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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I stole from Home Depo and this is my story:

Dark and stormy night in Pacific Northwest. I've finished a long day at work and am heading to meet family at the cabin in the woods. I get a text: "There is a mouse. Buy traps before you come." So I pull off the highway and hit a suburban Home Depo. I grab a wide selection of anti-mouse devices and potions. I try to buy my items but, in a deserted store, none of the cashiers are manned. The "manager" points me to the self-checkout. Ugh. My packing-wrapped packs of mouse traps wont scan. Manager "helps" but then turns it over to me to type in the numbers. With the manager watching I pay, bag my stuff, and leave.

In the parking lot I spread my assortment of mouse-killing paraphernalia on the passenger seat and sent a photo to the family at the cabin. Then I notice my mistake. I paid for two 2-packs of rat traps when in fact I had taken two 4-packs. Do I go back and correct this crime? Do I talk to that useless "manager" and spend an hour struggling to undo my mistake via the self-checkout? Do I risk missing the last ferry? I got into my car and drove on into the night. I am a shoplifter.

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Reminds me of buying beets at the grocery store that were $.99 "each", but were conveniently bundled in a group of 3.

I got home and was thinking "that was a lot of beets for $.99." but I still have no idea if I did the self checkout right or wrong when I entered "1" as the quantity.

I think there may be a labelling law that covers that. I believe that they label on any package has to be an accurate reflection of the package's price. Things like meat that are prepackaged but sold by weight have to be individually labelled/priced on the shelf. Each jurisdiction will have its own rules but they all came from a time in the 1950s when evil supermarkets were attempting to hide higher prices on groceries knowing that few people would check their receipts against the shelf prices.

https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/04/28/US-Pr...

Arizona:

F. Except as otherwise provided in this chapter or by rules adopted pursuant to this chapter, any package kept for the purpose of sale or offered or exposed for sale shall bear on the outside of the package a definite, plain and conspicuous declaration of: 4. The price, except as provided in subsections K and L.

DC:

(6) DISPLAY AND ADVERTISING OF CONSUMER COMMODITY UNIT PRICES.--A seller shall conspicuously and clearly display the price per package or unit and the unit price in close proximity to the display of the commodity

My dad ate lots of guava fruit in his childhood in his native country. He buys a few whenever the local grocers have them in stock. About half the time, the cashier keys them in as limes (about 1/3rd the price) and he doesn't realize until he's home and reads the receipt.

I can't imagine confusing them with limes given their size. I had a guava tree for a while and it's ... hard to eat that much guava.

There are several varieties of guava. The really good ones are small and lime sized and the really bad ones are bigger and crap.

Really good ones have nice, soft red flesh and don’t have seeds that will break a tooth.

I was lucky enough to have some guavas around for a while but not very recently - if I’m remembering correctly I think the seed hardness is also largely a function of how ripe they are?

That's the trade off of self checkout scales that try to match what you're buying compared to those that don't seem to care at all. At some stores, it's overly sensitive, and you constantly need attention to get past the system thinking you're trying to steal, and even adding a paper bag is enough to cause problems. At other it doesn't seem like it cares at all, and two items can be on at the same time without it noticing. Maybe they track it all and just review cameras later?

Produce charged by the item is probably hard to account for, but three times the normal weight seems like something that might be safe to trigger on.

I really really hate the weighing self-checkout things that are so prevalent in the UK (and I guess US?). They require a special artform of weighing the things just right, putting it one by one in the right basket etc, which is slower than going through a normal check-out.

In contrast one of the bigger chains in The Netherlands has a self-checkout system where you get a small hand scanner to put in a holder on your cart, it doesn't make you weigh anything, just show it the barcode before dropping things in your cart (or easier: put your bag in the cart, put everything straight in the bag). At the exit, drop the scanner thing in a charger, hold your phone in front of the checkout screen, Apple pay, done, straight to the car with your stuff already in your bag.

Their UX guys understand how to optimize. The original version made you press a few buttons to select things like "card payment" (still takes only 30 seconds vs the Tesco several minutes of weighing things), a few years ago they made it default to card payment, so you don't have to press any buttons if you use Apple pay or similar.

I guess only Amazon has an even better thing with their "walk straight our" shop. But it has the same optimization idea: Make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy things.

