Not a legal question but a moral or ethical one. You are buying something and you notice the cashier make an error that benefits you. You pay the bill and leave. Did you just steal or does something about the cashier’s action make what you did not stealing?
And, related, if the cashier gives you a discount that you didn’t legitimately qualify for, is that stealing?
Stealing.
Fraud.
Possibly I’ve misunderstood something about an otherwise accurate transaction, but I am compelled to verify that, just as I would if I felt I had been overcharged or excluded from an entitled discount.
Yes, but only if there was cash back involved. If you give her a 10 and you get back change for a 20, I’d say that’s stealing if you notice it. Cashiers usually have a short till taken out of their paychecks. A cashier making a mistake on the price not so much, especially if you don’t catch it right away.
You took something that isn’t yours. That’s stealing. If I notice, I always point it out and square it up. I have done this in restaurants several times, just as quickly as I point out the thing I got charged for and didn’t order.
I know people who instead just feel like it’s their lucky day, someone else’s tough luck. These generally are the same people who think it’s OK to pirate software and movies.
So it’s OK to take something worth $10 that you didn’t pay for, but not OK to take $10 too much in change? What’s the distinction?
Of course it’s stealing. Now, depending on how much it is, you aren’t necessarily required to go back if you only find out when you get him. Fifty cents, no, but if you accidentally ended up with twenty dollars that wasn’t yours you need to take that back. Even if it wasn’t coming out of the cashier’s check.
People don’t seem to be answering the second question. And I would add a third: what about a mis-priced item that you know the store manager intended to price at $20 but the clerk accidentally labeled it $10?
For my own part, my moral intuition says the cashier error and wrongful discount are immoral, though the second less than the first for some reason I cannot put my finger on. The mis-priced item seems like a closer call. And I have a difficult time coming up with a principle that draws a line between these and, say, getting a good deal on an item at a garage sale because you know it’s actually a rare painting.
If I catch it in the store I’ll say something and give the money back. I think to keep it would be stealing.
However, once when I was in walmart (back when I’d actually set foot in one), the cashier was so busy talking to a friend that she was paying no attention to me or the stuff she as ringing up.
The person at the door who was checking the receipts was also talking to a friend and paid little attention.
When I got home and checked the receipt I found the cashier has missed ringing up a $25 item. I thought about going back to the store but knowing I’d have to deal with long lines and rude cashiers, I figured they had two chances, they blew it.
Another time I let it go was
I was in a craft store and as the girl was ringing up my stuff she said she had made a mistake. She had rung my stuff up as 25% off instead of 50% off. Then her face brightened and she said she’d just take 75% off the rest of my stuff.
I said that I thought it didn’t work that way, but she said sure it does. After doing the math I realized she was erring in my favor, and once again I started to say something but then I thought she’d have to go get the manager, clear out the transaction, redo everything and she’d probably get into trouble as well. For the few bucks I kept my mouth shut.
So yes I have been a thief.
If the cashier charges me $2 for a pack of Diet Dr Peppers that I thought was $4, I’ll probably assume that there was a sale I didn’t know about and won’t say anything. There are always so many sales and deals and stuff it’s hard to keep track of. Also, when I’m buying 30 items at the grocery store, it’s harder to keep track of the price of any certain thing.
But if I’m buying a big TV that I know costs $1000, and the cashier charges me $100, I know that it’s a mistake, and it would be either stealing or fraud to not say anything. With a difference that big, and with me just buying one item, it’s obvious it’s not a sale, it’s a mistake.
For the a discount I don’t legitimately qualify for, I don’t think that’s stealing, unless I use deception to get it. Cashiers at some places have discretion on giving discounts out, and might give the student discount for a good customer, or a customer who had to deal with a long wait or some other issue, despite that customer not being a student. But if you lie about being a student to get the discount, knowing that the company only wants to give the student discount to students, then it might not be stealing, but it’s shady.
Including Walmart in a discussion of ethics really muddies things. With them, I have to admit to keeping a rough mental accounting of equivalence. The trash they sell me that fails prematurely doesn’t get returned, and “errors in my favor” get levied against what they would have given me had I returned defective items from earlier purchases. I know this is a slippery approach, and I might rethink it if it weren’t a headache to wait in the line at customer service, and if they didn’t intentionally understaff their checkout lines to keep me in the impulse-buy area for longer.
