My everyday footwear is a pair of three year old Bass shoes, leather with rubber soles. Recently, they have been making some store’s theft detectors go off. It doesn’t happen in every shop I enter, but it does occur in about 50% of them (except when I was visiting NYC three weeks ago, when every theft detector I passed went off, much to my annoyance).
One store clerk said that it was my shoes that were tripping the alarms, but she really couldn’t explain why. She just said that it happens to other people, too.
Any ideas as to why this is happening, or what I can do to stop it (other than buying new shoes, as I really like these)?
Some soles/heels have metal plates in them…my Rockports do the same thing to the detectors, and the people who run the detectors usually know about these types of shoes and let you through anyways.
Oooops, I’m not sure about “theft” detectors…I was assumed erroneously that you were talking about metal detectors at airports…not sure if they pick up the same materials in the scan.
Some shoe manufacturers are now building the anti-theft bars INTO the shoes. When you purchase them, the clerk is supposed to swipe the shoes, and deactivate the bar. Sometimes they forget or do it wrong. My SO had this problem, until a store manager at a K-Mart figured it out and explained it. The manager reswiped the shoes, and no more problems.
Ask someone in the store where you bought the shoes if they can try it for you.
I was walking out of Wal-mart one day and set off an alarm. The man working security relayed an anecdote about how he had accidently got a tag stuck on his shoe and it kept tripping the alarm.
All of that typing for what could have been said as “What gotpasswords said.”
IIRC those theft detectors were a tuned oscillator, so they were essentially looking for a particular resonnance which I believe they achieved from a simple coil of wire in the anti-theft tag. The little thing they would swipe the item over to render the anti-theft tag useless was just a little device to blast the tag with RF, which would melt part of the coil of wire and effectively destroy it.
Do your shoes have metal eyelets around the laces? Maybe the metal bits in your shoe just happen to hit the right resonnant frequency of the detector.
Note - it’s been years since I’ve looked at anti-theft devices and how they worked, so technology may have evolved quite a bit since then.