I can tolerate the receipt checking if the person is ready to check it as I walk by. But sometimes, there is an actual queue of people whose receipts are to be checked. In that case, I just walk past them. I’m not queuing up for an inconvenience I didn’t agree to.
How about if you look at it logically if it helps to keep down theft it will keep down prices which is a benefit to you and worth the few seconds of inconvenience.
My grocery store locks up the name-brand baby formula.
They don’t lock all the formula up? I’ve seen it a few times, but it was always ALL the formula, not just the name brand stuff.
total WTF moment the first time I ever saw it too.
I continually hear this mantra from people who don’t understand how pricing works. The only thing that controls prices is how much the market will bear, not the cost of production. The retailer could have a magic machine in the back room that craps big screen television sets for a nickel, and if the market would support a price of $2,000 that’s what they would cost.
I have personally taken millions of dollars worth of cost of production out of my employer’s products, and we have never cut prices by a single dime as a result. Why would we?
The availability of items is affected by the cost of production. If the market price will not allow the retailer to make back the cost of production that item will disappear.
No, I’ll use reason instead of logic, because logic alone leads to really silly results. You’ve constructed an if-then statement that is logical, but fails reason all the way through. You haven’t shown that it helps keep down theft, and I don’t believe that security theater in general reduces theft, so the ‘if’ fails the reason check. You then assert that lowering theft rates will lower prices, buy again have failed to show that a store with lower theft rates would choose to lower prices rather than retain the money to increase profits, and I doubt that you will be able to since AFAIK no stores have a standard procedure for ‘theft rate is down, lower prices’. Also, you are deciding on what cost-benefit ratio is acceptable for me, and don’t even have hard numbers for it, which is not logical or reasonable. If you had hard numbers for reducing price X amount vs Y seconds at the checkout, then maybe you could make some kind of logical or reasonable argument, but you’re just making a bald assertion, and one about my preferences which is even sillier.
Once I’ve completed my transaction at a store, I’m ready to take my property back home and continue on my day. If a store wants me to participate in some other program on the way out, it can make me an actual offer of consideration for my time (like costco does), or can accept the fact that I will decline to volunteer to allow them to search through my property.
The guy in question is Michael Righi. He refused to show his receipt after leaving Circuit City, at which point the employee physically prevented him from leaving. There was no reason to suspect shoplifting, so shopkeeper’s privilege did not apply. Nonetheless, Righi did not physically attempt to flee, but continued to refuse to show his receipt. The police were called, and when they arrived, the officer asked to see Righi’s driver’s license. Righi was legally obligated to state his name, and he did so, but he explicitly (albeit politely) refused to produce his driver’s license. He was then arrested - not for refusing to show his receipt to the store employee, but for refusing to show his license to the police officer.
Eventually the charges (don’t remember exactly what they were) were dropped. Righi pursued a lawsuit against the city for violating his rights, and probably would have won, but ultimately dropped it when he realized it was becoming a burden to his family.
Yes, he stuck to his principles, perhaps beyond all reason and sanity, but I’m glad there are people like him who push back against the overreach of authority by various people who don’t seem to understand the limits under which they’re supposed to be operating.
Righi used to have a blog that told the entire story in detail. Can’t find the blog anymore, but there are numerous news stories out there about it.
It’s not only “criminal types” who have a problem with it. Let’s just say that the check involved a full body pat-down. That would do an even better job at catching thieves and discouraging theft, reducing the store’s losses and lowering prices. Still on board? How about a strip search? That would do an even better job. X-ray scan? Body cavity search? Essentially everyone is going to draw the line somewhere and not want to be treated like a criminal by a company they just handed a big chunk of hard-earned money to. For some people, that line falls in the area of having the contents of their cart checked at the door.
I’m in the UK, and I read this thread in slack-jawed amazement that anybody would agree to that. I’m pretty sure the first supermarket chain to try this here would be out of business in a month.
On the other hand, we’re very keen on self-checkouts, which are probably equally annoying. Unexpected item in the bagging area!
Wal*Mart finally demanded to check my receipt after years of not doing it. I asked why, as I had been in plain sight of the snoop upon leaving the checkout. “To make sure there is nothing in your bags that wasn’t paid for.” is what I was told. It’s the snoop’s job, so I busted no balls. I already hated the place, but that was the last straw for me and I’ve not been back. Costco is different because you’re getting a lot of bulk items and they’re actually making sure the receipt matches what you’ve got. IME they tend to find stuff I was charged for but that didn’t make it into the buggy.
It’s possible to go one step further than this. Once you’ve paid for an item, it’s your personal property - just as much so as the clothes you’re wearing - and you are under no obligation to prove to anyone that it’s yours. You can discard or destroy your receipt before you leave the store if you like; if they want to accuse you of taking items without paying, the burden of proof is theirs. At Costco they may end up revoking your membership (under the terms of which you are required to show your receipt at the exit), and that’s fine, but anywhere else, they’ve got no authority to keep you from leaving the store just because you are unwilling (or unable) to show your receipt.
