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" I&amp;#039;m going to tell you a little story here, and when I refer to the\u00A0&amp;#039;friends&amp;#039; in it, I am\u00A0actually\u00A0talking about other people\u00A0and\u00A0not just trying to cover for myself. So please nobody call the police. When I lived in Australia for a few months as a backpacker, it was bloody expensive. We used to head down to the supermarkets to stock up on\u00A0dried noodles and anything in the\u00A0discount section to get us through. Until one day, I went to the shop with two\u00A0German friends\u00A0who were\u00A0sharing our dorm. As the boys picked up fresh steak from the meat counter, I wondered if they&amp;#039;d just won big on the lottery or something, until they conspicuously told me they&amp;#039;d explain later. Spying on them at the self-service till, I watched them place the fillets of steak\u00A0on the till scales, &amp;#039;look up item&amp;#039;, and then\u00A0brazenly select &amp;#039;Braeburn apples&amp;#039; on the screen. Now I don&amp;#039;t mean to brag, but\u00A0I&amp;#039;ve got 20-20 vision and the joints of\u00A0meat sat on the weighing scales of that\u00A0till certainly weren&amp;#039;t Braeburn apples, the cheeky buggers.  They got away with paying about at 8th of the price they would have if they&amp;#039;d selected the\u00A0actual\u00A0item they were weighing - steak. And the shop staff were too busy faffing about with people whose self-service tills were having emotional breakdowns\u00A0(&amp;quot;please place the item in the bagging area&amp;quot; - I HAVE)\u00A0to notice. And it&amp;#039;s not just my two German roommates in Australia who get up to these kind of tricks; it seems like the self-service tills have turned a hefty proportion of us into thieves. Because a new study conducted by\u00A0Leicester University\u00A0has revealed that shops which employ the use of these self-service tills tend to have more than\u00A0twice\u00A0the losses compared to those which don&amp;#039;t. What a bunch of petty criminals we all are.   According to the research, the self-service tills make it so much easier to steal from that those who would never normally consider robbing\u00A0are much more tempted to do it. It\u00A0also apparently encourages people to thieve because they believe they&amp;#039;re much less likely to get caught, because they can always blame it on human error and say they hadn&amp;#039;t understood that they weren&amp;#039;t being charged correctly (or at all). But you&amp;#039;d think supermarkets - with all the technology available to them these days\u00A0- would have become wise to this sort of criminal behaviour, introducing preventative methods. Or they&amp;#039;d at least put more staff around the self-service till areas, although I guess that kind of defeats the object of a machine doing a human&amp;#039;s job. So let&amp;#039;s all do the supermarkets a favour and be good, morally-upstanding, law-abiding citizens shall we? Now put that back on the shelf unless you&amp;#039;re planning to pay the correct amount for it at the tills. Follow Cat on Twitter. Like this? Come and check us out on Snapchat Discover.\u00A0  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/reports/news/a45117/self-service-tills-increase-theft-shop-lifters/>