I boldy grab a shitload of napkins, or katsup packets (say 3-4 dollars worth), or hell, even grab 3-4 dollars right outa the cash register.
Then I stand there, boldly proclaiming that possesion is nine tenths of the law, and they can pry that stuff from my cold dead hands. Is McTheft or its reps gonna go “meh, its only 4 dollars, next please” or are they gonna call the man on me?
I bet dollars to doughnuts that flashing blue lights show up before its all over.
This is a normal journalism procedure. Reporters are always told to “overwrite” the story with filler background at the end. The idea is that editors are going to have to juggle the final content of the newspaper based on what they feel is most newsworthy. In order to get articles to fit they want to have paragraphs at the end of each article that they can cut out without it affecting the main point of the article. If there’s a lot of news that day, they cut off all the fillers and squeeze in more articles. If it’s a slow news day, the fillers pad out the page.
Note to store owners: Do not steal from your customers. When you do, based on your ignorant inflexible “policy”, do not be surprised when they get pissed about it.
This isn’t like you put onions on my burger when I asked for none. This is: I gave you money in exchange for nuggets, you have no nuggets, but my money is already locked in the box, so “nanny-nanny-boo-boo it’s ours now”. Fuck that.
If McDonald’s blatantly stole my money like this, they would have to call the police on me. I’d be furious, whether it was $3 or 3 cents. Either give me what I ordered or give me my money back. No, I will not wait until tomorrow. If it is that big a deal to the manager that things stay calm and nice, he better refund my money out of his own pocket.
I don’t care if you’re the cashier and have no say in store policy; don’t get a job where you are obliged to steal from people and expect me to feel sorry for you.
Not to hijack too much, but once upon a time, I handed a cashier a sum of money – let’s say it was $4.25. Four ones and a quarter. Not that it should have made any difference, but it was the last thing I had in my pocketses, besides string – or nothing! I paid my very last cent for whatever goods or services I expected to receive. The cashier, who looked like a bubblegum-snapping precursor to a lobotomized Britney Spears, fumbled the money and dropped the quarter. It landed on her side of the counter and rolled behind some sort of permanent fixture. It would have taken a construction crew to retrieve it.
“Sir, I need $4.25, you only gave me $4, I need twenty five more cents.”
“I gave you the quarter. It’s not my fault that you dropped it. I paid what I should have paid.”
“But I only got four dollars! I can’t short my drawer, so you owe me a quarter!”
I gave her a look like a stern teacher gives a slow student. She gave me a look like a chicken looks at algebra. It finally dawned on her that there was no way I was giving her any more money.
The fact of the matter is, when you work in a job with high turnover and you are living paycheck to paycheck with no other means of support, you do what you have to to keep your job. If that means following a corporate rule to the letter, even if it’s a stupid rule, then so be it. That’s not to say that the cashier shouldn’t have gotten a manager, or that the manager shouldn’t have called someone even higher up if that’s what was needed to refund the woman’s money. If someone came into my store demanding a refund and I’ve got a rule that says no refunds, well, sorry, but they won’t get crap from me. In the case at McDonald’s, where the woman actually didn’t get any food in return for her money, I’d have gotten in touch with someone to authorize a refund if that was the policy. I’m not saying the manager or cashier involved didn’t make a mistake, but you can’t expect an individual–say, a minimum wage cashier–to put their job on the line because of a stupid corporate policy. And no, they shouldn’t refund it out of their own pocket. That’s ridiculous.
But if THEY made a mistake, who should pay for it? Them or the customer?
And its not a “refund”, its still a theft IMO, and any “refund” is only the rightful return of the customers money.
And I’ve never gotten this " I can’t give you your money back because the I don’t have the key to register"
Doesnt that thing open up everytime you ring up a sale?
If so, ring up the next sale and pull the damn 4 dollars out for the lady.
Sure, you may not be allowed to give the money back, but it sure isn’t because the register is some magic box that money can never be taken out of. Or is it?
The thing is, even if we hand back the money on the next sale the order isn’t voided out of the register so when we count it later, the money is missing. The register comes up short, the cashier gets accused of theft. Yes THEY may have made the mistake, but it’s the corporate policy preventing them just giving back the money, which would be easier, believe me. No, the register doesn’t necessarily open on every sale. On many registers it only opens for cash. If it was a credit card or gift card, the till stays closed. To void out a credit card most machines require a password, and THEN you still have to have a key to void it out of the register.
Also, it’s not necessarily the cashier’s fault. Let’s say I come in at three. The day manager fails to tell me we are out of ranch dressing. At three thirty my night cashier shows up while I’m doing something else. I don’t know we are out of ranch, so I dont’ tell her we are out of ranch. She rings up a customer for some ranch. She can’t find any, so she comes and asks me if we are out. I go look, can’t find any either. I assume we are out. I offer the customer a similar product, if they refuse I get out my keys, get the recipt back from the customer and give them a refund and an apology and probably a coupon if I’ve got one on me. I then leave a note for the day shift manager because it is HER fault. Not my fault, not the cashier’s fault, her fault. Now, assuming we had a no refunds policy, and I couldn’t refund that money, should I refund it out of my own pocket? No. It’s not MY fault the transaction was made, and it’s not MY fault that’s the policy. I apologize to the customer, I tell them that I don’t have the power to help them, but I hand them the name and the number of someone who does. And that’s that.
