My wife and I were in a Penney’s store at a mall this afternoon, looking for a pair of gloves for her. She found a pair she liked (mittens, actually) and we went to a register to pay for them. The guy scanned them, looked at his screen with a puzzled look, looked at the mittens, scanned them again, then looked up at me and said “Where did you get these?”
I motioned back in the direction we came from and said “There was an Isotoner display back there that said 45% off. These were sitting on top.”
He said, “They’re not in our system. I don’t think they’re from this store. Hang on, let me check online.” He walked over to another register, tried to look them up online, came back and said “Nope, they’re not ours. I’d sell them to you if I could but I don’t have any way to ring them up. Sorry.” And he put the mittens under the counter. So my wife I shrugged and said “That’s weird” and left the store.
So here’s my question. What if the guy had handed the mittens back to us, and we walked out of the store with them? I say it wouldn’t be shoplifting, because we weren’t walking out of Penney’s with unpaid Penney’s merchandise, and had in fact made a good faith effort to purchase them. If we got stopped walking out of the store, could they charge us with anything?
When or if the owners of said gloves came back looking for them, maybe they fell out of their bag. He is going to tell them you brought them up front, they wouldn’t scan, so he just let you have them??
That is the reason he put them under the counter. Treat them as lost property.
IANAL. If the clerk doesn’t do his job and gives you the gloves then you aren’t stealing anything. He’s an agent of the store, he’s giving them to you, unless someone else can prove they own the gloves then they’re yours.
Let’s say you just walked out of the store with the gloves and never tried to pay for them. Wherever the gloves came from they are effectively the property of the store and not yours. There may be some shoplifting specific law that you wouldn’t be violating, but you are still stealing.
I was at the grocery store once. I bought a two pack of strip steaks. When I went to pay for them, there was no price tag on them. Obviously, the tag fell off or the butcher forgot to price them.
Anyway, the cashier couldn’t be bothered with it so he just said: “I’m just gonna charge you 99 cents a pound. Is that okay?”
Me: “Um, sure.”
I walked out of that store feeling a little guilty. I’m not sure that the teenaged kid ringing my stuff up had the authority to sell me $30 worth of steaks for $2.
Was I technically stealing? I mean, it feels like me and the cashier were complicit in the “theft”.
That’s what we figured… that he set them aside to put in the lost and found, or check with a manager later when it wasn’t so busy. And let me be clear we weren’t trying to steal them. It was just such an odd situation that it made me wonder “what if…?”
Just because they weren’t in the system doesn’t mean that they weren’t the store’s merchandise. When we were in a Target on Thursday my best friend picked up an anniversary copy of The Princess Bride and tried to price scan it. It came up with item not in system. We walked back over to where she got it and grabbed another copy to scan. Item not in system. There were 4 copies and a shelf tag, so obviously they belonged to Target and somehow didn’t get into the computer system’s inventory.
Once I was shopping in a local drugstore/variety store type place and I saw a large silk plant that I decided to purchase. It was tagged at $40 or so which was a really good price for the item. I hauled it up to the checkout and the cashier scanned it. It came up as suntan lotion or something, price $5.99.
I pointed out the error to the cashier and the printed manufacturers tag that showed $39.99. She said “it scanned at $5.99, you get it for $5.99. I guess this is your lucky day.”
So I took the item. I didn’t feel complicit at all.
I’m going to go with not shoplifting. Morals and ethics aside, if the clerks decides to hand you something for free or at an obviously overly reduced price that’s not your problem. The clerk made you an offer, you accepted it, you paid and you left with your goods and a receipt.*
If the business owner has a problem, they need to take that up with the clerk, not the customer that made a good faith effort to pay the full price. They didn’t remove or alter the price tag. They didn’t make it so the clerk couldn’t find the price if they went back the shelf to look. The customer can’t do anything about the price not being in the system and the customer shouldn’t have to walk out empty handed because the store screwed up, especially if no one wants to attempt to fix the problem on the spot.
Again, morals and ethics aside. Nothing is being done maliciously. IOW, this would be different if the customer came in multiple times per day and kept buying the same thing or the clerk was in on it. Also, this is all just about the customer’s POV, they wouldn’t be shoplifting in this case.