I’ve witnessed the Costco receipt checker catch an unpaid item in someone’s cart. Back when they first opened in my town there were several self-checkouts in addition to the normal lanes. I’m pretty sure the self checkouts used a different color receipt paper than the regular lines. The receipt checker points out that such and such isn’t on the receipt and the person mumbled something about how “they” (not I) forgot to scan it. Yet they had a self-checkout receipt. Not sure how that ended up but they were directed back to the service desk.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or attempting to sarcastically disagree with me, but the stuff that you said is all true. You don’t actually have a general obligation to present a receipt or to prove that your property is yours. The receipt is useful to you in a variety of situations, but you’re not obligated to keep it.
I once saw a receipt checker at Costco catch a person who DIDN’T have something they’d actually paid for. It was some bulky thing, like a big package of paper towels, and somehow it had been left back at the cash or fallen off the bottom of their cart. So in that case they saved someone some money and trouble.
The line to have the receipts checked is mildly irritating but it would be trivial to rob the place blind (even with the receipt checking) so if it saves them millions I don’t really blame them. I am not familiar with big box store loss prevention statistics, but grocery and bulk stores are fantastically easy to steal from so I’d guess it’s a huge problem. One cannot blame them for this little dog and pony show if it prevents some theft.
It is annoying. Most of the time I submit to it peacefully but I get annoyed when they’re chatting instead of doing their job. One day she was checking like five full carts ahead of me, and all I had was a container of laundry detergent - heavy. I blew past them and she yelled at me, “You have to wait for me to check your receipt!” All pissed off and everything. I yelled back “I only have one item and I’m not waiting!” and left.
Sorry for not being clear. Yes, I was agreeing with you, and pointing out that you can even make it impossible to comply with their demands (by destroying your receipt before they can examine it), and there’s nothing they can do about it.
FWIW, I do shop at Costco, and since it’s a condition of membership, I submit to the receipt checks there, but I question their value; the checker rarely appears to do anything more than verify that you’ve got a lot of items on your receipt and a lot of items in your cart. 
“Oh… uh, oops! Guess I missed that. It must’ve been hidden under something else.”
“Sir, it’s an 8-piece dining room set.”
It’s like that at our local Costco, also. I’ve gotten the impression they’re mainly looking for obvious items and checking that we got our cash if we paid with a card and wanted $20 or something, or stuff that required a cashier to get for us (stamps). They certainly don’t poke around the boxes piled full of things for specifics.
Slight hijack, but a sincere thank you for being, I’m pretty sure, the first person I’ve ever seen acknowledge this point in this type of discussion. People defending annoying loss prevention practices will inevitably resort to the refrain “…and that helps them keep prices lower!”, or its sibling, “…or else they’ll have to raise prices!”
If Wal-Mart (or whoever) thought for a second that the base Profit value — meaning Units Sold x (Price - Wholesale Cost) — would be greater at a higher price, that’s what the price would already be.* The fact that their net profit is the base profit minus other costs (including theft) does nothing to change that; the goal of pricing is still to maximize that first value.
Similarly, to Bill’s second point, if a new loss prevention tactic did result in significant savings, the company would hardly decrease prices out of the kindness of their hearts. "But if they saved enough money, they could lower the price and sell more units!" Again, see above; if they thought that the base profit would be higher at a lower price, that’s what they’d already be charging.
None of this means that stores shouldn’t take reasonable measures to protect against losses and maximize their profits, only that the “higher prices” argument is ridiculous. Personally, I either blow past receipt checkers or not depending on some combination of my mood and how many items I have, and as long as I remain free to do that, I don’t have a problem with the practice if they think it helps.
*Obligatory note for pedants: this ignores the concept of loss-leader items, which have nothing to do with loss prevention but would doubtless be brought up if I didn’t mention them.
Some of the big things they look for and do.
You notice many places casually swipe a highlighter over the receipt. This is designed to thwart a specific type of theft that was very effective for a while.
People would come in, buy a 50" LCD TV, put it in their car, hand a friend the same receipt, go grab another TV and head for the door. If anyone questioned him, he had a receipt that was just a few minutes old. This works well with a broad variety of high priced items.
They really dont care if you somehow got an extra pack of M&M’s they are watching for large ticket items that may have been missed or intentionally skipped.
Door checkers are also often familiar with the prices of some of the larger ticket items and if someone engaging in UPC pirating can often spot the discrepancies.
These guys would use a cheaper UPC code, stick it to the item, go through the self checkout lane, return without receipt for full price store credit and purchase expensive items with the store credit for resale. Netting around $300,000 in two years. They also were bouncing around 11 states worth of home depot stores to do it.