Yeah, around here Target seems to be easiest. They don't care if you use the scale at all. You can just scan and put into a bag someone with you is holding, or whatever, it never needs to touch the scale. Each self-checkout does have a little security screen above it through that's about 4"x6" that shows you and says you're being recorded, so my guess is that it along with the fact most people are paying with credit makes purposeful fraud fairly low, or at least low enough to be worth while.

FYI in the UK Waitrose mostly don’t use the scale to verify what you’re putting in.

It’s one one the reasons I shop there - quicker to scan, out directly in a bag, and pay.

I was buying stuff at Home Depot today and you could just scan the stuff directly in your cart without putting it on the scales.

I had a similar experience. I had to ask the self-checkout store clerk whether each banana was $0.25 or if it was all the bananas. They told me it was $0.25 per banana.

Oh, wow.

I’ve remarked to my wife how if I ever go crazy, can’t hold down a job, and live in the streets that I would sustain myself with bananas because you can buy a whole bundle of them for pennies.

Woops…

If their labeling is confusing or misleading, that's their fault.

Yup!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28038481

You did not steal, they charged you not enough. Big difference.

Stealing / shoplifting means you had intention.

A Danish supermarket chain got all pissy about how you where stealing from them and you’d get reported to the police if you kept the money when their staff gave you the wrong change. It last until customers pointed out that their recipts where wrong in something like 80 - 90% of the time, in the stores favor and they’d now start filling police reports rather than just asking the staff to correct the error.

Sounds like people should start reporting that supermarket chain to the police.

It was self checkout and OP selected the wrong SKU at checkout.

The stealing part didn't happen until later when OP realized his mistake and intentionally chose never to correct it

Nope, the responsibility is on both parties (Home Depot and the purchaser) to avoid mistakes like that, because we're all human and we all make mistakes.

Home Depot is partially at fault for a checkout interface that allows the error to be made in the first place.

OP no more "stole" later on than the store "allowed him to take it". It's a gray area where neither party has preponderant fault.

It's going to cost the consumer time/money/effort to return the item, just like it would cost Home Depot time/money/effort to build systems that would avoid more of the mistakes in the first place.

In other words, the consumer has no more obligation to return the item than Home Depot does to prevent the mistakes in the first place. And in the long run it tends to even out -- for every free item you accidentally get from Home Depot that wasn't worth returning, there's probably another item you bought that failed to function as advertised that also wasn't worth returning.

Is it assisting a crime if a checker improperly scans an item to the benefit of a shopper without realizing it … then realizes it later and does nothing about it?

Should they be punished?

Not punished but they should be hold accountable to return it or pay the money if returning is impossible.

We've had a few cases where people got 2 items instead of 1 delivered. They did not had the right to keep the item, but they did not get punishment other then returning or paying back.

The annoying thing is that the store again has all the power here. If you get overcharged for something that was supposed to be on sale, scans as the wrong item, or the price label is different than the scan, it is on YOU to notice, then wait in line in person to explain the problem and get it corrected.

There is no penalty for the store and you don’t get any additional compensation, so most people will say, “I guess it’s just $2 so it’s not worth fixing.” But suppose this happens to thousands of people. The company always wins.

"The company always wins."

You're replying to a story where the company lost.

There's a ton of consumer protection laws. I agree companies might have the upper hand, but I think consumers have a lot of recourse here in the US. There's tons of laws, the ability to do chargebacks, etc.

> You're replying to a story where the company lost.

When people say "The house always wins" re: casinos, we don't take the rare slots payout as evidence that the outcomes are not, in fact, stacked against the little guy.

What makes being overcharged due to errors more common than being undercharged? If anything I would expect it to be the other way around as it is easier to accidentally fail to scan an item than to accidentally double-scan an item, and personally I'm much more likely to double-check everything when the total comes out surprisingly high than when it comes out surprisingly low.

> What makes being overcharged due to errors more common than being undercharged?

Design? The people making these systems are doing so at the behest of customers who would find overcharging much more acceptable than undercharging.

I too unintentionally steal from home depot. If you sell assorted individual bolts/nuts/washers, the most convenient place for people to put them is their pockets unless you provide a better option, which they don't. pretty easy to forget about the 3 nuts in your pocket.

