Yeah, the self-checkouts are just a big way to scam wal-mart. None of the Wal-Employees ever pay attention to the alerts that they clear. My dad used to buy a lot of “plungers” there.
(Plunger=big box of pool chlorine that usually runs almost a hundred bucks.)
This scam is ridiculously easy. I work for a company that makes the printers and media for some of Wal-Mart’s stores and it would be so simple for me to print out both fake bar codes and fake price stickers themselves! I’m sure it’s much more easily done on computers nowadays, though, but relying on bar codes alone does leave them open to a LOT of abuse.
Which, I presume, is why CostCo generally doesn’t have small electronic things out on the warehouse floor. Instead, they have shrinkwrapped cards which you take up to the checkout, and the cashier gets the item out of storage for you.
That’s how they sell RAM, anyway.
Some years ago, I bought a phone at Target on sale at $29.95. When going thru the check-out, it rang up as $9.95. I pointed this out to the clerk, and she said in a disgusted tone that this was an error in the computer pricing file, and that clerks in all the stores had been calling the computer center all day about this, but ‘those idiots’ still hadn’t corrected the pricing file. And that her job was just to charge me what the register said, not to fix pricing mistakes by others who wouldn’t bother to fix them themselves.
So I ended up with a real bargain there.
I was seriously tempted to go back and get several more, for gifts for family members.
I would’ve if I knew anyone in need of a phone.
Actually, a great many of them are idiots who get caught because they make stupid mistakes. At least, that’s the opinion of my parents, who are both criminal lawyers (although some would say that’s repetitive ;)).
The reason it makes the news when someone gets away with a big scam is because that isn’t the norm. And even these people were eventually caught.
Or maybe it’s rare that someone who has gotten away with it for so long gets caught at all. We have no information on the amount of people who are regularly committing crimes and not getting caught.
I bet this HAS been going on for a long time, but most people who do it don’t pull it off enough to attract much attention (too scared for repeats, whatever). Maybe these couples are the stupid ones for not having the self-control to avoid detection and capture.
See, criminals ARE stupid! It’s just all in how you DEFINE “stupid”.