I’m scared of it - the barcode swapping, banana-identity-theft, proud walking stunt. Now, children can get away with juvie, but the cascading effects on everyone else are a plunge into a lower-trust environment than we already have in retail. Do not tempt the undignifying plexiglass aisle to grow into a surveillance eyeball scanning palace. Commerce has always had a trust problem… but put in another way, trust has always been the currency of commerce.

Before we talk about self-checkouts, let’s understand trade, the exchange of goods and services. A merchant would gain a reputation for selling quality products. Need a pot? Go to the potters, their son, Harry, sells them cheaper and they’re just as good as his mom’s!

Trust is how brands work — you buy Apple over a no-name because a 50-year track record is doing the heavy lifting. New companies borrow that trust through founder stories and Kickstarter pitches, hoping experience can stand in until they’ve earned their own. But trust isn’t just something sellers build for buyers. It runs the other way, too.

Checkout is a problem you start thinking about when business is good. There’s demand for your product, whether justified or not. You may know a local coffee shop in your neighborhood that has “mid coffee” by your standards, and yet there’s a line around the corner in the blazing sun.

Why are there lines in the first place? Why aren’t they like grocery stores? Most of the time, it’s because they’re transforming the raw ingredients for you right then and there, the coffee beans, cane sugar, and milk into a creamy, caffeinated concoction that’ll cost you home ownership a decade from now. The alternative is pre-packaged goods… but if I told you, grocery stores resembled a coffee shop before the self-serve line was invented?

Imagine going to your nearest grocery store, you know you need cereal, veggies, and cat food. You write your list and arrive. A clerk takes it away, and they go check the inventory, gather the items, and bring them to you to check out. Insane, right? Thankfully, Clarence Saunders founded Piggly Wiggly in 1916 - the first self-service grocery store - before that? Give ‘em your list, you’re gonna wait a wiggly while.

The underlying mechanism? Trust. We kinda don’t trust you to grab your own items because you might steal. Now, Saunders’ brain wasn’t jiggly-wiggly, he knew this, but also knew the increase in business would offset the loss, that’s the kind of thinking that gets you the biggly-bucks. All the grocery stores I’ve been to work like this; it became known as the “groceteria” - just like a cafeteria is self-serve. It’s now a dated term, but I’m going to start using it; I hope you do too.

Where Saunders left off, David R. Humble picked up the torch, and in 1986, 70 years later, we had our first self-checkout machines near Atlanta, Georgia. Now there was a new trust problem! Instead of discreet, this created “skip scanning,” where people simply don’t scan an item and add it to their bag after paying for the rest of the items.

Every evolution in convenience has been a trust fall for the retailers. Saunders trusted you with the aisles of endless cereal, Humble trusted you with the barcode beeping wand. The banana trick is what happens when the bucket filled with trust gets flipped for laughs.

I see this “barcode swapping” and feel conflicted because people need a bit of relief. It’s not a new type of fraud - retailers are aware of this type of manipulation and often catch the perpetrators. Yet watching it happen feels personal with the first-person perspective. You’re now complicit in the act. Let’s be the conscious hive mind and resist the dopamine hit.

The banana trick going viral isn’t really about bananas, or kids, or even theft. It’s about what happens when a 100-year-old handshake gets renegotiated in public. Saunders bet that most people are honest enough to make self-service worth it. Humble doubled down. Every groceteria you’ve ever walked into is running on that bet.

The bet still works. Inventory theft exists, but the math has held for a century. What breaks the math isn’t the kid with the banana — it’s the rest of us watching the clip and quietly recalculating. It’s the store that responds with another camera, another locked cabinet, another buzzer for the toothpaste. Low trust is contagious in both directions, and once you’re in the surveillance palace, you don’t get the groceteria back.

So call me a goody-two-shoes. I’d rather live in Clarence Saunders’ bet than David R. Humble’s nightmare. Scan your own bananas. Scan them as bananas.