I used to ride motorcycles, sportbikes. I was in a pharmacy once carrying my helmet via the chin strap. Rather than a bag or cart I was putting things into the helmet as if it were a basket. Store security noticed and confronted me in the aisle. They were friendly enough.

I grab one of the buckets and use it as a shopping cart, even if I'm only getting a few nuts and bolts like that, just so I don't accidentally lose one in a pocket.

Of course, that backfired once when I got home and realized I hadn't paid for the bucket.

this is a good idea, because I always need one more bucket than I currently own. same phenomenon as clamps

I don't know who would build a paperclip-maximizing AI, but I'd totally build a clamp-maximizer.

Home Depot doesn't sell "Replacement Clamp Pads" for their Bessey "Clutch Style Bar Clamp". They regularly go missing. You're _supposed_ to shop lift them, then the store sends the defective clamps back to be refitted. This is apparently by design.

They don't?

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Hide-Unavailable-Products/N-5yc1...

Those are close but don't fit. They're for pipe clamps.

I had a similar self-checkout error at a home depot. I can't remember what the exact item was but I was buying it in bulk so probably some sort of fastener or screw.

The packaging was clear and the scanner must have gotten the barcode off one of the single items rather than outer bundled item barcode. The cart price was high enough I didn't notice the price difference on one item.

I called and they said not to worry about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For me it wasn't dark and stormy, it was hot and smoky...

I discovered my three "No Trespassing" signs were not on the receipt. It is funny that my anti-crime sign ended up being a crime. I spend so damn much money with them though, recently purchased wood chipper, gas powered post driver and tons of other little things. Probably spent a good $2000 in the past 4 months, so I don't feel guilty.

Your ideas of morality are interesting for want of a better word.

Is he wrong though? If you went to a shop and spent $2,000 but forgot to pay for 3 items (say worth $5) by accident, I do not think the shop manager should be upset, or that you should feel bad about it? If it was a smaller/non-chain store, it would probably be free! If anything, the main annoyance is probably their stock numbers being out of date.

Making mistakes is human, and I do not think they should feel bad for what they have done (and for not correcting it), and this is coming from someone who cannot steal the bags that now cost 20 pence at Tesco and even went to buy imaginary food at Waitrose after I forgot to pay another time...

No, he isn't wrong, I just had not thought of it in that way. If you spend a fortune in a store then that creates a bit more leeway for accidents whereas when you walk into a store with the single purpose of relieving them of their wares then that gives a completely different vibe. Intent is what matters and I had not come to this conclusion.

I'm always going out of my way to keep things fair and can be quite rigid about this, never even realized there are shades of gray there.

The fun parts of 'shades of gray' is this can actually lead to increased sales down the line, if you end up with that quiet nagging "I owe them for .." in the back of your head. Almost like goodwill that the store did nothing to intentionally earn.

Innocent mistakes are incredibly curious beasts.

Just to clarify, yes the 3 signs probably total $6. Would I feel guilty if they didn't charge me for a $300 tool? Absolutely not, because I would have gone back in and told them about it.

Thanks for the personal insult.

Insult?

Morality "is interesting for lack of a better word" USUALLY means a negative thing - and you meant it specifically about "my ideas of morality" as a whole - so yes that is an insult. I didn't get "your morality is awesome I wish I was like that" from your statement so I do apologize if I reached and I am wrong about what you meant.

No, I just think it is interesting, and I don't have a better term for it. For me - right up until reading your comment - such a thing was black-and-white, and I see that there is some wiggle room there based on the rest of the relationship, so thank you for that. I do believe that if you were caught in a situation like that on the way to the door from the register that it might cause a lot of trouble though, which in turn might end up with you stopping to visit that particular store.

I've seen enough of this in a local supermarket (Albert Heijn, a large chain in NL), which has switched to self checkout + random checks on a lot of checkout lanes.

Older people that are more or less forced to use the self checkout because there are now too few cashiers end up making mistakes and are then treated like shoplifters if they end up with a random check. Quite frustrating.

Thanks and I do apologize for the assumption earlier.

For everyone worried about micro-crime the stores and insurance companies already have this priced into "shrinkage". No store can keep a 1:1 correspondence between items purchased and items sold at intended prices to customers and it's only best-effort to approach that correspondence. SLAs of 100% are unrealistic for either stores or customers. In this case the average SLA due to shrink is about 99% across retail sectors (1.38% shrink is the average, 1% the median) [0]. That includes a lot of intentional theft which dwarfs accidental over- and under- payment.

