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Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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