A customer of Coles was reportedly told that they had to bag their products in a specific way at self-serve checkouts, causing them to brand the retailer’s control over their behavior “out of hand.”
This is not the first time that someone has claimed that the company has been monitoring how consumers shop.
In 2024, Yahoo News reported that the company had been monitoring how people scan their products.
The incident has reignited the debate about how people are being made to carry their purchases in a certain way.
The customer claimed that they had been going through the same store in Sydney for a thousand times and had bought two 24-packs of Pepsi Max.
The customer stated that this was not an unusual shop for him, as his girlfriend was a huge fan of Pepsi Max.
He said that he started to scan the product barcodes in order to bag the loose groceries first.
He noted that the checkouts at the self-serve area of the store tend to throw a fit if a person adds their own bag.
After a couple of items were scanned, the assistant behind the counter informed the customer that they were doing the wrong thing by not scanning the drinks first.
The staff member then reportedly proceeded to take their card and void the items that they had already purchased.
The customer noted that the assistant behind the counter then told them that they had to enter the two cartons of Pepsi Max.
He said that he initially thought that he was doing the right thing by not scanning the drinks first.
However, she then proceeded to do so, and she reportedly made multiple attempts to enter his drinks through the manual menu.
The customer then asked the supervisor if this was a standard policy.
The customer then said that they were being forced to scan the large items first, and that this was the way the company told them to do it.
They noted that this was the third time that they had been forced to do this, and that they were not happy with the way they were being treated.
A spokesperson for Coles said that the company encourages its employees to help customers scan the large items first.
However, they noted that the staff member at the Waterloo store should have refrained from taking their card and voiding the items that they had already purchased.
A spokesperson for the company then apologized to the customer, but they did not address the claims that a new system had been implemented that requires the scanning of bulky items first.