> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil?

I find it really annoying when people put words into somebody's mouth.

Misplaced perishable goods are certainly a problem, but not the one they're discussing right now.

It sounds like the careless actions of the general public really bother you. Let me tell you something: grocery stores are low margin retailers who make their money by volume of sale, not enforcing conformity. The moment you open your doors to the public, you are going to get all kinds of mentally ill, aloof, high/drunk, distracted, disabled, elderly/senile, and (literally) retarded people in your store. It's futile to judge their actions using your idealist looking glasses.

The moment you start kicking people out over subjective "rule-violations", you are eating into your own profits, pissing off people, and projecting your own morality onto strangers. Aunt Minny may have set down that roast because it hurts her hip to walk across the store, and she realizes she already bought a roast yesterday. But over the last 10 years she's spent $25,000 shopping there. Some guy with Crohn's disease may literally shit on your floor if he doesn't drop his perishable item and run home/to the rest room. If both of those people are regular shoppers, sure the lost perishable item eats into your bottom line, but in the long run you are making a profit off them.

Waging an unnecessary morality war can only impede your ability to run a profitable business.

Edit: why not just give employees handheld IR thermometers, and if the temperature of the product is < $MEAT_MAX or $VEGGIE_MAX degrees then allow them to restock it.

The number of people who think that people had parents growing up is astounding! -_-

> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil?

It's incorrect and misleading to talk like that malicious use case is the only one at play here.

Why is it the customer's responsibility to figure out and comply with the rules of your (nonstandard) system to avoid getting charged for something they don't intend to buy and didn't in fact use or take out of the store?

There are all kinds of reasons why that is unreasonable:

* different stores might have systems with different rules and policies, causing confusion;

* people may not remember where to return the item;

* the magic machine-learning system might glitch and not recognize the item was replaced, and you probably won't notice since there's little feedback from the "virtual cart" since you're not interacting with it directly;

* another glitch could put another customer's item in your "virtual cart", so you have nothing to return;

* etc.

Systems like this should fail in customer-friendly ways, and "item returned to the wrong place" is a kind of failure.