At some Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart stores, you may soon see employees strolling about wearing a new accessory: body cameras. Walmart is also piloting this tech in Canada. They’re compact and sometimes colourful devices that hang from a lanyard like a name tag at a conference. Except instead of sweetly introducing you to a clerk, they introduce the tacit threat of being recorded.
This technology is typically associated with law enforcement, not retail clerks. Though the cameras aren’t always storing video or audio, they can be switched on during “escalations.” It’s a surreal update to the kind of “Karen”-esque supermarket-aisle showdowns you sometimes see on social media, but more importantly, it’s a dark sign of what’s being asked of wage workers in today’s surveillance economy.