[0] https://www.bluecart.com/blog/inventory-shrinkage

Went to Trader Joe's last year and "treated" myself to a fancy jar of honey. I usually buy the cheap stuff, but this was like a $10 jar of New Zealand honey. I probably spent 3 minutes in front of the display deciding if I should buy it or my usual stuff.

I got in line, grocer bagged (I usually help, but they did all the bagging last year), paid and left. When I got to my car I saw the jar of honey in the corner of the car outside of the bags; they never scanned it. Instead of going back in and paying for it, I just left. Still feel kind of bad for it.

I can one up this. Made an order online and had my contractor go pick up the stuff. I think it wasn't pulled yet so the contractor picked it himself. Few days later I start getting "Your order is ready" e-mails and eventually a cancelled one. Guess they didn't mark it as completed, re-picked it, and then eventually refunded the order when it wasn't picked out.

Though typing this all out it does occur to me that maybe my contractor just walked out with all the stuff.

I did similar thing of sorts with a all in one air fryer though I went to a manned cashier with it and a few other items. I realized once I got home the cashier didn't charge me for the air fryer.

So your not alone re: not going back when You had all intentions of paying and went thru the right process to do so.

The company I'm sure wrote their error down in their billion dollar loss column. Which I shop there regularly and do self check out now more successfully!

I've had this happen with a blender at a Target, and a Christmas tree at a Walmart. The cashiers were very much doing it intentionally. That's what happens when you pay people minimum wage!

I used to work retail, and I wouldn't classify this as "shoplifting". It is more appropriate to label this as "Shitty customer service resulting in totally-avoidable shrink".

Propane tanks aren't allowed in stores in most places in the US. Which causes some problems when the folks working at box stores don't know that their store sells (literally) empty ones brand new (vacuumed down from the factory).

I had a new one in my cart, and was told no fewer than 3 times to take it outside between the aisle and the register.

If I hadn't been feeling so damn honest, I'd have followed their instructions to the letter.

Why would one want an empty one?

To have it filled up outside?

Exactly: most places do an exchange program in which you don't own the tank, and aren't responsible for the long term maintenance of it. The propane exchange is marked up to cover that. Based on the expected lifetime of the tank and how much propane you use , it can make sense to own your own tank and pay a lower price per unit on the propane (provided there's somebody nearby who fills tanks).

i wouldn't qualify that as stealing since it was an innocent (although beneficial) mistake

had you plan to confuse the manager to let him ask you to type stuff then it would be different

I had a similar issue one day, while showing some prices to my mother I had to take one box of something out of the shelf. After criticizing the absurd premium of that mall, we walked out. 100m outside the store I notice I still had that box under my arm.. somehow there was no anti-stealing widget and I simply walked out with it unknowingly. It was one petty CDROM label sticker press from the early 2000s, $20 top .. mother and I decided not to go through the hurdle of negotiating good faith return with the security guy. (the irony is that 3 years prior I did steal, out of a joke-then-dare moment with a buddy, stuff and got caught; so when I realized I did "steal" again .. I became livid and started to look at my mother mortified saying I swear I swear I didn't while she looked at me dumbfounded not understand what the hell I was talking about)

Bank error (to use monopoly terminology) isn’t the same as bank robbery. This is irrevant to what they’re trying to prevent.

> I paid for two 2-packs of rat traps when in fact I had taken two 4-packs. Do I go back and correct this crime?

I'm curious what you believe the crime was? It's possible the item rang up wrong and you inputted the correct numbers.

And whether you should have gone back--what would you have done if you relised you made the opposite mistake--you paid for two 4-packs, but only taken two 2-packs?

I accidentally scanned a flank steak as a can of beans since I was holding the can and flank at the same time. The bagging station must have had the weight sensor turned off since I didn't notice the mistake until looking at my receipt at home.

So the question is, did the rat traps work or not?

well written but irrelevant to the article's described effort to protect high-end equipment against organized criminals

No, theft requires intent.

You can go back later and settle up if you make a mistake. If you don't... well now it is theft.

Been many years now. SOL lapsed long ago. I'm free and clear.

