Not to pass judgment on your wife or anything like that, but I’m very curious: Has this changed the way you feel about your wife or her judgment?
I was just thinking to myself that if my wife said that she stole things constantly through self check out, I would advise her that it would be wise to stop. To me it’s reckless, you may never get caught, but you might get caught, and who knows what incident that might create.
I’m not concerned about her getting caught (I think that would be a good thing), I’m more so concerned that the activity contributes to rising prices, it’s a detriment to the commons in a sense, it should have a real impact on her conscience, and it’s laughably unnecessary. We earn so much more than the median income for our over priced region; we could pay double for everything and barely feel it.
And you can reasonably guess that the "incident" it will create will be proportionate to the value of the thing being stolen. If you cause a scene over someone else not paying for a $2 candy bar, you're the asshole.
I can scan things faster than the register can take it. It gives me a beep, I move on. Then I see the register is missing items, and getting out of sync with the scale function. Most things I buy are light-weight, so the computer decides to just fudge it and move on. (And if you notice after the fact that you've moved it onto the belt, you can't take it back, the system will hang and block you from going on until you put it back).
I'm not trying to steal, just their hardware can't keep up, and I'm not going to slow down to watch to make sure every beep corresponds to a successful item rung up.
What would you say of the case where you do all your grocery shopping and they close the full service checkouts right as you wrap up and force self checkout? You’ve agreed to shop with the intention of having a cashier and they unilaterally change the terms after you’ve invested your time… I’d say unilaterally changing goods received is just as much theft as unilaterally changing payment.
(Which will usually actually cost them more than just stealing some small item which doesn’t justify either.)