*They may want to toss the clerk a dollar or something just so they didn’t get the gloves for free. If something should happen, if the cops would come knocking, the person could say they paid something for them. This would be even more helpful if there were cameras.
In our stores (I work for a supermarket chain) that cashier would be terminated for “sweethearting” IF the facts can be established just as you’ve described. Even our union contract (one of the most employee-friendly in the industry) allows termination on first offence for this.
I doubt there’d be enough evidence for prosecuting you, though. You might get banned from the store though.
Maybe I can help with this. My store has a policy that the store’s mistakes are not the customer’s mistakes. If we mislabel something or ring it up wrong or otherwise screw up YOU get the benefit of our mistake (obviously, if something is overpriced you don’t pay the higher price, this is a policy for when someone screws up and labels a $10 product as $2 or something). Needless to say, once the mistake is uncovered there’s a made scramble to fix the problem so no one else gets a SuperFanstaticExpealidocious Deal.
So if $30 steak is mislabeled $0.99/pound by one of our employees, including yes, the cashier, you’re off the hook. If anyone is going to get in trouble it’s the cashier.
On the flip side, that is, the employee side, the cashier is supposed to try to get a reasonable price for the item when it’s not ringing up at all. That could be calling someone in the meat department, a manager, calling some other employee to walk over to the meat department and check it out, or yelling over to another cashier “Hey, you know how much this is going for?” At my store we’ll exert some effort to get you a real price on the item. Not all stores will do this, and frankly, some employees don’t give a damn.
In addition, cashiers at my store have some limited discretion in pricing and adjustments of pricing, mostly for expediting check-out during rush times. But not sufficient to reduce $10/pound meat to $0.99/pound meat.
Yes, this happens to about a half dozen items in my store every week (but with something like a half million items in each store have fun finding those particular items). We’ll take the price off a shelf tag or try to find a comparable item by the same company and take the price off that.
But stuff clearly left behind by someone else we can’t sell you. It’s lost and found. Sometimes the owners do come back.
On the other hand, you probably do want to give employees, at least some select employees, some discretion in pricing. One time, for instance, I got a great price on some chicken fingers because I happened to be walking past the meat counter near the end of the day, and they had to offload them quickly or they’d end up having to just throw them out. Selling chicken at $.50 a pound is better than getting $0 a pound for it.
I had this happen at Lowe’s buying some hardware. I was trying to buy a box of bolts and when the cashier scanned the box it didn’t come up in his system. He said we don’t sell these, they aren’t ours, so you can just take them. So, lucky me I guess. It’s weird because there were several identical boxes left where I picked up my box, so it’s not like someone left them there by accident. Someone actually stocked this item there.
Well the cashier probably exceeded authority, as described above. But maybe it was a division manager who really did know – because in my big hardware store, shelf stocking in some items is done by third-party wholesalers, and if they leave un-stocked line items on the shelf, nobody is happy.
A price check can tie up a line for 5 or more mins. Angry customers may not return. I’ve set my items down and left the store because the cashier was waiting for the asst manager. There were other people in front of me. I had an appointment and walked out after waiting over 5 mins.
It costs the store much less for the cashier to ring up a reasonable guesstimate. I’ve had cashiers ask if I remembered the price on the shelf tag.
I once had the scenario happen where an item’s price rang up as a single penny despite the fact it was normally a $20 item. Cashier had to bring manager over to approve it which they did, turned out it was an item they were no longer suppose to have in-stock and have returned or destroyed. Sold it to me as is but reading online apparently they’re not suppose to sell it to people due to some weird quirk where it’s not their item to sell anymore?
I think that had something to do with it. I stood in line for a good 15 minutes before finally getting to the register. He probably didn’t want to hold up the line – although neither of the cashiers seemed to be in much of a hurry. I guess I could have raised a stink and said “I’ve been standing in line for 15 minutes, I’m not leaving without these gloves” and forced him to either ring them up or call a manager. But I never think about stuff like that until long after I’ve left the store.