Once I got home from Costco with a trunk full of stuff. My wife asked me how much the big-ass pack of AA batteries cost since they were on sale at CVS that week. When I checked the receipt, I found out they hadn’t rung up the batteries. “Free!” No, I didn’t go back.
As far as intentional theft, I ripped a piece of candy from the market in Alpine Village when I was about 7. It took me about 10 minutes to work myself up to it, and about 5 minutes to calm down and eat it. Not worth the massive guilt I felt.
When I worked at the campus pizza parlor, I delivered 3 pizzas to some friends on my dorm floor, and charged them for only one. (I had taken the order on the phone and rang it up as one pizza, but then made all three pies. My manager was constantly writing up math department charge orders that somehow ended up in the trash after the pizzas were picked up. It’s amazing that place was able to turn a profit).
When I first started working, there was a newspaper rack on the corner outside the office building. I discovered that if you yanked up on the door after closing it, you would get your quarter back. That worked until they raised the price to 50c. They must have fixed the rack when they reset the coin slots.
Yes, I shoplifted a few small items when I was a kid.
About a year ago, I got home from Dollar Tree with a big bottle of shampoo. I still don’t know if I paid for it or not. I do know I don’t buy shampoo at Dollar Tree. I guess it could have been left on the counter by someone else and I paid for it, or I grabbed a bag left behind by the previous customer.
A few years ago I needed to buy a riding mower. Lowe’s had a 10% off deal if I used my Lowe’s credit card. I went to pay for it and reminded the cashier about the 10% off deal and showed her my card. She took off the 10% and I swiped my card. When I got home, I found I used my VISA card instead of the Lowe’s one. In my defense, the two cards look very similar. It worked out well for me since I then used my saved-up points on the VISA towards the mower.
I remember stealing some candy (a roll of Lifesavers?) from the local drugstore when I was a kid. Somehow my parents found out and made me go back and pay for it.
I’m sure there have been plenty of times that I’ve come home from the store with something they didn’t charge me for, but I figure there are just as many times they overcharged me, or rang it up but forgot to bag it, so in the long run I’d call it about even.
I am ashamed to admit that I shoplifted from my local department store when I was a kid - small toys, and pieces and decals from plastic model kits. One of the biggest regrets of my life. Years later, I anonymously sent them money to cover what I’d taken.
When I was a kid, yeah. Petty theft, pretty much. As a teen, some other Great Pretenders and I stole a case of pints of Old Crow bourbon. A local liquor store owner kept his inventory on the unlocked front porch of his house, which was just begging for idiots like us to come along. We got caught and the lesson was learned. That was the last time for me, other than perhaps small office supplies like a forgotten pen in my shirt pocket. Even the smell of Old Crow still makes me nauseous, and that happened 57 years ago.
In a similar vein, once at CostCo the door checkers actually found a DVD that had somehow been overlooked by the cashier. They simply made me pay the one item at the customer service desk. I was hoping the cashier didn’t get in too much trouble.
Yes, and not because I wanted it for free or that I couldn’t afford it. It was a busy weekend, daylight was in short supply, and I wanted to finish a project in the yard.
Needed some $3 toggle bolts or something like that from Home Depot. Found what I was looking for quickly and then got to the front registers and they were all 6-10 people deep.
In the spur of the moment I just thought “screw it” and walked out of the store with them.
At the time, it never occurred to us that we might be taking money from actual people. It was a huge chain store, and we were ripping off Faceless Corporate Consumerism. We shoplifted back in the hippie days because that was “stickin’ it to Da Man”…remember Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Steal This Book’?
My copy (yes, of course it’s stolen) has great advice like “Tape those annoying business reply cards to a brick, and Bigcorp, Inc. will have to pay the return postage on it.” and also how to rip off the largest corporation at the time, the phone company.
But I do admit it’s wrong, it hurts people not just Big Business. And I get to regale young Confirmation students with my stories during the “Thou Shall Not Steal” class.
Though I don’t even try to hide the joy I had of getting away with something.
My siblings used to steal penny candy from the convenience store near my grandparents, so I did that a couple of times when I was too small to understand that taking without paying was wrong. I just thought it was okay to take a piece or two of penny candy from the store like they did. I didn’t say “thank you” either, which would have been polite at least. I think I stopped when my mother saw me do it at the grocery store and corrected me.
