Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
I would pay for a mistake, but I wouldn’t feel sorry. They want me to be perfect, but I’m just a customer, so no reason to feel bad if I type it on wrong.
Well, the main point is that for some demographics a situation like this is a simple mistake with no consequences while for others it’s a direct way to talk to the police.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.
For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for
Criminal charges sticking. The
Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.
When a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
I would pay for a mistake, but I wouldn’t feel sorry. They want me to be perfect, but I’m just a customer, so no reason to feel bad if I type it on wrong.
Well, the main point is that for some demographics a situation like this is a simple mistake with no consequences while for others it’s a direct way to talk to the police.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.
For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for Criminal charges sticking. The Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
I don’t think I’m making that argument at all. I’m just relaying what I witnessed when I worked first hand in that industry ~26 years ago.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.
When a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.
often, yes
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
Hello from France. Our countries don’t admit to themselves how racist they still are and how much of a poison it is. I hope your friend is OK.
Yeah, he was born here, so it’s not something new to him.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work and it was just me not getting paying attention
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…
The more likely scenario is that you just neglect to scan that case of beer, or those ribeye steaks.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
The letter of the law is the letter of the law afaik
They even call the security and police. Yes, they call it thief.
Fair, you may be pulled to a court for no reason.
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.