Detecting Bottom Of The Basket Shrink At The Supermarket?

Kroger has a series of mirrors and a window at the lower cart level so the cashier can see the lower cart area easily. They also have a program called "HAVE YOU SEEN B.O.B.?", where B.O.B. stands for bottom of basket, not a guy named Bob. Also, some of the newer stores have a camera in that window that, I assume, is tied to analytics of some sort to alert store personell when something slides by unnoticed.

Several different methods, in addition to the mirrors, and much cheaper than Lanehawk:

The POS can be set up to remind cashiers to check "BOB" before the transaction total

Also there are very inexpensive analog kits, that use a pin hole camera and a 4" monitor installed at each register, None of the stores that used this bothered recording the video - it was simply a view system for cashiers. No feedback on the reduction of Bob instances, but the chains we worked with back in my integrator days did keep buying them

I asked the local man at the suppermarket here in Belgrade about undercart stealers and he was proud enough to show me how he took some censors from the electrik garage opening devices, the thing that stops the door from squashing on you if you try to beat it on the way down. He took infrared beam shooter and put it on the ceiling(5m) and put detecter right next to it both facing down aiming the floor where was stuck a patch of metal foil tape right under where the cart was. He says czechout lady to look for the red light on the ceiling to go off after the cart got emptied. He said now he need replace the censors on the loading docks before somebody gets squashed on again. That is the value of life here.

I once spoke to some folks from Italy about this problem. They said that they didn't have this problem over there because they simply took the bottoms out of the baskets.

There is also StopLift not sure about their current technology, I think the previous generation leveraged outsourced labor to make the final determination. From what I've heard, the retailers are less concerned about catching an incident in real-time, and more concerned about catching cashiers that let it happen. So, an alert 24 hours after the actual event is still good enough to fire a cashier with.