Do you think the store needed to apologize?
the GD thread is closed and done, all nine pages of it. i know my position on the matter; but that thread appeared to be surprisingly split, or maybe it’s just a few vocal posters. so i wonder what the majority opinion is. there is no need to rehash the arguments in that thead, this is strictly just for polling your opinion.
this is a yes/no poll. you may elaborate or explain your choice.
Not really a fan of the poll options. I think you’d see much different answers if you asked for opinions about the store policy and police action.
Yes I feel the store needed to apologize, not because I felt they were wrong, however. We still don’t have enough information to determine what actually happened. They needed to apologize because the press only covered one side of the story, apologizing was the fastest and easiest way to stop the bad press.
Absolutely. Not necessarily because they were wrong, because that’s irrelevant to me, but because no one in their right mind is going to want to shop at a store where they think they’re going to be detained and hauled into a police station for forgetting something small in their cart.
It’s a PR nightmare.
No. Policy is policy and they followed it. Perhaps that policy needs revised but I don’t see the need for an apology.
I don’t see the need for an apology.
I would also support a national movement to stop the consumption of items before paying for them. Depriving the shopkeeper of the right to turn down your purchase is theft. It’s the equivalent of a kid winning a fight over a candy bar by licking the outside of it.
Another vote for “yes, they should have apologized because it’s good PR”.
No, the woman was shoplifiting. Forgetting is certainly no excuse, and I doubt she forgot in the first place. I can’t stand people who eat stuff before they pay for it because who knows if they are planning on paying for it anyway.
What a bizarre stance. When I go to Safeway, I always assume that the “shopkeeper” will let me purchase any of their products, and I haven’t been wrong yet.
I wouldn’t eat a whole thing while I’m shopping, because I would feel a little weird about giving them a wrapper to ring up, plus it would be easy to get distracted and forget like in the article, but when my daughter was a toddler I would sometimes open up a box of granola bars or something and give her one of them.
No prior police record, honest mistake, lesson learned. Yeah, the manager should have apologized, and maybe the police should have intervened a bit more and asked that the charges be dropped, even if store policy was violated.
It’s not an issue, admittedly, but we shop at Food Lion, are well known by the manager (he’s a big contributor to my animal welfare projects) and I routinely pick up a bottle of Snapple or Luzianne diet tea, and drink it as we shop.
Once we went through the line, the cashier (James, the manager at that time) was about to hit the “total” when I realized what I had in my hand, still half-full, and stopped him. He winked at me, said “No problem, we know where you live”, but if had walked out without either of us noticing and rushed back in, it still would not have been a problem.
Sometimes you need to consider giving the benefit of doubt, IMO.
Has anyone asked if there’s an employee reward of some kind involved?
Thanks
Quasi
My stance is the bizarre one?
What if the cashier notices that the milk or sandwich you picked out is expired and says, wait we can’t sell you that? What if the store only accepted credit/debit and all you had on you was cash? What if you’re trying to purchase beer on a Sunday or after midnight in a place with blue laws? What if, due to a stocking accident (or because you snuck into the back room), you managed to get something in your cart that they aren’t legally allowed to sell until tomorrow or next week? What if you were making a loud scene at the deli counter and were asked to leave/escorted off the premises? There are modern reasons to deny purchases.
If there is an urgent need for you or your kid to eat, take the sandwich/granola box straight to checkout and pay for it. Then put the box in your purse and eat it (better yet, bring your own food or eat in advance, if you know your kid will get hungry and throw a tantrum in the granola aisle).
Norms are weird. I cannot imagine even thinking for a *second *that it’s okay to eat grocery store food before you pay for it.
Man, going to the grocery store must be quite an adventure for you if sneaking into back rooms, getting kicked out for causing a scene, and drinking beer are all possibilities.
Personally, I have a 100% success rate for purchasing things I’m trying to purchase at the grocery store.
Yeah, all that would have been fine, as would waiting until we got home. But since it doesn’t matter, the way we did it was fine too.
I also don’t think the store’s management has any need to apologize. They could, as a PR move, but there’s no actual need.
I tend to agree with rachelellogram in that I don’t like the idea of eating food from a grocery store before paying for it, though my reasing is simply that, until you’ve paid for it, it isn’t yours and it just kind of seems like bad form. Your mileage may vary, but it just rubs me the wrong way.
I used to WORK in a grocery store. So I’ve seen all of this from the back-end. I’m glad for your 100% attempted-purchase success-rate (mine is 100% too), but that isn’t universal.
In my experience, the number of people who do this is pretty small. And it makes your cashier/bagger talk about you after you leave, and think you’re really weird. My stance on this isn’t the bizarre one.
Of course those kinds of things can happen to people who cause scenes, try to buy beer when it’s not allowed, etc. But my grocery trips are uneventful.
I wouldn’t expect it to happen all that often. In all the times I’ve gone grocery shopping, I’ve only done it a handful of times, several years ago, and I doubt I’ll ever do it again, now that my kid is older.
And if it gave the employees something to talk about (which I don’t believe they did talk about it, or even notice most of the time), good for them.
[off topic]
For people that do eat things before they’ve purchased them, why exactly can’t you pay for them first? I mean, I’m not trying to be snarky and I’ve also been on four hour long shopping excursions, with two carts and a kid in tow, yet I was able to buy a Coke (or whatever) before I consumed it. So please help me understand. What gives?
[/off topic]
I don’t ever eat while shopping, but it seems kinda awkward to buy something then return to the store to go shopping, I think that may even prove more confusing for store security, as at checkout you’d have items already paid for.
I was taught to never go shopping while hungry, it leads to spending far more then you need to spend. If I need to go grocery shopping I eat at home or on the way.
If the stores want a zero tolerance policy, fine. But then it goes both ways.
An item rings up for more than the displayed price? Manager gets arrested for fraud.
The cashier inputs a more expensive fruit instead of my apples? He gets arrested for theft.
The reality is that people make mistakes. I don’t think I’ve forgotten to pay for anything yet, but there’s been a handful of “Oh right, I need to pay for this” occurrences. There’s no malice. It’s simply the fact that we are humans, and we aren’t perfect.
I’ve never eaten when I shop, but it seems to be normal for some people to do so. I’ve also never seen a grocery store that has a posted policy against it, or for the cashiers to raise a fuss when the people paid for eaten food.
It’s very refreshing to see even my friends disagree with me, sometimes, 'cause y’all do it in a way which doesn’t attack.
But may I once again ask, was there some kind of employee incentive/reward to make this thing go as forward as it has?
Sorry if I missed a previous answer!
Quasi
Like all the other aspects of the story there is remarkably little information on what actually happened, we don’t know what the stores policy was or even why the incident resulted in an arrest. They only real information we have is an interview with one of the accused and a statement from Safeway saying they would review policy and would not press charges.