Do grocery shoppers carrot all?

Is it a loophole or larceny? When it comes to scamming self-service checkouts, apparently the answer is in the eye of the shopper.

As supermarkets increasingly favour kiosks over cashiers, a new breed of shoplifter has emerged. As The Independent reports, customers have been passing off pricey avocados as one of the cheapest vegetables in the supermarket, the lowly carrot.

University of London criminology professor Emmeline Taylor first identified the trend in Australia, and recently found that customers in the U.K. have been swindling supermarkets in the same manner.

“I was working with retailers to reduce shoplifting when one major supermarket discovered it had sold more carrots than it had ever had in stock,” Taylor told The Times.

“Puzzled by this development, it looked into its inventories and found that in some cases, customers were apparently purchasing 18 kg (40 lb) of carrots in one go. Unfortunately this wasn’t a sudden switch to healthy eating, it was an early sign of a new type of shoplifter.”

For some shoppers, cashier less checkouts are “a green light for dishonest behaviour,” Taylor wrote in an article for The Conversation. Swapping products at self-scanners has become so commonplace that many people don’t even consider it a crime.

“This behaviour is perceived as cheating the system or a way of ‘gamifying’ an otherwise mundane routine,” she told The Times.

More than 325,000 selfcheckout machines are expected to be in use globally by 2019, Taylor wrote. And at 86 per cent, self-service supermarkets are much more likely to fall prey to shoplifters than those with cashiers (52 per cent). Earlier this year, checkout-free grocery store Amazon Go opened its doors in Seattle, Wash. While Metro, Canada’s third largest grocer, announced its plan to pilot scan-and-go technology that will allow shoppers to scan items as they shop and pay as they leave the store.

In the U.K. alone, shoppers stole $5.5 billion (£3.2 billion) worth of food from checkout kiosks last year, The Independent reports. Given that research also suggests that “discount theft” has doubled in the past several years, self-service crime sprees may require more than a security guard stationed at the exit to curb.