Legal question: 'reverse shoplifting?'

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am seeking an answer to a specific question, but it’s about as pointless and trivial as it gets, so I posted this here – Mods, feel free to move it.

In the cafeteria at work, I often partake of a large sub, medium drink and chips. This combo is priced at $7.03 including tax.

One day recently, I didn’t feel like having chips. When the cashier rang it up, the price of a large sub and a medium drink was $7.26 including tax.

*They pay me 23 cents to take a bag of chips.

What the H-E-double hockey sticks?!?*

I aksed the cashier if I could change my mind and take a bag of chips after all.

She said, sure, no problem. So I paid the $7.03, and took a bag of chips that effectively cost negative 23 cents.

My question: would I have been guilty of shoplifting if I had paid and left without taking the chips?

2

I’d guess that since the chips are yours, you are free to leave them wherever you want to, including the counter where you paid.

Convincing the person at the cash register that you shouldn’t have to pay 23 cents for that privilege might be bothersome, though.

3

I think you would have been guilty of shoplifting had you paid the higher amount ($7.26), and then taken the chips. :confused:

Under those circumstances, you’d have a decent shot at an insanity defense.

4

It’s pretty common for a combo meal to cost less than the sum of its parts, but I don’t know why. If I didn’t want the chips (yeah, right) I would just take them and hoard them for a later time.

5

I don’t know how widespread the Little Caesar’s Pizza chain is, but they do a similar deal. The have (really good) breadsticks called Crazy Bread. They’re bathed in butter and sprinkled with plenty of mozzerella (sp?), so I like to eat them as they are. They have “crazy sauce” which is just pizza sauce, and I don’t really need it. If you get just the sticks, it’s one price, but if you get the “special”, which is sticks+sauce, it’s like 30 cents cheaper. And they WILL NOT just keep the sauce, the guy says he’ll get in trouble if he doesn’t give it to me. This is so stupid. I’ve even tried taking it directly out of their hands and throwing it away right in front of them, but they don’t care. The next time (they knew me there) they would still insist I take it. I eventually stopped going there.

6

The Barbie Liberation Organization does something similar. They buy talking Barbie dolls and talking GI Joe dolls, switch the voice boxes on them, repackage everything and then slip them back on to store shelves. According to the program I saw on this, all perfectly legal. Mattel, however, is none too happy about it, of course, and it seems that the altered dolls have become quite the collectors item. (There was even a bit on these on an episode of The Simpsons wherein one of the girls at school gets a Malibu Stacey doll that says, “Did somebody put in a call for the webslinger?” in a masculine voice.)

7

They can’t be that much of a collector’s item - You could just buy one of each, switch the voiceboxes yourself, and voila. If you could actually sell them for much more than retail I would be surprised.

8

It makes sense that a combo meal of say 3 items is cheaper than the 3 items seperately. What doesn’t make sense it when it’s cheaper than 2 of the items. This happened to me to at Wendy’s. I didn’t want the fries, so I just ordered the Double & a soda. It was about 25 cents more than the combo. So I cancelled the order and got the combo.

9

Well, I don’t know much about it (not being interested in collecting dolls and all), but apparently, what happens is that some average schmoe gets the doll, thinks its defective, returns it to the store, and the doll gets sent back to the folks at Mattel, so there’s not too many of them in circulation. I think that the BLO folks also put something into the package so that folks know (assuming they’re smart enough to dig through the tons of packaging material that comes with everything these days) that they altered the doll. This site has a copy of one of their flyers in a PDF format. Apparently, BLO doesn’t have a website. (Strange, since is was started by a bunch of college folks with an obviously twisted sense of humor.)