I’m not a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction, but I doubt it’s theft.
The customer gave the property. The cashier didn’t take it against the customer’s will. The cashier had no guilty mind: they honestly thought (while taking the money) that they were doing so legitimately as part of a genuine, commercial transaction.
Again, I don’t know criminal law in Florida, but these points tend to be strong indicators of something that is not criminal.
I’d be happy of course to review a legal analysis written by those in this thread who have said conclusively that it was theft. I could be wrong.
An earlier poster in this thread recalls reading (but can’t confirm) that the woman did stay and call for the manager, and the manager personally refused to give her money back.
It isn’t a “refund” situation. In general, stores operate on a verbal contract that they will provide a service or a good in exchange for an agreed upon amount of money. If I cough up the money, you can’t just come up empty handed and tell me too bad. You failed to uphold your end of the bargain.
To be told by the manager that what I paid for would not be provided, and I could kiss my money goodbye? If that isn’t a crime, it’s an outrage. :mad: You can’t just hide behind “policy” there. Wrong is wrong.
Um, it’s my understanding that McDonald’s DID refund the money and provided the woman with a letter of apology and coupons and whatnot. Or something. She didnt’ kiss her money goodbye. In the situation I detailed upthread, the guy got his money back too. I didn’t tell him he couldn’t have his money back, I only told him that I wasn’t the person who could give it to him. But here’s the 800 number, and they can help you. I wasn’t hiding behind policy, I was enforcing it. And you know what? It’s not a bad policy. No recipt, no refund. You toss your recipt out the window before even opening your pizza box? Tough. We have people come through every day claiming to have got a pizza last week that was bad, but they don’t have a recipt or the box, they don’t know what time it was or who rung them up and no they didn’t call and complain to a manager on the night in question. Every. Day. Somebody had some breadsticks left off their order, but they have no recipt. Somebody got a medium pizza in a large box, but they ate the pizza anyway and threw away the box and the recipt. Their pizza was so bad they tossed it to the dogs. They found a hair in their food but ate it anyway and lost the packaging and the recipt. “No, I guess the recipt must be in my other pants.” Too bad for you then. This policy prevents a lot of scams. Sometimes it backfires, but not often enough to make it not worth it.
If your management is that inflexible, mean, heartless, stupid, and theiving you are probably on borrowed time anyway.
Thats the one (only?) good thing about McJobs, they are on every corner and they are always looking for help.
Of course, maybe the customer is also living hand to mouth as well and those chicken mcfrackits were her big treat to herself for the week. So, now she is out both those valuable 4 dollars and the treat. I’d be pissed too.
If I worked there, I’d have ponied up 4 damn dollars of my own money, then worked the system to see if I could reimbursed.
It may not be theft in the strictest legal sense, but its IMO it is a lot closer to that than the typical “hey, I asked for NO mustard” or “this things COLD” scenario.
I don’t object to your handling of the pizza situation, starwarsfreek42. That’s exactly right, in my opinion. If someone is dissatisfied with their service or food, it is perfectly okay for a cashier or manager to make them show a receipt before they can get a refund. I wouldn’t even be pissed about a refusal to refund any money at all, though that’s not a store I would ever go to again.
I’m not even particularly objecting to the McNugget situation, because I don’t exactly know what’s going on. What I gathered however, from this thread and the article in the OP, is that this woman ordered McNuggets and got nothing in return. No nuggets, no money. It’s not like the nuggets had a hair in them, or she only got 5 instead of 6. Then she would have been asking for a refund, and store policy would apply. But she did not get what she ordered, she was provided no service, and the store still refused to give her her money back. THAT’s what I consider a crime.
I believe it’s called “fraud” when you pretend to sell stuff to people, but in reality just take their money and give them nothing. And yes, if I was a McDonald’s cashier (which I was, once upon a time), I would risk losing my job over a refusal to defraud customers. Even poor people have morals.
Sometimes, and sometimes not. I remember looking for a job back in my youth, and not being able to get one even at McDonald’s. When I finally found something, I held onto it for dear life, even though the manager was a complete ass. Morals weren’t going to pay my rent.
So you’d solve an act of thievery by becoming a thief yourself? Is it worth carrying a criminal record over $4?
You would think that, in this economy, you would get better customer service, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. If companies were truly interested in serving customers, they would hire employees who had the skills necessary to know when policies should be rigidly followed and when rules should be “bent” in the interests of retaining a customer. However, most companies are interested in filling their “customer service” positions with warm bodies who do nothing but toe the party line whether it serves the customer or the company or not.
I do not usually blame the employees, because often they are doing exactly what they were trained to do. Often, these days, it seems that employees are not trained in customer service at all.
Now, I admit that we don’t exactly know what happened here. Perhaps the cashier did offer a refund but said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’ll have to wait for the manager to get back from his smoke break so he can open the till” and she freaked out anyway. I think that customers might be less likely to freak out like this if they were reasonably assured that they would eventually get what was fair. However, it’s obvious that the fair thing to do would be to return her money, but that wasn’t happening. It’s also obvious that too many customers have tried to defraud the system–the companies don’t trust the customers, either, and they freak out and clamp down on “policy”.