of alcohol very seriously, and we’ve put a considerable investment in our training and systems to ensure that the responsible sale of alcohol occurs at our stores,” said Brendan Wonnacott, a spokesperson for Fresh & Easy. “The bottom line is, Fresh & Easy team members are always there monitoring what’s going on.”
 
And Wonnacott maintains that the store’s machines perform the age-verification process just fine.
 
“Alcohol purchases cannot be finalized without an intervention from an attendant,” he said. “So anytime an alcoholic beverage is scanned, the transaction freezes, and it requires assistance from a clerk. Our system is advanced, and we’re pleased with how the system operates.”
 
Assemblyman De La Torre’s office did not return a call for comments.
 
The future of self-checkout in California
 
Whether a real or perceived malfunction is to blame, one thing is clear to the authors of the UCLA/LAANE study and bill AB 1060: The retail and self-checkout industries need to do a better job preventing the illegal purchase of alcohol.
 
“At a minimum, you want to ensure that you’re dealing with the lack of supervision,” said Roxana Tynan, LAANE’s deputy director. “So if you have one person, they don’t have an unreasonable amount of self-checkout stalls that they’re supervising and that they’ve got a clear view of what’s happening at each of those stalls.”
 
But Tynan, along with De La Torre and bill AB 1060, ultimately suggest a more dramatic change.
 
“The safest option is, simply, you ban the sale of liquor at self-checkout,” she said. “And, certainly, we’re supportive of De La Torre’s legislation that’s been proposed on this.”
 
But the companies behind the technology see things differently.
 
“This is just my opinion, but I think that’s a shame,” said Kenneth Duffy, IBM’s kiosk offering marketing manager, when he learned of the proposed legislation. Like NCR’s Lutz, he is skeptical about the claim that “computer failures” allowed the study’s participants to purchase alcohol.
 
“To my knowledge, we’ve never had a retailer come back and say ‘We’re having issues with people getting products illegally by getting around the system,’” he said.
 
None of the chains in the survey use IBM’s self-checkout systems.
 
Duffy believes retailers and their employees may not be doing their part to prevent minors from purchasing alcohol.
 
“The store managers have to be aware and have to be monitoring the health of that system,” he said. “The employees that are specifically assigned to look after that need to be trained on it and need to be adequately educated on what their responsibilities are.”
 
But how much accountability rests with the makers of the self-checkout machines?
 
“I think the onus, the responsibility on the manufacturers and the suppliers, is to provide the highest quality hardware and software that complies with and conforms to all the necessary regulatory requirements,” Duffy said. “Beyond that, unfortunately, it really is out of our control how, then, the retailer or the customer employs all of the features.”
 
Regardless of who or what is at fault, the UCLA/LAANE study has put NCR on the defensive. The company recently issued a statement saying that human error was the more likely cause of the self-checkout breakdowns, not the machines themselves.

“NCR’s experience is that retailers should and do consistently monitor to ensure that the correct procedures are in place and that staff are applying them correctly and consistently,” the statement said. “However, it is also very important to understand that the LAANE study incorrectly describes how NCR self-checkout works and therefore its conclusions regarding self-checkout are likewise incorrect.”

In the statement, NCR also notes that the State of California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has conducted its own field tests and found that self-checkout systems “successfully prevented sales of alcohol to minors” and that it has no evidence and has received no complaints indicating otherwise.

The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control could not be reached for comment.
 
For now, the fate of bill AB 1060 is unclear. Fresh & Easy’s Wonnacott and LAANE’s Tynan confirmed that its review in the California Senate was stalled last week and that it may be back up for review in the future.
 
In the meantime, though, self-checkout manufacturers say they will continue to encourage grocers to step up their efforts to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors.
 
“I think, really, all it takes is a little bit of time and resources to train the employees to make sure that they recognize that this is a big deal,” Duffy said.
 
UPDATE: According to a news release from Assemblyman De La Torre’s office, bill AB 1060 was passed by the California Senate Government Organization Committee in a unanimous 8-0 vote. The bill will next be heard in the California Senate Appropriations Committee in August.

By Ewan Turney

April 4, 2009

Supermarkets are delivering alcohol ordered online to under-18s, a council has found.

Stockton Council carried out online test purchases to scrutinise the systems put in place by supermarkets through their home delivery scheme.

Test purchase volunteers, aged between 13 and 16, were delivered alcohol by supermarkets on two separate occasions.

A further test purchaser was able to buy alcohol at a self-service check-out at a supermarket.

Trading standards will now carry out further investigations into those retailers who sold the alcohol.

