A Little Secret-Shoplifters Can Ignore Exit Alarms Analysis

Every day, US department, retail, and grocery stores lose an estimated 91 million dollars to shoplifting. But how is this happening? Are our technologies too simple, too easy to outsmart? Or are the people in today’s society underestimating their ingenuity? Despite the psychological effect of stopping some people from becoming shoplifters, anti-theft devices don't actually stop or deter the professional or determined. Not only do anti-theft devices waste people's time, they do not catch or identify shoplifters any better than a camera could. Marga, the author of the article “A Little Secret-- Shoplifters Can Ignore Exit Alarms”, also does not find these machines very useful. “The problem with these systems is that they are not sophisticated,” points out Marga. “They...will beep if you pass the sensors with an active tag from a product that you bought elsewhere….[this] makes shoppers waste time,” claims Marga. To add to this problem, there are also laws that impose restrictions on apprehending suspected shoplifters. However, at the same time, Marga acknowledges the frequent alarms’ effect on possible shoplifters as they “deter shoplifting...it stops potential shoplifters from trying it”, though it does not stop already professional shoplifters from trying it.
These gates work by a system similar to radar--by firing out radio waves, but instead of waiting for them to bounce back, they simply wait for an activated tag to come through. The activated tag-- a small, functioning radio transmitter and receiver, will receive the gate’s signal and transmit one of its own, causing the alarms to go off. An inactivated tag, on the other hand, has been disabled at the checkout line by either destroying or deactivating the electronic component in the tag. Though the deactivation process doesn’t always work, the concept itself is simple and