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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of a Costco bug I discovered, it appears that they fixed it lol.

So, Costco runs AS/400 in stores, and their online store is in .Net MVC. I worked with both technologies and often have to communicate with AS/400 devs and they are close to their retirement so little fucks are given. Plus, working with DB2 is annoying in general, the .NET data provider from IBM is expensive and sucks.

Now onto the bug, when you purchased items online at a discount, you were able to return to store at a full price as their systems were not communicating that a discount was applied. I returned several items, but did not realize until I bought a laptop that was $400 off and tried returning it. I ended up calling Costco and letting them know. Unfortunately, they didn't give me any lifetime membership or a good citizen award.

If any Costco devs read this and know about this send me some love.

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Costco still has issues of resolving discounts on a return. I won't state the bug explicitly but I had a conversation with them about how they refunded me a significant amount I never paid on a large purchase and showed them the delta via receipts. Local management was appreciative but didn't seem to have an idea of how to proceed to make things right. Ultimately they said my account would be flagged as owing the difference so the next time I shopped I would be charged for the incorrect refund. The problem is that that didn't work either and I don't shop there often. I tried to do the right thing but ultimately it ends up being their responsibility to handle it when the customer is standing right in front of them showing their loss of revenue.

"I tried to do the right thing but ultimately it ends up being their responsibility to handle it when the customer is standing right in front of them showing their loss of revenue."

I bought some lions mane mushrooms from a grocery store, which cost $10-12 per lbs. The cashier rang them up as "regular" (button) mushrooms at $2 per lbs. I pointed out the mistake and she tried to correct it but chose the button mushroom again. I brought it up a second time and she selected a different incorrect mushroom at a slight increase ($4/lb?). At that point, I gave up. She's the one ringing it up. I tried.

Where in the world can you buy lions mane mushrooms in a grocery store? I have been seriously debating growing my own because i cant find them.

Wegmans has them sometimes. I have two local/independent stores that also carry them. Although, I grow my own due to price. Occasionally I'll get some from a small scale producer who sells to the two local stores.

Berkeley Bowl

I was in dire need of an Cat 5 cable a few years ago and went to Walmart to get one. Until this point I had always made my own cables, so when I saw the price ($40ish) I was floored. Unfortunately, I had to buy it anyway. As I was checking out I had that cable and a small bag of beef jerky. The cashier wasn’t paying attention and didn’t engage with me at all. She scanned the beef jerky and moved the cable across the scanner, but it didn’t register. She told me it would be ~$3.50. I considered telling her that missed the cable but given the fact I was mad about the cable costing so much I didn’t say anything. I always wondered if I would feel bad about doing that, but several years later I still don’t.

You just stole it. I don’t see how this is even a grey area. Can you walk me through the thinking of “the cashier touched it, so now it’s mine?”

I once made a purchase of multiple items where the cashier scanned the items, put them in a bag, charged me a total and I paid it. Only sometime later I found out they missed a $100 item.

Did I steal something? Did the cashier give me something for free? Who is responsible? What if I didn't notice the $100 charge absent from the bill? What if I was charged twice as much? What if I told the cashier and they did nothing?

What turns something into a crime, in your eyes?

I certainly don't think I stole anything, nor do I think OP stole anything.

The OP knowingly walked out without being charged. At this point it’s not any different than if he/she had just pocketed it and walked out.

The different between this and the contrived shit you posted is knowing you didn’t pay and walking out of the store in the first place. There isn’t really any subtly here.

It is different. In the checkout case, the cashier's intervening negligent act led to you getting the item for free.

It might still be theft (or fraud or some related charge), but only if those laws create a strict liability crime out of keeping something that you know was given to you by mistake. I'm not sure but I think there might be specific laws to that effect if you knowingly take advantage of a bank's mistake. Whether there's a similar law in general, probably depends on where you live.

In the pure theft case, there's no intervening act by a store employee. It requires criminal intent.

The argument that if the customer knew, it's theft, applies equally to cases where the product is rung up incorrectly, which several other people in this thread have claimed to have witnessed. I guess we're all thieves now. I've been overcharged and undercharged at stores.

Also even if the intervening act by the store employee doesn't matter, it would be impossible to prosecute. They'd have to show that the customer knew the checkout person missed the item. How would they do that? Interrogating people you live with to find out if you mentioned it to them? No, they don't have access to admissions on HN years later.

> In the pure theft case, there's no intervening act by a store employee. It requires criminal intent

Yes there is, they have cameras and people who can frisk at the doors. I don’t think you want to go down the path of “if there was some action an employee could have taken to stop it, it’s not theft”.

> No, they don't have access to admissions on HN years later.

“They can’t prove it” is not an argument that something isn’t theft. You can go through whatever mental gymnastics you want to go over how difficult it will be to legally prove theft for prosecution, but it doesn’t change what it morally is at all.

In smaller stores (fast food restaurants for sure), when the cash doesn’t balance, the employees pay the difference i think. does it hurt walmart or does it hurt the employees in that case?

Who is at fault for that harm? The customer? The employee? The employer? Regulators? Society??