How do you know what the manager intended and what the real price should be? With sales, prices are often changed on so many items. There have been multiple times I’ve been shopping at Macy’s or some place like that, and when I’m checking out, some of the clothes are much cheaper than I had thought, because sales applied to them I hadn’t realized, and the signs weren’t always clear.
But I guess if there were 12 widgets on the shelf priced at $20, and there’s an identical one priced at $10, then that is dishonest if you try to get that thirteenth one for $10. But even then, at most stores the pricing is in the computer. So even if it’s labeled $10, the barcode will ring up at $20. If you then try to argue with the cashier and pressure them to try to get the item for $10, then you are dishonest and somewhat of a jerk.
If I catch in the store I’d give the money back if I don’t notice till I got home I prob would not rather go through the hassle of taking the money back if it’s just a couple bucks. If somehow they gave me a large amount back like $100 or something I’d prob return it when I got back on that side of town.
Because in the omniscient world of hypotheticals to test your moral intuition, I’m telling you. If you like, imagine you’re good friends with the manager.
Does anyone’s calculus change if it’s a casino dealer overpaying you or paying an otherwise losing hand?
Ok, in that case, then I’d say it would be dishonest to try to buy the item for $10 when you know the price should be $20.
But if the clerk didn’t believe me, or didn’t know how to charge me more than the computer was saying to charge, I don’t know how far I would press it. If it was some non-essential item, I might just change my mind on buying it for my own moral piece of mind. But if it was an item I needed, and there’s a line behind me, and the clerk is having trouble getting a price check, I might just buy it for $10 and hope that things even out later. I don’t know if that makes me dishonest, but I just don’t like dealing with hassles.
I agree with all this. The only thing I can think of regarding the difference is that if you get a discount, they’re probably still making money because of the markup. Maybe not covering all the overhead, but still more than paying for the inventory.
But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe it’s just that I don’t want the cashier to end up with a short drawer at the end of their shift.
Or I’m figuring the person ringing me up has some discretion to give discounts. Did the cashier realize I didn’t have a coupon, or get 6 of the item, or whatever, and still give me the discount? If they’re aware, I don’t have a problem with it.
I say yes to the first question. I have gone back in a store with the extra money if I didn’t realize it at the time.
For the second question, if I notice it while she is giving the discount to me, I’d also say yes. If I see I’m getting a discount I don’t deserve, I will say something. 99% of the time the cashier just says, “Oh, well” and lets it go, probably because it’s more work to void everything, but at least I brought it to her attention.
If I notice the mistake instantly, whether incorrect change or pricing, I will tell the cashier.
But I have to say that if I discover the mistake later that day, when I’m already at home in my fuzzy slippers, I’m probably not going to do a damn thing. Unless the mistake is so crazy that it ends up being a headline in the paper (“Employee Fired After Accidentally Charging a Mystery Woman $200 for a $2000 Item”).
Yeah, I think that’s a good candidate for the divergent intuitions.
In order to really test apples to apples, I think you’ve got to assume that in each situation the person bearing the cost is the store owner and you’ve got to imagine a particular person in that role. Otherwise, I think our tendency is to sympathize with the cashier over the owner, or the sole proprietor over the Wal-Mart shareholder, even though we probably wouldn’t admit that any of that should matter logically.
If I notice it right away, I say something.
However, if I notice it later… dunno. I actually had this happen a couple years ago. I was at Target, and was buying a pretty big bunch of things, including a purse that was around $30. Something happened when the checker was scanning the purse and she became distracted. I don’t recall the details, but there was some back-and-forth confusion over something around the time she was dealing with the purse.
About a week later, I decided I didn’t want the purse after all, and started looking through my stash of receipts so I could return it. As it turned out, the checker, in her distraction, had not actually scanned the purse and I didn’t pay for it.
Had I caught it at the time, I would have absolutely said something. However… a week later? First off, the amount of confusion I anticipated in the attempt to return something that I’d not paid for gave me a headache even thinking about it. And secondly, I truly think it was this checker’s fault that it was missed, and I’m pretty sure any video footage of the event (which I assume Target had) would show it was her being distracted.
In the end, I decided it was more important to me to not get the checker in trouble than it was to make sure Target got its $30. As I didn’t want the purse, I donated it to charity.
Did I steal? Not in my mind, as I truly didn’t even realize it until a week later. And neither, apparently, did Target.