Walmart near me has started using receipt checkers lately and they don’t even really do their job, it’s kind of a gimmick really. They just look at the receipt for a second Don’t even look at your cart, but they stop you every time. It’s just such a waste of my time when I’m in a hurry. I had one person even tell me that it was required by law. No it’s not! There’s no law in the USA that says they have to check your receipt.
They work similar to captchas… They are not there for your benefit. They are there to make a corpo parasite feel like they are doing a thing.
You can refuse the check and there is really nothing they can do beyond banning you.
If you didn’t commit a crime and they try to detain you, they gonna have a fat law suit against them. So they won’t really bother to do anything.
Captchas are actually a great tool for reducing spam and botting. Depending on the platform, they can directly benefit you. Captchas and manual approval for Lemmy account signups are directly responsible for the lack of spambots on this platform. The problem is that captchas got co-opted to force people to give companies free AI training data.
As with everything else big tech touches…
Benefit is for them first, always