I'm not even sure this is relevant. We're not talking about a cashier returning too much change. In this scenario, there is nothing to not balance. The item wasn't scanned, isn't on a receipt, was simply given away. The balance in the till is still correct.

If an employee of the store quotes you a different price than the label on the shelf or item, you owe the store zero responsibility.

Retail stores change pricing on products and fail to update pricing on the shelf all the time. Home Depot, Walmart, etc have interactions like what OP described occur every day.

The responsibility rests with the corporation to train and reward employee behavior.

If the company has chosen to staff their store with someone that doesn't give a fuck (underpaid, poorly treated, mismanaged, improperly trained, not well rested, etc), then that is a gamble they chose to take, and the last thing I am going to do is rock their boat when they built and arranged it this way.

FWIW, I don't think it was the moral or ethical thing to do. I didn't intend for my post to come off as if I thought it was. I shared this story in the context of process breakdown, not "stealing is ok".

As for my thinking, it was impulsive, I was a fresh grad and didn't have much money, I was upset about the price, I thought the cashier was being rude by completely ignoring me. I felt like I attempted to engage with the process of buying the cable in the correct way and the process broke down in my favor. I was not going to go out of my way to fix it.

Again, none of that makes it the right thing to do. I wouldn't have considered walking in and stuffing it into my pocket, but feeling like I did my best I shrugged my shoulders and went on with my day.

Opening stores in key areas to destroy local business. Draconic contracts with suppliers. Lowest possible quality. Highest possible price. Huge markup.

Can you walk me through the thinking of "corps fuck me over and I should be thankful"?

Two wrongs don't make it right, though. Not that you're wrong about Walmart.

Who doesn't take off the Man now and again, though? Honesty doesn't get you very far these days.

Lions Mane is incredible. Crazy to me that it’s not more widely recognized for what it is.

I met someone many years ago who bragged that they did this with sales tax. They purchased expensive items at Costco in Oregon, paying 0% sales tax, and then returned those items in Washington and received a full refund plus 10% sales tax. This was the first time I met a person who appeared normal but lacked social mores against fraud.

In grade school a class mate told me how to mail letters for free: print where the letter _should be sent_ in the return address, print anything for the apparent delivery address, apply no stamp, and drop in a public mail bin. The letter will be sent "back" to the return address because postage was not paid.

When I got home later that day I excitedly shared with my parents the new hack I had learned and they told me it was wrong because it was stealing. I had been so taken with the neatness of the scheme I did not register its immorality.

I use this exact scam as a way to explain email forging and how the Bad Guys (TM) get spam delivered.

Funny enough, my grandmother told me about a version of this scam, but as a prank. Get some roadkill, put it in a sealed bag. Put that bag in a box. Mail it the slowest way possible to a far away address that doesn't exist. Put your target's address for the Return Address. Be sure to do it in summer. By the time it gets to them... yuck.

Nana, you were weird. But still miss you.

I went on a tour of a USPS Bulk Mail Center and asked what was the weirdest thing they ever came across. Mail person said they had a box bleeding onetime. They set it aside for the postal inspectors. Turns out it was steaks.

I would expect that postage scam to only work in the same geographic area. If you put a return as California but dropped it in the box in NY I dont know if they would return it, would they? If so I would imagine they have anti-fraud measures against doing this in mass.

A postmark is applied where the post office receives the letter. If the return address isn't in the post office's service area and there's no postmark, it's fraudulent. I'd be shocked if the automated systems don't check for that before applying a postmark.

Not refuting anything you said, but I personally have dropped letters while traveling on a weekend, just because, so like dropping a letter in Oregon on Saturday evenings, obviously with proper postage, and my return address as in different state 800 miles away. One reason is If the delivery address is in same direction, i.e. if I am travelling towards letter's destination halfway, I like to see it as quick delivery and help to Post, like I am covering half distance for them.

You're right, it's not necessarily fraudulent, and there are cases like yours, or when someone's on vacation and uses their real home address as the return address.

But there's no way to allow those while preventing abuse, so I can't imagine what good options they have other than to reject and trash those pieces of mail (since they have no way to return them). I guess they probably allow them and eat the losses due to abuse?

In uni me and a friend who when to a university across the country (not US) did something similar - he mailed one letter to me once, then I'd replace the letter, cross out the address and write "return to sender". We'd do that over and over again. I think after 3 times the letter just got dropped and not delivered

Don't they need to show up the purchase recipt/bill? Wouldn't the store's location be identified on that?

You need a membership to shop at Costco, so to return items you just use your membership card and they pull up your purchase history on the computer.

I would expect that history to include a price, but I guess it doesn't.

Costco accepts returns without receipts. I assume their system can look up all items purchased with your Costco membership.

I'd expect Costco would require receipts for returns, even for online purchases, like most stores. Then the store would only refund the amount after discounts. But perhaps Costco is more trusting of their customers because they have to pay for membership.

I'm a member and am nearly certain they can just lookup what you've bought on the membership. They scan the member card for any purchase.

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