Come on man. You seem like a reasonable poster most of the time. All you are doing here is making some poor minimum wage worker get an extra task that isn’t necessary. They don’t have any control over how many people corporate hires. The management doesn’t either. If you walk into a store and it’s crazy crowded just walk out before filling your cart up, abandoning it, and forcing somebody making 7.25 an hour to backtrack your steps and put your stuff away. That’s really obnoxious behavior. You’re not helping anyone.
I don’t mind if they check my receipt because I am not prone to stealing. But if I ever do decide to shoplift myself a national parks calendar or perhaps an extra spraycan of lysol, I will for sure be shitting bricks.
And at Walmart, you can blow right past them.
Do smile however.
More or less, they are checking the stuff under the cart. Customers and clerks both often forget stuff there.
No, they aint. They dont take that much time.
What can they do? if they detain you, it’s false arrest.
There is no “consequences”, grave or otherwise. Now, at a membership store, they can revoke your membership.
First, my local Costco has employees who do a pretty good quick scan of carts. You want them to sloooowly count every single item in your cart before you’re convinced they’re really checking? Maybe go to a checker who’s newer. There are probably employees who don’t do a very thorough job. My guess is they can get away with only so much of that.
There were two links in my post. The second one–“they raise prices”–said “Store theft added $423 to the average American family’s shopping bill this year according to a new report on retail theft released Tuesday.” I don’t know how you can read that any other way than that stores factor in shrinkage when setting prices. If you must have it spelled out in so many words, here:
However, store owners typically pass on the costs of shoplifting to consumers in the form of higher prices.
This isn’t entirely true, shrinkage is part of both the cost side of the equation AND the competitive landscape for the retailer. If all retailers have 2.0% shrinkage, it’s the equivalent of any other cost that all retailers have to deal with, like lighting the store, it’s part of the concept of being a retailer, and those costs are passed on to the customer. If one retailer has 0.2% shrinkage, they may not reduce their prices, as they can price equivalent to other retailers that have higher shrinkage. Or, they might reduce their costs and become a preferred retailer, driving more volume at the same margins as before.
I don’t abandon carts, but I think you are wrong here. If the $7.25 person isn’t putting your stuff away, she is presumably doing something else. Some manager somewhere is responsible for staffing levels, and if enough people are abandoning carts because of wait times and tasks aren’t being completed because someone is busy restocking, then they’ll raise staffing levels.
That does require them knowing why the cart was ditched, so I applaud LSL for trying to track down a manager.
not sure if it was mentioned the biggest problem might be employees stealing , not customers. I assume they check employees too. Of course they can go out other doors although they probably have video of the other doors.
Yeah, looks like they basically just get good PR for it. Weird, but ok.
Am I invisible here? Did no one read the newspaper story I linked to about a couple who ripped off not 1 but 3 separate Walmarts for about $2000 who would have been stopped if there had been a receipt check at the door? (I think the story only described one instance, but I know the mook and it was 3 in all.)
Y’all keep going on about how just because you know you’re not shoplifting you shouldn’t have to have your receipt checked. Unfortunately for you, there are people who take advantage of that to shoplift and the store has no way to tell the difference. Instead of being angry at the store, be angry at the assholes who make life more difficult for those of us who are honest.
I’ve been asked for the receipt at Best Buy by the door checker, with the register in full view of the door checker, less than ten feet away. Seems kind of unnecessary.
In those cases, it’s to ensure the $7/hr 29hrs/wk register jockey rang up both the pack of gum and the high end TV you are walking out with.
So by that logic, if Walmart asks if they can perform a cavity search, I should agree to it because of this genius.
The store has no legal right to detain me, unless they have probable cause to believe I’ve shoplifted. I choose not to volunteer to let them look at any of my possessions, including the ones that they freely and willingly sold to me a few seconds ago.
I don’t know that I need to care that much about retail theft when the Walmart near me also has a “Cash for Gift Cards” kiosk located at the front of the store. They’re basically paying people to steal from you. They’ll even launder the money (and take a cut).
Their top 6 executive made 112 million last year.
Shoplifting is around 35% of retail theft. Employee theft is a similar percentage. They could always improve employee relations to reduce theft.
They could always invest in better security.
The cheapest thing to do is to inconvenience their customers. So that’s what they chose.
I smile, say “no thank you”, and keep walking.
Did it cure his COVID?
Wait, what? How are those kiosks that let people cash in gift cards any sort of theft? Many people, including me, have gift cards for stores or restaurants we don’t go to, so if one can get, say, 70-80% of the value of the gift card in cash, one may prefer that. I’ve heard that billions is tied up in gift cards languishing in junk drawers throughout the country.
I worked as one of those BBY door guys for many years (early 90s) before managing them. We kept ongoing logs of receipt errors we caught during our shifts. From “Jenny, you need to scan all 10 cds this guy bought individually. You can’t just scan Depeche Mode 10 times” to “Mark, you missed the Epson printer on the bottom of the cart again” to “Chuck, you need to scan ‘both’ boxes of the Cerwin Vega speakers, they are $250 each not for the pair.”
During Christmas season we would have contests to see who could catch the most errors. Tons of them adding up to thousands of dollars.
If you steal a credit card and want to turn it into meth you don’t have a lot of good options. The safest way is to just sell the card, but you can’t really verify the value to the buyer, so you get pennies on the potential dollar. You can make more money by buying something in demand and then trading/selling it. If you do it enough though, you end up with a bunch of stolen goods waiting to be purchased and a bunch of sketchy customers who will dime you out in a second.
Luckily for criminals, Coinstar and others have figured out a way to launder your criminal gains under the guise of “some of the customers might be legitimate”. You take the stolen card, buy a $1000 worth of gift cards go to a gift card kiosk and exchange it for $700 cash. The multi-billion dollar corporations look the other way while splitting $300 in profit and get to wipe a huge liability off the books. Your local pawn shop follows more rules and is is more regulated.
So some percentage of people who cash in coins at the Coinstar machine have broken into parking meters, or their grandfather’s coin collection or whatever and are cashing in those coins. My guess is that the percentage of fraudsters cashing in stolen coins or stolen gift cards is probably a tiny fraction of the overall use of these machines.