The next time you go to Circuit City, you enter the store and begin browsing. Moments later, you’re approached by the manager, who hands you a written trespass notice. “You’re not welcome to shop here any longer, sir / ma’am.”
“What? Why?”
“You refused to cooperate with our inventory control procedures last time you were here. You’re no longer welcome in any Circuit City store. if you re-enter our property after being given this warning, we’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”
Would the existence of such a consequence change your mind?
Store managers are free to be jerks. I’m free to shop elsewhere.
I was banned for life from a local chain drugstore after their incompetent security drone accused me of shoplifting. Even though they didn’t find anything when they searched me, and I had not stolen anything, the store manager told me never to come back. I’m happy to note that the chain went bankrupt a few years later.
It certainly wouldn’t change my mind. If they’re willing to lose my custom just because I refused to be treated like suspect merely for shopping at their store, I wouldn’t WANT to shop there. Would you?
That’s a good thought experiment, but it would not change my mind. It would make me pretty likely to write a letter to the editor, though, and the local news station, and to create an anti-Circuit City blog post, and see if I can find any statistical evidence that such notices are disproportionally given out to members of a particular protected class. I can be a very stubborn person.
If a substantial number of stores started making this their policy, such that it became more trouble to avoid many stores than to pander to their inventory control whims, then I might. But for now, I know that I can just go somewhere else. More and more, I do my shopping online anyway, so it’s quickly becoming a moot point.
If you are going to be openly disrespectful of my employees who are doing the job I asked them to, you can officially stay out of my store. If you want my product and knowledge you play by my rules in my shop. OF course I’m sure the guy at Circut City or Sams Club will be more than happy to sell you SDRAM for your RDRAM using computer.
In my case, even with the value of merchandise I deal in, its irrelevant. Customers have no access to product in my business. If you ask for it, one is obtained, kinda like auto parts places, 99% of the stock is racked out of reach of the customer.
If this was to ever happen, I would be proud to be the guy banned from their store for not shoplifting. IF a manager at a major chain ever had the cojones to do something like this, and IF they had some facial recognition software to catch me walking in, and IF there was no competing store in the same parking lot, and IF I couldn’t get the same stuff online for cheaper anyway, then and only then might I regret my actions, but probably not.
I just seriously can’t imagine anyone ever doing this. Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA are all within a block of each other. Walmart, why would I shop there anyway? I now have one more reason to avoid that place. The other stores typically just wave when the buzzer goes off anyway, so this is all theoretical.
But c’mon people. Several of you have implied that it make sense for a store to inconvenience ALL its customers because a few of its employees might be theives. Does this not strike you as bassackwards?
Yeah yeah, they have the right, it’s their store, they can do whatever they want, but you’re trying to convince us that’s this is a good policy. I mean, I can understand those of you who say “Meh, it’s not a big deal, it’s a few seconds and I’m not in that much of a hurry”. But don’t get all defensive about some multimillion dollar conglomerates “right” to search my stuff.
No. I would leave and do my shopping somewhere that paying customers are not treated like criminals.
I’m with the walrus.
And I am totally free to encourage everyone I know not to support your store because you unfairly treat your customers like criminals and have the audacity to get pissed off when someone doesn’t want to be searched after having made a purchase. I would certainly let all my clients know about your practices, and hope to get a letter to the editor of the city newspapers published in each.
The ‘guy at Circuit City’ would have a hard time selling a computer engineer the wrong type of RAM anyway.
I don’t need your knowledge and there are plenty of places I can get the product. Can you afford the bad reputation you’d get for treating a paying customer like a thief?
Regardless whether the store policy is right or wrong, I just think it’s fucked up to dump on working people for the sins of upper management. If you have a problem with the policy, absolutely complain to the manager or corporate central, I would feel free to give them Hail Columbia if necessary. But when minimum-wage working stiffs are just trying to earn a buck, and have no choice but to obey orders or get fired, it does no one any good when the public gives them shit. They already have to catch shit from the bosses, I hate to see them being made miserable from both directions. It isn’t their fault if they’re just doing their job, so please see them as human beings just like yourself.