“Alcohol can contribute to anti social behaviour and it is very concerning some retailers are not being vigilant and always checking proof of age,” said Councillor Steve Nelson

“I would urge any retailer to refuse the sale if there is any doubt about the customer’s age.”

 **Control state means state owns wholesaler and/or retail establishment.  Generally do not carry wine in package store.

Nineteen of the 34 states that permit wine in grocery stores are “control states” where the state is the wholesaler and/or retailer.  Border states Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia are “control states”

Of the 34 states, at least 19 states have allowed wine in grocery stores since the end of prohibition - when initial rules for alcohol sales were established.  They are not changing the rules after families invested their life savings in a business when the competition was clear.

Several of these states only allow state wines or small farm wines to be sold in groceries.

Recent attempts in Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota, and Tennessee to allow wine in groceries have been defeated.  They have made multiple attempts in these states and each time was defeated.

Not a single state has passed a law like this in 23 years.

Other countries, like England and Ireland are currently reviewing their policies allowing wine in groceries because they believe it is the reason for out-of-control underage and binge drinking.  They have commended the states in the U.S. that require alcohol to be sold by package stores. 

Sixteen states is not exactly an insignificant number, as it represents one-third of the country.

More importantly, can a lone grocery store cashier standing ten to thirty feet away overseeing multiple U-Scan lanes tell which bottles have a high alcohol-content and which ones are harmless?

As this photo illustrates, many grocery store products are eerily similar to wine bottles in weight, shape, and labeling.

A cashier overseeing U-Scan or self-serve lanes is supposed to be alerted when a product containing alcohol is scanned. A non-alcoholic product does not send out a check ID alert. This is how and why the use of “Swipe and Swap Scams” came about.

Here’s how it works: use a same weight, similar-looking non-alcoholic product to swipe and then swap it with an alcoholic product that goes undetected in a grocery bag. We learned of this from reports of teenagers currently obtaining beer in groceries U-Scan lanes by using the “Swipe and Swap” scam: a 6 pack of soda is swiped over the self-scanner and a 6 pack of beer is swapped and placed into their grocery bag.

For teens: No alert, no ID check, no problem.
For our communities: This is a big problem and a potentially fatal flaw.

These systems currently in place are easily beat by teens illegally obtaining beer.

IF wines are allowed in to grocery stores, they can and will do the same with high alcohol content bottle of wines. All they have to do is “Swipe and Swap” out bottles like those pictured here.

We’ll ask it again: Can you tell which bottles contain wine and which do not?

Answers: Wine, Non-Wine, Non-Wine, Non-Wine, Wine, Wine, Wine

February 9, 2009

 A proposal in the State Budget to permit wine in grocery stores, designed to generate new revenue for the state, would in fact leave New York with much less revenue due to the loss of distilled spirits sales - according to a new economic analysis released by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

The Council sent the report to the governor and key legislators in both the State House and Senate so they could better understand the implications of the plan.

“Allowing grocery stores to sell wine will simply take foot traffic out of package stores - drastically reducing spirits tax revenues for the state,” said David Ozgo, chief economist for the Distilled Spirits Council and author of the analysis. “If consumers increasingly substitute wine for spirits, New York will end up actually losing more in tax revenues than it’s expected to gain,” he added, citing the considerably higher tax rate applied to spirits.

Further, Ozgo noted, each time a package store loses a distilled spirits sale, the state will lose 47% of its tax revenue because of the higher tax rate of spirits. The report also found that a massive reduction in spirits sales would force approximately 560 package store owners to close their doors.

“This report plainly shows that the proposal to allow wine in grocery stores doesn’t raise the revenue that was projected,” Ozgo added. “One has to ask, if it doesn’t raise the revenue and hurts small businesses by taking traffic out of package stores - what’s the point?”

An eight-year drive to liberalize the British Columbia liquor trade that’s seen wineries and wine stores in the province flourish is coming under fire from the province’s top doctor.

Tighter controls are needed to prevent a growing misuse of alcohol in B.C., according to a recent report by Dr. Perry Kendall, the British Columbia provincial health officer.

The report notes that instances of binge drinking, driving while impaired and alcohol-related hospital stays have increased since 2002. Chronic diseases linked to alcohol consumption such as liver disease and some cancers have also show an increase, the report states.

The health data comes six years after the provincial government opened the door to private liquor stores. The number of stores in B.C. selling wine and other forms of alcohol has grown to a current total of 1,294, up from just 786 in 2002. Based on sales data, consumption increased 8% province-wide and as much as 8.6%in the Interior Health Authority’s jurisdiction, an area that includes the province’s popular Okanagan wine region.