Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The Pak ‘n Save’s owner, Glenn Miller, was reportedly furious about the incident at first, but calmed down after he saw the security footage, including images of the first customer, who arrived with a young child, spent 20 minutes shopping, paid for her purchases and left. “I still think she probably doesn’t know we weren’t there. It is the funniest thing. You just have to laugh your head off when you watch,” Miller said.

“They weren’t in for a free-for-all. They were doing their normal shopping and then got to the checkout. Half of them paid and the other half thought ‘This is a good deal’ and walked out. I can certainly see the funny side of it, but I’d rather not have the publicity, to be honest. It makes me look a bit of a dickhead.” (That’s apparently a much less impolite term in New Zealand.)

Still open is the question of why the system that automatically opens the store—doors, lights and everything else that signaled to customers that the Pak ‘n Save was open for business—was able to operate without human intervention.

Mis-programming a holiday isn’t that surprising. It’s easy to assume that someone else has already programmed “don’t open this Friday” into the system, and the user interfaces for physical-plant automation are often cryptic at best. (And at a time when iPhones can’t even figure out how to manage the shift to Daylight time properly, the bar for automatic scheduling of a movable religious holiday is pretty low.)

But who came up with the brilliant idea of automatically opening a store completely without human intervention? You’ll always want the ability for a human manager to override the automation. But it’s even more critical to be sure that the automation doesn’t do its thing when there are no store personnel around. You’ll never want to unlock the doors without someone on site.

There should have been a button, a switch, something that, unless it was pushed, would prevent the store-opening process from proceeding. That’s the time when you want human intervention in the process.

It’s nice that half the customers paid for their groceries without prompting. It’s also nice that checkout automation made that possible, once they were in the door.

But it is possible for automation to be too reliable. And it’s always going to be more reliable than the honesty of customers.