If making these decisions on a case-by-case basis is so easy, demonstrate it for us. I provided the scenario. You tell us what decision you would make in that case.
Not always. But if he believes that they shoplifted, why shouldn’t he want them arrested?
How do you know that this is a very likely case? It seems pretty plausible to me that it could be lots. And if it is, then it might not be all that likely that this is innocent. And if the manager is moronic in detaining them, the couple were even more moronic by behaving in a way that could get them in trouble. Especially with a kid.
And if they do believe it’s actual shoplifting, the fact that they waited for four hours isn’t really relevant.
Well, yeah. No one has claimed otherwise.
Between shoplifting and accidentally leaving with an unpaid item, actually. But you knew that, you kidder.
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It’s worth pointing out that the “wrongfully” applies only to the action, not to the intent. After all, she did indeed eat the sandwich before it belonged to her. That said, the more I think about this, the more I’m getting pulled to your side, in terms of whether the couple should be convicted or not. In terms of arrest, it only seems reasonably to assume that people generally intend to do what they do.
It’s also worth questioning whether eating food in a grocery store before you pay for it is legal anyway. Grocery stores would be foolish at best to enforce that law against customers, but given that they generally do enforce it against employees…
I made a comparison between one shoplifter and another shoplifter. You went off talking about murder and arson.
Well, as someone who has been a clerk and a manager in different retail establishments and currently is stuck working in a grocery store, I guess it is easy for me to make claims, but I have the experience to support my opinions.
The actions of the Safeway staff were wrong.
I know all about shrinkage and if anyone working for me had called the police because they found a wrapper for eaten food in a shopping cart and the customer offered to pay for it, that employee would, at minimum, have been given a thorough (re-)education in handling that sort of issue. Depending how poorly they mismanaged their customer interaction, they might have further been given a written warning.
Is that what happened here? How do you know? What about the other sandwich? Was that eaten too? Was it uneaten and somehow concealed? No store employees or other shoppers witnessed suspicious behavior or something that made it apparent shoplifting was occurring?
Given the apparent lack of evidence for either a deliberate-shoplifting or unintentional-nonpayment scenario, why are you seemingly upset by the idea that store management might choose to assume the latter instead of the former?
I haven’t changed my original position on this, which is that it’s ludicrous to remove someone’s child from them and send them to jail over $5, even if they had deliberately shoplifted the sandwiches, and it is entirely plausible that they did not.
I’m not upset that store management might assume something. I have no idea where you’re getting this from.
I guess I was getting kind of a Det. Jack McCoy “cross-examining the witness” vibe off your previous string of pointed questions. Sorry.
treis, you’re right that to make an arrest the officers had to have probable cause as to each element of the offence. What you’re missing is that leaving the store without paying is (by most people’s definition) probable cause to infer intent not to pay. Not proof, of course, and not of itself proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But it is probable cause. That said, this is a close case. Another manager might have acted differently. A different set of police officers might have acted differently. Had it been me, in either capacity, I would have let them go (after they paid for the sandwiches). But no clear error was committed in inferring intent for purposes of probable cause from failure to pay.
Keep in mind they had already checked out and were leaving the store.
And I’m very surprised that the stores you worked in took such a casual attitude towards shoplifting. What was your store’s policy? Did they pretty much just accept shoplifting as a cost of doing business? Did they establish a ceiling on how much could be taken before it the police were called? Or did the managers decide on a case-by-case basis whether the people involved looked “shifty” or not?
My guess is that the managers probably don’t have the discretion to decide to let people go. I can see why the store would institute a “we prosecute all shoplifters” policy. Suppose for example that Safeway had decided to let the Leszczynskis go without taking any action. And a month from now, a couple of teenagers get caught stealing a sixpack of beer and the store decides to press charges. If the teenagers’ lawyer finds out about the Leszczynskis (and he will because he’ll be certain to ask about the store’s shoplifting procedures and when previous shoplifting incidents have occurred) he’s going to be all over the manager and the store asking why one pair of shoplifters were allowed to leave and another pair were arrested.