When I was still very little (maybe 7 or 8?) I figured out how to swap the bar codes on Lego sets. At the time, the store printed its own bar cords and price labels rather than using the standard UPC on the box. I knew it was wrong but I didn’t fully grasp who would be affected when I did it.
In high school, I was thinking of buying a CD and I absentmindedly walked out of the store. I was so embarrassed that I went back and bought it even though I had already decided I didn’t want it. I don’t remember what album it was but I know I was disappointed with it and really wish I’d remembered to put it down.
Ikea, those masters of packing, used to have chairs that were sold individually but were boxed in an odd L-shaped box. I picked out four but the stack looked like only two boxes, so the clerk only scanned it twice. I was already aggravated at having to march through Ikea’s horrifying maze, their floor staff was rude and unhelpful, and their lines were understaffed and egregiously long. I didn’t bother to notify the clerk of her error. I still have those chairs in my basement. I bought enough overpriced, disappointing crap from Ikea in the years after that I feel like we’re even.
The closest I ever came was when I was a kid and I was at the local convenience store. They used to have these “big block” Hershey candy bars (similar to the “king size” or whatever they’re called today) that were noticeably bigger than a regular Hershey bar and were also more expensive. However, I noticed that they were of similar size to Milky Way bar or a Three Musketeers bar, which cost the same as a regular Hershey bar. So, with mailce aforethought, I took a Hershey big block bar, put it between a Milky Way and a Three Musketeers, and walked up to the counter to see if they’d notice. They charged me for three regular candy bars. I paid, walked quickly out of the store, and literally could not sleep at all that night because of the guilt. I never made amends though.
More recently (within the past 6 months), I was doing the weekly grocery shopping and needed some toothpaste. I noticed there was a little sign on the toothpaste shelf that said “Buy 1 Get 1 Free,” so I picked up two and put them into my cart. When they went through the register, I checked to see if the second was indeed free, but it wasn’t. I went to the service counter and made a stink – “it clearly said buy one get one free on the shelf,” and the woman behind the counter either believed me or didn’t want to bother checking, so she refunded me the price of one tube of toothpaste. Later that same day I was back in the same store (for some reason) and I walked over to the toothpaste aisle and noticed I had misread the sign – it actually said “Buy 2 Get 1 Free.” So I bought another tube of toothpaste at full price and decided the store and I were square. That night my wife was like, “why do you have so much toothpaste?”
Not only did the store from my story upthread go out of business (was relieved to read that it was from too-rapid expansion, not “Disappearing Inventory Issues”), but others have been gentrified…
The drug store I once stole a comic book from is a cutesy hipster toy store now. And the hardware store (I got caught that time, and was grounded during the best week of the summer of '62) is now a flower shop.
My Dad would tell me random stories of his youth. Many I’m not sure if they were supposed to be a lesson for me or just random thoughts.
He once told me that when he was in the army in the 40’s, he discovered he only had $0.25 for his meal instead of $0.35. He left it on the counter and walked out quickly and never went to the cafe again.
Not really. I don’t count the store forgot to ring something up as stealing, this wasn’t me in cahoots with the cashier. But I’ve also had times when something I paid for didn’t make it into the bag.
I did use my student ID to get a student discount for a couple of years post graduation. Not on campus where they can scan it, but for movies and museums.
I do remember one of my neighbors had subscribed to one of those VHS Columbia House services and the tapes were left on my doorstop by mistake. I tried to bring them to the correct apartment, but I think they had moved out, probably in the middle of the night. After a month or so of knocking on the door of an obviously empty apartment, I just opened the boxes and enjoyed the films for myself.
When I had my dog in for a veterinary visit one time, I also bought a bag of specialty dog food that cost something like $70. Because of the various procedures and medications I paid for, neither I nor the girl doing the billing noticed that I was never charged for the dog food. I returned the next day to pay for it, mainly because there was no way I was going to rip off my dog’s dedicated caregiver or the small veterinary business he worked for. I was very glad I did it. If it had been someplace like Walmart, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
OTOH, on the criminal side of things, to this day my potato chip and nacho chip bags are kept closed with a couple of binder-type paper clips that are still technically the property of a former employer.