Well, you can still go back and buy 2 two packs at four pack prices and then you wouldn't be a shop lifter anymore.

This post almost reads like "well home depot's UX wasn't very good one day and I was in a hurry so that entitled me to steal guilt free"

Would you consider it not stealing if it had been the cashier who rang him up?

What if he didn't notice it at all? Is he still "guilty" for the theft, such that it would be fair for police to show up at his doorstep and arrest him if the store detected it and correlated it to this credit card? Is it fair for him to be put in county jail for six months, which is a possible consequence for petty theft?

The stealing part (or rather "dishonesty part") happens when you realize a mistake has been made and intentionally choose not to correct it. If a cashier gives me a $10 bill for change instead of a $1 and I realize the mistake out in the parking lot and choose not to correct it, yes, I am guilty of being dishonest and yes, I am stealing from home depot even though it was 100% the cashier's fault.

I don't see why this is a moral dilemma. If the opposite happened and you got short changed and home depot refused to correct it wouldn't you think home depot stole from you?

> If the opposite happened and you got short changed and home depot refused to correct it wouldn't you think home depot stole from you?

If I got short changed at Home Depot, noticed it after I'd left the store, then returned and asked them to swap $1 for $10 I'd expect to be laughed out of the store.

Why? I would expect them to count the money in the register, find it is off by $9 compared to what their computer says should be in the register, and then believe your story.

This is a contrived example though. Say you buy something on homedepot.com and they never ship it to you and keep your money? Would you still expect to be laughed at if you call up their customer service and explain?

What about back at home? Are you morally incumbent to drive back to resolve it? There was no intention for dishonesty on your part; the expectation of you to inconvenience yourself for something you did not intend, for such a small imbalance, strikes me as an unreasonable one. If you noticed it there in the store that they gave you incorrect change and said nothing, yes, I'd agree it was dishonest to say nothing. But when you notice after the fact, the decision to do nothing says more about the level of effort involved rather than morality.

It's also why I don't expect Home Depot to find and pay me should they shortchange me; the level of effort is too large. Is Home Depot morally guilty of theft because the clerk shortchanged me? How would that even work, that the -company- is morally guilty?

> What about back at home? Are you morally incumbent to drive back to resolve it?

I mean... Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln ostensibly did just that, so I guess it just depends on the value you place on your own integrity.

As for me... if I discovered they had given me a few extra cents in change I probably wouldn't drive back (I probably wouldn't even discover it because I hardly ever count change). But if I realized I hadn't paid for something or that I got more than I paid for (i.e. bought a can of spray paint online and they shipped me 3) I probably would at least contact their customer service and ask if they wanted me to send the two additional cans back.

> It's also why I don't expect Home Depot to find and pay me should they shortchange me; the level of effort is too large.

Ok, what if it happened not because of a negligent clerk but a negligent programmer? You buy a non-existant product on homedepot.com that was there because of a bug and your money just goes into a home depot's pocket and the product is never shipped to you (because it doesn't exist). If home depot discovers this you would expect them to track down and refund anyone who bought the non-existent product, am I wrong? And if they discover the bug and decide to do nothing (because it's too much effort to refund everyone) and just keep the money, wouldn't that be stealing?

You actually make my point; you're describing something much easier to track, a website purchase. The effort is much lower, you can literally just refund the money, which is a normal part of business operations, so yes, of course i would expect them to.

Would I expect them to find someone who was erroneously charged too much in person, who paid in cash? No, because the effort would be so large.

In terms of contacting customer service, sure. If there's a nice easy way to do so via the internet. If it's, for instance, a phone tree, that after 5 minutes I still haven't gotten a human? Nope. Or if they ask me to do literally anything beyond hand it over to a courier (for, again, the "they shipped me too much"? Nope.

Exactly. It does get you funny looks though, when you go back into the store to try to correct an error like that. I've even had employees tell me to get lost because it is too much trouble to fix the error.

During the transaction, yes... it is morally incumbent on both parties to ensure they aren't cheating the other. After the transaction though, the moral calculus shifts, and I'm going to take into account the time/convenience cost to myself (among other factors) when I decide whether or not to rectify it. (I've found out the hard way that companies can make this surprisingly difficult or time-consuming.)

$9 means exponentially more to me than it does to a national chain.

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