The various news stories reported that the wrappers were in the cart as they prepared to leave the store. If anyone had seen the sandwiches being concealed prior to the arrival of the customers at the register, it should have been addressed when the concealment took place or at the register.
It is just bad policy to try to play “gotcha” regarding potential shoplifting, especially when the payment for the item is so easily obtained and the (cutomers’ versions of) the events are actually fairly common events in stores, today.
Safeway has not merely offered an apology, but also noted that they need to address changes to their policies.
As a retailer, I find remarkable the amount of speculation and “what if” scenarios I’ve seen in this thread and the lengths to which some folks are going to turn this into some sort of serious crime.
Hopefully you will concede that Safeway might feel that the policy needs to be changed as a result of bad publicity rather than due to any actual fault in the policy.
No one has a casual attitude about shoplifting. However, people who actually work in retail, (particularly grocery), recognize that in today’s culture, food does get eaten before the checkout and people do occasionally forget to pay. If someone stuck an expensive steak in a coat pocket, we would prosecute. If we saw a sandwich wrapper in the bottom of a cart, we would point it out–99 times out a hundred, receiving an immediate expression of embarrassment and an offer to pay, even without asking to see the receipt on which it was rung up.
In this case, the evidence was clearly visible and an offer to pay was made immediately. The cost to the store simply to have a person making more than minimum wage sit with the couple until police could arrive and the time required by someone at the management level to process the reports detailing the “crime” cost the company more than ten times, (possibly more than twenty times), the cost of the two sandwiches when the customer actually offered to pay for the sandwiches when the wrappers were discovered. That did not save Safeway anything and it did nothing to discourage any future shoplifting, simply making it more likely that actual criminals would hide the evidence rahter than parading it past the security guard at the front door.
Not at all.
Their policy, (or the education of personnel in regard to actual policy), is seriously flawed. The publicity muight have done more to call attention to that flawed policy or lack of training, but that should have been corrected even if the incident had never become public knowledge.
However I’m not sure what you’re saying the policy should be.
Based on your post above, you seem to feel that if a person eats food in the store and then forgets to pay for it when they check out, you feel that’s credible as long as the person still has the wrapper as evidence that they planned on paying for it and they offer to pay for the food without argument.
Wouldn’t this just encourage people to eat food in the store? They hang on to the wrapper. If somebody notices they claim it was an honest mistake and pay for what they ate. If nobody notices the empty wrapper in their cart, they walk away without paying for the food they ate.
And repeating the question I’ve asked already, suppose the person who had the sirloin hidden in their coat pocket also had their kid with them. What do you do then? If you call the police, they’ll call CPS to take the kid while they book the parent. So do you let the steaklifter go in order to avoid separating parent and child?
This is silly. You are building some sort of claim that we need to be hard-asses with every possible case on the off chance that some negligible number of criminals will begin stealing sandwiches at every opportunity. When running register or packing groceries, I have seen missed items below carts or in the child seats of the kiddie “cars” attached to the carts or under purses on the child seats or in the hands of small children two or three times a week. I have always called attention to the item and the matter has always been resolved without an issue. I would guess that fewer such items are caught in a store with a self-packing policy, so that having someone such as a security guard at the exit would be a solution to discover the same items. As long as the store is paid for the items, the store has no need to be trying to create criminals out of forgetful shoppers.
Under the hard-ass scenario, the store is going to lose many times the dollars in grabbing and holding (often innocent) people that it saves in occasionally catching actual criminals.
Would you set loose a car thief because he or she was accompanied by a child?
If there is a reasonable belief that someone is actually attempting theft, then stopping that person and holding him or her for the police is appropriate, regardless whether the suspect is accomapnied by a child. Finding a sandwich wrapper in a cart for which a customer offers to pay does not support a reasonable belief that someone is attempting to steal from the store.