Tesco, if you are not familiar is the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, and it offers a service called scan as you shop, where you scan the items you want to buy on a little hand held scanner as you put them in your trolley and once you’ve finished you go through a separate checkout line where you pay. It’s worth pointing out that you get asked if there were any items that wouldn’t scan but this hasn’t happened to me so not sure what happens, I’d guess a Tesco colleague would scan it for you?

The main selling point of the service, at least for me, is that you place items directly in your bags as you shop so you don’t have to take the shopping out of the trolley for the checkout, thus making the process quicker and less cumbersome.

In order to avoid rampant theft there are random checks carried out, these consist of a Tesco colleague scanning a subset of your shopping, unless the check finds an item that wasn’t scanned and you didn’t make it clear that it wouldn’t scan, in which case a full check is done, which is exactly what happened to me on the first time I used the service.

Fast forward a few months and every single time I’ve used the service, probably about 6 times, I’ve had a random check, which by now clearly are not random as my account clearly has the is_dodgy_customer flag set to true or maybe I’m in the dodgy_customer cluster.