Well, I never said I dump on them, nor do I recall anyone else in this thread doing so (this guy is recognized by all as being more than a little insane, methinks). Saying “no thanks” and walking out is not giving anyone shit. If the company fired everyone who didn’t tackle jerks like myself and forcefully check my receipt, I’m thinking they’d have unacceptable turnover and HR would complain. I do not see that I have to give up what I take to be my civil rights just because someone doesn’t want to be ignored.
I’ve been personally blamed for gas prices and oxygenated fuel as a PFY behind the counter, so I know what you’re saying, but it’s still kinda not so compelling, for taking this to a ridiculous extreme gives us “I vas only vollowing orders, ja?”.
Dang, I’m running out of hyperbole here…
If I let them check my receipt, the terrorists have already won! What would Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin say? Read the works of Thomas Paine and despair!
No, that doesn’t work.
YOU BUSH LOVER! Sticking up for big business at the expense of my Seventh Amendment rights!
Right to trial by jury. Intentionally irrelevant to this discussion. Fourth is almost relevant, if the store was the Federal government
And that would be your right…thankfully in my business no such measures have been implemented, nor will there ever be if I can help it. Something like this strikes me as a last resort. My business is all about personal service, so I don’t have much of a dog in this fight beyond the hypothetical in a much larger scale. IF I had 10 employees on duty and dozens of customers passing through my doors every hour, with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory on the sales floor, I could see a possible need for such measures.
Glad to hear you are one of the engineers that knows their way around a PC, I have done jobs for 2 engineers in the last week
Then I have little choice but to obey the laws of my area for fear of criminal enforcement against me. If local ordinances created a potential risk to my business in some way it would be factored for in my business plan and prices adjusted accordingly if needed. Since all of my direct competition has to comply as well, its a wash in the grand scheme of things.
This of course applies to businesses like mine, you could probably find examples of a business where you might want the knowhow of the staff because they have more experience with their product than you.
Do you feel like you are being treated like a theif at a jewelry store? You realize he one on one attention you get is not for improving service.
Yes; for some reason, I was under the impression that in California, the state law required just cause–other than merely shopping at the store–to search a person. Admittedly, I got that impression from listening to the aforementioned talk radio show about the issue just a couple of years ago.
So, let’s look at this way: What law is it that permits you to search shoppers whom you don’t have just cause to suspect of shoplifting?
Of course I know my way around a PC. I designed them, and now my FTJ is as a systems administrator and I do freelance consulting for a variety of different clients. I was in one of the small ‘personal service’ shops here once last summer when I asked about the price of one of their internal DVD burners, because it wasn’t marked. The guy working there asked me how I knew what a DVD burner was, and I haven’t been back to his shop since.
I don’t shop in jewelry stores. Shiny baubles are not my thing. Actually, I buy almost everything I can online because I don’t want to deal with stores. About the only place where I’d actually have to ask the store people for things is the auto parts store, which is only a minor inconvenience because the one near my house is never busy, and the pharmacy whose services I cannot legally get otherwise. I do submit my refills via the web, though.
Uh, these people are just as much part of the checkout process as the cashier. IF you do not like shopping where they are present, do not shop there. I do not endorse their methods, but I have no problem with them doing as they see fit with their business on their dime within the bounds of the law. If you contine to shop there, you are endorsing it.
They don’t need a law allowing it, they need a law prohibiting it to stop them. You have our legal system backwards in that regard. Since store personell are not law enforcement, they are not bound by 4th amendment search restrictions the way police officers are.
You don’t need a law allowing you to leave with your purchases, they need a law permitting them to detain you. Since I am not store personnel, and since once the cashier and I have exchanged the money for the products those products do not belong to the store but to me, what permits them to delay my departure? Absent probable cause, which everyone here agrees gives them the right to detain and search you, do you have a cite for that law?
Only one of the three closest WalMarts around me checks receipts…and the stand for checking them is located right smack dab at the end of the check-out aisles…like three steps away. They basically watch you pay for your stuff, and then check it. The door is a long way away…I don’t understand why they don’t check there instead.
