On every receipt, by law, is a unique barcode encoding the shop and purchase value. That barcode, when scanned, leads to a government webpage (and doing your taxes involves scanning each barcode for anything deductible, so many of the receipts get scanned).
On that webpage, occasionally they ask for a photo of the best before label of the goods. The best before date usually includes the lot number.
Now, the government has a list of lots of serial numbers and associated retailers. They can now easily punish those who regularly sell stolen goods.
I suspect there are both undercover sellers and buyers to find buyers willing to buy without a receipt, or sellers willing to sell without a receipt.
So a dystopian police surveillance-state?
Thanks but no thanks. The socially optimal amount of theft is not zero.
At least this way you get the benefits of it.
And any that don't still need to keep records for tax purposes, and the authorities could still request that anytime and without your knowledge.
It is frequent that news reports say "attacked with a hammer purchased by the defendants credit card earlier the same day". So it appears the facility to search card payments is fairly widely used.
Not really, because the search could have happened in the opposite direction (eg. they ask the store for a list of transactions that were made with the suspect's card). I doubt they're asking visa/mastercard to give them a list of all hammers sold in the past month.
I didn’t know this.
Let’s say I buy advil, condoms, and dish soap with my capital one Visa card at Walgreens. What information does Walgreens share with visa and/or capital one? I just assumed the name of merchant and the total amount charged was all they needed?
I remember back when I was younger, I’d often see adults requesting the cashier to charge this much on one card, this much on another, bringing out four or five cards. Do all these banks/ card processors get a full list of items sold?
That tends to only be sent on hotel or airline transactions or when working with government accounts.
Generally speaking the merchants and card networks have very antagonistic relationships. The big merchants know that their sales data is valuable and won’t share it without incentives. The credit card networks do offer lower interchange rates for sending level 3 data but it still hasn’t seen a lot of uptake.
You seem to have mixed dystopian and utopian.